Epicurus — "The greatest good is prudence."
The greatest good is prudence.
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More from Epicurus
"The limit of quantity in pleasures is the removal of all that is painful. Wherever and whenever this is present, pleasure is no longer increased, but has reached its stationary maximum."
"The time when we are best able to enjoy ourselves is when we have least need of enjoyment."
"We should not pretend to be philosophers, but be philosophers in reality."
"Death is nothing to us; for that which has been dissolved into its elements experiences no sensation, and that which has no sensation is nothing to us."
"I have never wished to cater to the crowd; for what I know they do not approve, and what they approve I do not know."
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.