Epicurus — "We must not violate nature, but obey her."
We must not violate nature, but obey her.
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More from Epicurus
"The man who says that all things happen of necessity cannot criticize one who says that not all things happen of necessity."
"The end of all our actions is to be free from pain and fear."
"The limit of a pleasant life is not exceeded by him who has put an end to the pain of want and has arranged his life to be safe from all disturbance."
"I have never wished to cater to the crowd; for what I know they do not approve, and what they approve I do not know."
"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."
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.