Epicurus — "It is better to be unhappy in a rational way than happy in an irrational way."
It is better to be unhappy in a rational way than happy in an irrational way.
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More from Epicurus
"The greatest good is to be free from pain and mental disturbance."
"Every pain is easy to despise, for the one who has considered it in its real limits."
"The limit of a pleasant life is not exceeded by him who has put an end to the pain of want and has arranged his life to be safe from all disturbance."
"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."
"It is better to be a victim of injustice than to be the perpetrator."
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.