Epicurus — "The cheerful man is also the wise man."
The cheerful man is also the wise man.
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More from Epicurus
"The beginning and the root of all good is the pleasure of the stomach; even wisdom and culture must be referred to this."
"Justice is a contract of utility entered into to prevent men from harming or being harmed by one another."
"The wealth required by nature is limited and is easy to procure; but the wealth required by vain ideals extends to infinity."
"No pleasure is a bad thing in itself; but the means by which certain pleasures are gained bring troubles many times greater than the pleasures."
"The wise man is not disturbed by the absence of friends, but by the absence of virtue."
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.