Epicurus — "We must release ourselves from the prison of business and politics."
We must release ourselves from the prison of business and politics.
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More from Epicurus
"The noble soul occupies itself with wisdom and friendship."
"The wise man is happy even on the rack."
"The wise man is but little favored by fortune, but his reason procures him the greatest and most valuable goods."
"The pleasure of the stomach is the root and source of all good."
"We must not violate nature, but obey her. And we shall obey her if we fulfill the necessary desires and also the natural, if they bring no harm, but sternly reject the harmful."
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.