Quotes About Epicureans

Boldness formerly was not the character of atheists as such. They were even of a character nearly the reverse; they were formerly like the old Epicureans, rather an unenterprising race. But of late they are grown active, designing, turbulent, and seditious.

Modern stereotypes brand Epicureans as seekers after sensual pleasure, often associated with the motto, 'Eat, drink

In Cicero's time the left and the right wing in ethical philosophy were represented by the Epicureans and the Stoics respectively, while the Peripatetics held a middle ground.

There are only Epicureans, either crude or refined; Christ was the most refined.

With the Epicureans it was never science for the sake of science but always science for the sake of human happiness.

No one can understand the Stoics and Epicureans without some knowledge of the Hellenistic age, or the scholastics without a modicum of understanding of the growth of the Church from the fifth to the thirteenth centuries.

His philosophy was a mixture of three famous schools -- the Cynics, the Stoics and the Epicureans -- and summed up all three of them in his famous phrase, 'You can't trust any bugger further than you can throw him, and there's nothing you can do about it, so let's have a drink.

What did they care if the rabbis who found them with the books of haskala, of enlightenment, called them epicureans, atheists, breakers of the wall? These old epithets they began to take as names of honor. Out of their ranks came the minds and spirits that created modern Zionism. The fact that Zionism was cradled against the separatist learning of the old yeshivas colors the state of Israel to this hour.

In the third section, you proceed to turn us into modest and peace-loving Epicureans.

Epicureans, from the beginning, rejected idealisms and absolutes that divorced people from context and from nature, and chose to engage reality instead. Our morality is contextual. Rather than hand down absolute dos and don'ts, the first Epicureans elaborated methods by which we can most effectively use our faculties.

The ancient Epicureans observed that, since we are all made of particles and we observe no sentience after death, fear-based religion is unnecessary and people should focus on living well. After we die, the particles in our bodies return to nature and are recycled into other bodies. There are important ethical repercussions once we accept that we get only one life.