Epicurus — "To be happy, we must take care of our bodies and our souls."
To be happy, we must take care of our bodies and our souls.
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More from Epicurus
"The beginning and the root of all good is the pleasure of the stomach; even wisdom and culture must be referred to this."
"It is not so much our friends' help that helps us as the confident knowledge that they will help us."
"A free man cannot acquire many possessions, because this is difficult to do without serving either crowds or kings."
"Justice is a contract of utility entered into to prevent men from harming or being harmed by one another."
"We must therefore pursue the things that make for happiness, seeing that when happiness is present, we have everything; but when it is absent, we do everything to possess it."
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.