Epicurus — "To be happy, we must take care of our bodies and our souls."
To be happy, we must take care of our bodies and our souls.
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More from Epicurus
"The wealth required by nature is limited and is easy to procure; but the wealth required by vain ideals extends to infinity."
"We should envy no one, for good men do not deserve envy, and as for the bad, the more they prosper, the more they harm themselves."
"No pleasure is a bad thing in itself; but the means by which certain pleasures are gained bring troubles many times greater than the pleasures."
"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."
"We must not violate nature, but obey her. And we shall obey her if we fulfill the necessary desires and also the natural, if they bring no harm, but sternly reject the harmful."
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.