Epicurus — "Of all the things which wisdom provides for the happiness of the whole life, by …"
Of all the things which wisdom provides for the happiness of the whole life, by far the most important is the acquisition of friendship.
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More from Epicurus
"It is better to be unhappy and reasonable than happy and unreasonable."
"The just man is most free from disturbance, while the unjust is full of the utmost disturbance."
"We should not believe in fate, but in our own free will."
"The greatest good is prudence."
"Empty is the argument of the philosopher by which no human suffering is therapeutically treated. For just as there is no profit in medicine if it does not expel the diseases of the body, so there is n…"
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.