Epicurus — "We should rather laugh than weep at human life."
We should rather laugh than weep at human life.
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More from Epicurus
"I have never wished to cater to the crowd; for what I know they do not approve, and what they approve I do not know."
"The magnitude of pleasure reaches its limit in the removal of all pain. When that point is attained, pleasure does not further increase, but only varies in kind."
"We must laugh and philosophize at the same time."
"I was never anxious to please the mob, for I have not learned what pleases it."
"The greatest security of all is to be found in a quiet life withdrawn from the multitude."
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.