Epicurus — "Pleasure is the starting point and goal of living blessedly."
Pleasure is the starting point and goal of living blessedly.
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More from Epicurus
"It is not so much our friends' help that helps us as the confident knowledge that they will help us."
"The wise man counts it a greater advantage to be content with little than to be rich."
"The magnitude of pleasure reaches its limit in the removal of all pain. When that state is present, pleasure can be varied, but it cannot be increased, nor can it be diminished, so long as it is not d…"
"The pleasure of the soul is superior to that of the body."
"The end of all our actions is to be free from pain and fear."
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.