Quotes from Epicurus

We must free ourselves from the prison of everyday affairs and politics.

I am grateful to blessed Nature, because she made what is necessary easy to acquire and what is hard to acquire unnecessary.

Meditate then, on all these things, and on those things which are related to them, both day and night, and both alone and with like-minded companions. For if you will do this, you will never be disturbed while asleep or awake by imagined fears, but you will live like a god among men. For a man who lives among immortal blessings is in no respect like a mortal being.

Jangan iri kepada siapa pun, karena orang baik tidak layak diirikan. Sedangkan orang jahat, semakin mereka makmur, semakin mereka merusak diri sendiri.

Live in obscurity--lathe bi?sas (???? ??????)

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

If a person fights the clear evidence of his senses he will never be able to share in genuine tranquillity."41 In other words, a person who doubts his senses will either lose contact with the reality of the surrounding world, like the Skeptics, and become psychologically isolated and insecure, or he will fall prey, as do the religionists, to theological explanations which do not allay anxiety but foment it.

Two of Epicurus's early influences, Democritus and Pyrrho, had actually journeyed all the way to what is now India, where they had encountered Buddhism in the schools of the gymnosophists

The man who says that all events are necessitated has no ground for critizing the man who says that not all events are necessitated. For according to him this is itself a necessitated event.

How unhappy are the lives of men! How purblind their hearts!

Haec ego non multis, sed tibi: satis enim magnum alter alteri theatrum sumus.

The greatest fruit of self-sufficiency is freedom.

If you wish to make Pythocles wealthy, don't give him more money; rather, reduce his desires.

Pleasure and pain moreover supply the motives of desire and of avoidance, and the springs of conduct generally. This being so, it clearly follows that actions are right and praiseworthy only as being a means to the attainment of a life of pleasure. But that which is not itself a means to anything else, but to which all else is a means, is what the Greeks term the telos, the highest, ultimate or final Good.

27. Of all the means which are procured by wisdom to ensure happiness throughout the whole of life, by far the most important is the acquisition of firends.

Epicurus as a moral empiricist felt that our immediate feelings are far more cogent and authoritative guides to the good life than abstract maxims, verbal indoctrination, or even the voice of reason itself. Hence he based his ethics on nature, not on convention or on reason.

Self-sufficiency is the greatest of all wealth.

The blessed and indestructible being of the divine has no concerns of its own, nor does it make trouble for others. It is not affected by feelings of anger or benevolence, because these are found where there is lack of strength.

Of all the things that wisdom provides for the happiness of the whole man, by far the most important is the acquisition of friendship.

The opinions held by most people about the gods are not true conceptions of them but fallacious notions, according to which awful penalties are meted out to the evil and the greatest of blessings to the good.

We must laugh and philosophize and manage our households and look after our other affairs all at the same time, and never stop proclaiming the words of the true philosophy.

Mereka yang pernah menolong orang-orang yang kesusahan, menginsafi bahwa memberi lebih baik daripada menerima.

Some men spend their whole life furnishing for themselves the things proper to life without realizing that at our birth each of us was poured a mortal brew to drink.

By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul. It