The pleasant life is produced not by endless drinking and revelry but by sober reasoning.
Ou gar potous kai komous syneirous... all' ho nephalios logismos.
Philosophers
Epicurus
Born on the island of Samos around 341 BCE, Epicurus was an ancient Greek philosopher who founded the Garden school in Athens and declared pleasure the highest good. Yet his pleasure was not sensual indulgence but ataraxia — tranquility of mind achieved by eliminating pain and anxiety. Inheriting Democritus's atomism and introducing the 'swerve' of atoms to ground free will, he became a founding figure of Hellenistic practical philosophy.
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Epicurus's Other Quotes
Live unknown.
Death is nothing to us; for what has been dissolved has no sensation, and what has no sensation is nothing to us.
Just as medicine is useless if it does not drive out bodily disease, so philosophy is useless if it does not drive out suffering of the soul.
When we say pleasure is the goal, we do not mean the pleasures of the dissolute or of sensual indulgence, but freedom from bodily pain and mental disturbance.
Bodily pain does not last without limit; intense pain is brief in duration.
Related Quotes
All the natural movements of the soul are governed by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace alone is the exception.
-- Simone Weil
As in all things, we suffer from excess in reading too. Many books are a burden, not an ornament.
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The wise man is free from passions, not because he does not feel, but because his judgments are correct.
-- Chrysippus of Soli
Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.
-- Bertrand Russell
I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.
-- Benedictus de Spinoza
The divine law commands rational consideration of existing things and reflection upon them.
-- Averroes