Epicurus — "Live unknown."
Live unknown.
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More from Epicurus
"It is better to be unhappy and reasonable than happy and unreasonable."
"When we are young, we should not hesitate to philosophize, and when we are old, we should not grow tired of philosophizing. For no one is too young or too old to attain health of the soul."
"Luxury and gluttony are not the path to pleasure, but moderation and self-sufficiency."
"Of all the things which wisdom provides for the happiness of the whole life, by far the most important is the acquisition of friendship."
"We are born once and cannot be born twice, but for all eternity must be no more. But you, who are not master of tomorrow, postpone your happiness. Life is wasted by delaying, and each one of us dies w…"
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.