Quotes About Epicurus

The strong stand taken by the Epicureans against all these tendencies was taken not in the name of science and human knowledge alone but in the name of human happiness, on the reasonable assumption that if men know the true nature of reality they are more likely to be happy than if they do not. Hence the happy and the good life presupposes knowing and knowing how to know.

When we exist, death is not present, and when death is present, we do not exist

A morte não é nada para nós, porque o corpo, quando está dissolvido nos seus elementos, não tem sentimento, e o que não tem sentimento não é nada para nós.

Nenhum prazer é em si mesmo mau, mas as coisas que produzem certos prazeres acarretam aborrecimentos muitas vezes maiores do que os próprios prazeres.

Reality is all things simultaneously, or, in the Greek phrase, it is a process of "becoming" in which even apparently clearcut opposites lose identity and merge into each other.

A Fortuna, porém, raramente interfere com o sábio; seus maiores e mais elevados interesses têm sido, são e serão dirigidos pela razão ao longo de sua vida.

La morte, il più terribile dei mali, non è niente. Quando ci siamo noi la morte non c'è, e quando c'è lei noi non siamo più.

Like many of the ideas that mattered in the American Revolution, extraterrestrials got their start in antiquity. The Greek philosopher Epicurus speculated that the universe must be infinite, eternal and abounding in 'worlds' just like our own.

Justice does not exist in the abstract," Epicurus flatly asserts; it is just "a compact to not harm or be harmed";

Epicurus agreed, albeit in slightly more poetic phraseology: Of all the things that wisdom provides for living one's entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship.

Most modern people think of religion as a consolation, but to Epicurus it was the opposite. Supernatural interference with the course of nature seemed to him a source of terror, and immortality fatal to the hope of release from pain. Accordingly he constructed an elaborate doctrine designed to cure men of the beliefs that inspire fear.

Epicurus was a materialist, but not a determinist. He followed Democritus in believing that the world consists of atoms and the void; but he did not believe, as Democritus did, that the atoms are at all times completely controlled by natural laws.

It follows, in the words of Epicurus, that "Death is nothing to us; for that which is dissolved, is without sensation, and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us.

Knowledge of what? If, as Epicurus insisted, the what is unknowable, Walt's knowledge is a personal gnosis, in which the knower himself is known by whatever can be known.

Lucretius, who follows [Epicurus] in denouncing love, sees no harm in sexual intercourse provided it is divorced from passion.

Epicurus frees his Wise Man from anticipation and worry about the future.4 [B] The most solid of our laws concerning

Writing to Lucretius, on Epicurus' belief that the soul was no different from the rest of the cosmos; made of atoms] Death is therefore nothing to us, and does not concern us at all, since it appears that the substance of the soul is perishable. When the separation of body and soul, whose union is the essence of our being, is consummated, it is clear that absolutely nothing will be able to reach us and awaken our sensibility, not even if earth mixes with sea, and sea with heaven.

I ... do not even know what I should conceive the good to be, if I eliminate the pleasures of taste, and eliminate the pleasures of sex, and eliminate the pleasures of listening, and eliminate the pleasant motions caused in our vision by a sensible form. ~ Epicurus

The justice of nature is a pledge of reciprocal usefulness ... neither to harm one another nor to be harmed … Justice was not a thing in its own right, but [exists] in mutual dealings in whatever places there [is] a pact about neither harming one another nor being harmed. ~ Epicurus

Fourth, they sometimes 'swerved'. The swerve was a deviation from the basic downward path. It occurred frequently enough to cause the entanglement of many atoms; the result was a universe containing objects of a sufficient size to be experienced instead of a universe in which individual imperceptible atoms simply rained down. The atomic swerve, Epicurus thought, could supply the basis for free will, if only by providing a model of spontaneous, unpredictable, undetermined action.

Unlike many later atomists, and unlike his Stoic rivals, Epicurus rejected determinism not only in the physical realm but also in the realm of human agency.

For he was Epicurus owene sone.

The flesh endures the storms of the present alone; the mind, those of the past and future as well as the present.

If God listened to the prayers of men, all men would quickly have perished: for they are forever praying for evil against one another.