Epicurus — "The beginning and the root of all good is the pleasure of the stomach; even wisd…"
The beginning and the root of all good is the pleasure of the stomach; even wisdom and culture must be referred to this.
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More from Epicurus
"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 wise man counts it a greater advantage to be content with little than to be rich."
"The man who best knows how to meet external threats makes into one family all the creatures he can."
"A free man cannot acquire many possessions, because this is difficult to do without serving either crowds or kings."
"The time when we are best able to enjoy ourselves is when we have least need of enjoyment."
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.