Epicurus — "The greatest good is to be free from troubles of the mind."
The greatest good is to be free from troubles of the mind.
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More from Epicurus
"He who has peace of mind has no need of wealth."
"Self-sufficiency is the greatest of all wealth."
"The truly wise man is he who does not grieve for what he has not, but rejoices in what he has."
"The study of nature creates men who are not only free from fear, but also from vanity."
"It is not possible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and honorably and justly, and it is not possible to live wisely and honorably and justly without living a pleasant life."
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.