Epicurus — "Luxury and gluttony are not the path to pleasure, but moderation and self-suffic…"
Luxury and gluttony are not the path to pleasure, but moderation and self-sufficiency.
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More from Epicurus
"The wise man will not be more grateful for good things when they are present than when they are not."
"The wise man is not afraid of death; indeed, he welcomes it as a release from the bondage of the body."
"He who is not satisfied with a little is satisfied with nothing."
"Justice is a contract of utility entered into to prevent men from harming or being harmed by one another."
"The greatest good is to be found in the prudent management of the good things of life."
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.