Epicurus — "We should envy no one, for good men do not deserve envy, and as for the bad, the…"
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.
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More from Epicurus
"The wise man is but little favored by fortune, but his reason procures him the greatest and most valuable goods."
"It is not possible for one to rid himself of his fears about the most important matters if he does not understand the nature of the whole, but is still in doubt about some of the things that are said …"
"The greatest good is to be free from pain and mental disturbance."
"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."
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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.