Epicurus — "It is not wealth that makes us happy, but the use we make of it."
It is not wealth that makes us happy, but the use we make of it.
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More from Epicurus
"It is better to lie on a humble pallet and be free from care than to own a golden bed and be full of trouble."
"Of all the things which wisdom provides for the happiness of the whole life, by far the most important is the acquisition of friendship."
"The greatest disturbance of the soul is not pain, but the fear of pain."
"The greatest good is to be found in the prudent management of the good things of life."
"The art of living well and the art of dying well are one."
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.