Epicurus — "The greatest good is prudence; it is even more precious than philosophy itself."
The greatest good is prudence; it is even more precious than philosophy itself.
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More from Epicurus
"The greatest good is to be free from pain and mental disturbance."
"A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is no easy thing to do without servility to mobs or monarchs."
"The one who least needs tomorrow will most gladly greet tomorrow."
"We must release ourselves from the prison of business and politics."
"The wise man will not be more grateful for good things when they are present than when they are not."
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.