Epicurus — "The wise man, when he is in danger, laughs at the danger."
The wise man, when he is in danger, laughs at the danger.
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More from Epicurus
"Against all things it is possible to find security, but with regard to death we all dwell in an unfortified city."
"We should envy no one, for good men do not deserve envy, and as for the bad, the more they prosper, the more they harm themselves."
"Of all the means which wisdom acquires to ensure happiness throughout the whole of life, by far the most important is the possession of friends."
"It is better to lie on a humble pallet and be free from care than to own a golden bed and be full of trouble."
"It is better to be unfortunate in a reasonable manner than to be fortunate in an unreasonable one."
About Epicurus (341-270 BCE)
Greek philosopher who founded the Garden school in Athens, whose materialist atomism and pleasure-as-tranquility ethics shaped Hellenistic thought. Closely associated with Lucretius (Roman successor whose De Rerum Natura preserved Epicurean physics). For an intellectual contrast, see the Stoics (Zeno, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius), the Hellenistic ethical school of discipline-of-acceptance — Stoic 'live according to nature' and Epicurean 'pleasure and absence of pain' framed every ancient ethical decision — every Roman of Cicero's era was implicitly choosing one path or the other. The Stoic-Epicurean rivalry was the central philosophical debate of the Hellenistic and Roman world for 400 years.
The standard scholarly entry points to Epicurus's work: A.A. Long (UC Berkeley, Classics) — Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics (1974); Tim O'Keefe (Georgia State University, ancient philosophy) — Epicureanism (2010); David Sedley (Cambridge, Classics) — Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom (1998). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Epicurus.