Epicurus — "The man who says that all things happen of necessity cannot criticize one who sa…"
The man who says that all things happen of necessity cannot criticize one who says that not all things happen of necessity.
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More from Epicurus
"It is better to endure a necessary pain than to suffer a constant anxiety."
"It is better to be unhappy in a rational way than happy in an irrational way."
"It is not possible to dispel the fear of the most important things unless one understands the whole nature of the universe."
"The magnitude of pleasure reaches its limit in the removal of all pain. When that point is attained, pleasure does not further increase, but only varies in kind."
"Limit yourself to the present, and your fears will be gone."
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.