Epicureanism Quotes

Snow is the beginning and the end of everything.

Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when he is young nor weary in the search of it when he has grown old. For no age is too early or too late for the health of the soul.

Of all the things which wisdom provides to make us entirely happy, much the greatest is the possession of friendship.

It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and well and justly. And it is impossible to live wisely and well and justly without living a pleasant life.

Stranger, here you will do well to tarry; here our highest good is pleasure.

Pleasure is the beginning and the end of living happily.

Don't fear god, Don't worry about death; What is good is easy to get, and What is terrible is easy to endure

I never desired to please the rabble. What pleased them, I did not learn; and what I knew was far removed from their understanding.

The time when most of you should withdraw into yourself is when you are forced to be in a crowd.

Misfortune seldom intrudes upon the wise man; his greatest and highest interests are directed by reason throughout the course of life.

It is better for you to be free of fear lying upon a pallet, than to have a golden couch and a rich table and be full of trouble.

Before the 3rd century you're having several philosophical schools still as a going concern. You have not only the Platonists and the Aristotelians but you have Scepticism, you have Stoicism, you even have a little bit of Epicureanism. And what happens after Plotinus is that everybody becomes a Neo-Platonist. So if we then go forward to the Islamic world for example, Plotinus is immensely influential, and Neo-Platonism becomes at least one major component of mainstream Islamic philosophy as well.

Justice... is a kind of compact not to harm or be harmed.

It is folly for a man to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obtain by himself.

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.

Epicureanism did inspire libertine culture in isolated sects, but Epicurus himself rejected an ethics of sensory indulgence, and he would have disowned latter-day 'Epicureanism' as a fussy, expensive, unphilosophical approach to eating and drinking.

It is possible to provide security against other ills, but as far as death is concerned, we men live in a city without walls.

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not.

Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.

If thou wilt make a man happy, add not unto his riches but take away from his desires.

The misfortune of the wise is better than the prosperity of the fool.

A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do without servility to mobs or monarchs.

Someone who has thought rationally and deeply about how the body works is likely to arrive at better ideas about how to be healthy than someone who has followed a hunch. Medicine presupposes a hierarchy between the confusion the layperson will be in about what is wrong with him, and the more accurate knowledge available to doctors reasoning logically. At the heart of Epicureanism is the thought that we are as bad at answering the question "What will make me happy?" as "What will make me healthy?" Our souls do not spell out their troubles.

The art of living well and the art of dying well are one.

Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.

Not what we have But what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.

There is no such thing as justice in the abstract; it is merely a compact between men.

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 toward attaining it.

It is not so much our friends' help that helps us, as the confidence of their help.

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.