Epicurus — "It is better to be unfortunate in a reasonable manner than to be fortunate in an…"
It is better to be unfortunate in a reasonable manner than to be fortunate in an unreasonable one.
Get This Quote & Author's Image Illustrated On:
Click any product to generate a realistic preview. Up to 3 at a time.
* Initial load can take up to 90 seconds — revising the preview in another color is nearly instant.
Kitchen
Apparel
Other
More from Epicurus
"Death is nothing to us; for that which has been dissolved into its elements experiences no sensation, and that which has no sensation is nothing to us."
"The man who is most blessed is he who has the fewest wants."
"A free man cannot acquire many possessions, because this is difficult to do without serving either crowds or kings."
"The man who says that all things happen of necessity cannot criticize one who says that not all things happen of necessity."
"It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor."
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.