Epicurus — "The wise man avoids pain, but does not seek pleasure."
The wise man avoids pain, but does not seek pleasure.
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More from Epicurus
"We must exercise ourselves in the things which bring happiness, since, if that be present, we have everything, and if that be absent, all our actions are directed to attaining it."
"He who is not satisfied with a little is satisfied with nothing."
"It is not so much our friends' help that helps us as the confident knowledge that they will help us."
"It is impossible for someone to dispel his fears about the most important matters if he doesn't know the nature of the universe but still suspects something of the stories told in myths. So that it is…"
"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.