Epicurus — "The time when we are best able to enjoy ourselves is when we have least need of …"
The time when we are best able to enjoy ourselves is when we have least need of enjoyment.
Get This Quote & Author's Image Illustrated On:
Click any product to generate a realistic preview. Up to 3 at a time.
* Initial load can take up to 90 seconds — revising the preview in another color is nearly instant.
Kitchen
Apparel
Other
More from Epicurus
"The one who least needs tomorrow will most gladly greet tomorrow."
"We are born once and cannot be born twice, but for all eternity must be no more. But you, who are not master of tomorrow, postpone your happiness. Life is wasted by delaying, and each one of us dies w…"
"We should look for someone to eat and drink with before looking for something to eat and drink."
"Against all things it is possible to find security, but with regard to death we all dwell in an unfortified city."
"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.