Epicurus — "We must, therefore, be careful how we choose our pleasures, and how we avoid our…"
We must, therefore, be careful how we choose our pleasures, and how we avoid our pains.
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More from Epicurus
"It is folly for a man to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obtain by himself."
"Empty is the argument of the philosopher by which no human suffering is therapeutically treated."
"If you wish to make Pythocles rich, do not give him more money; diminish his desires."
"The greatest disturbance of the soul is not pain, but the fear of pain."
"The time when you should most of all withdraw into yourself is when you are forced to be in a crowd."
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.