Epicurus — "The greatest good is the knowledge of the nature of things."
The greatest good is the knowledge of the nature of things.
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More from Epicurus
"Every pain is easy to despise, for the one who has considered it in its real limits."
"We should not believe in fate, but in our own free will."
"The wise man is a happy man, even in the midst of torture."
"The truly wise man is he who does not grieve for what he has not, but rejoices in what he has."
"The flesh cries out for an end to hunger, an end to thirst, an end to cold. If a man has these, and is confident of having them in the future, he might contend in happiness even with Zeus."
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.
Details
Letter to Herodotus (though often summarized as such, precise phrasing can vary)
Date: c. 300 BCE
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