Epicurus — "It is folly for a man to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obt…"
It is folly for a man to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obtain by himself.
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More from Epicurus
"The wise man is not afraid of death; indeed, he welcomes it as a release from the bondage of the body."
"The acquisition of riches has been for many men not an end, but a change, of troubles."
"Every pain is easy to despise, for the one who has considered it in its real limits."
"The man who says that all things happen of necessity cannot criticize one who says that not all things happen of necessity. For he admits that the very statement he is making is made of necessity."
"The greatest security of all is to be found in a quiet life withdrawn from the multitude."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.