Epicurus — "The wise man is a happy man, even in the midst of torture."
The wise man is a happy man, even in the midst of torture.
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More from Epicurus
"The beginning and root of all good is the pleasure of the stomach."
"We must therefore pursue the things that make for happiness, seeing that when happiness is present, we have everything; but when it is absent, we do everything to possess it."
"We must release ourselves from the prison of business and politics."
"The knowledge of the celestial phenomena has no other end than to procure tranquility and firmness of mind."
"Every pain is easy to despise, for the one who has considered it in its real limits."
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.