Top 100 Epicurus's Quotes
#1. 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
Epicurus
#2. Epicurus's old questions are still unanswered: Is he (God) willing to prevent evil, but not able? then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? then whence evil?
David Hume
#3. Companionship was at the top of Epicurus's list of life's pleasures. He wrote, 'Of all the things that wisdom provides to help one live one's entire life in happiness, the greatest by far is the possession of friendship.
Daniel Klein
#4. Men are so thoughtless, nay, so mad, that some, through fear of death, force themselves to die.
Epicurus
#6. Vain is the word of that philosopher which does not heal any suffering of man.
Epicurus
#8. One who understands the limits of the good life knows that what eliminates the pains brought on by need and what makes the whole of life perfect is easily obtained, so that there is no need for enterprises that entail the struggle for success.19
Epicurus
#9. Contemplating Clodia I find scarcely a drop in my heart of that compassion which Epicurus enjoins us to extend toward the erring.
Thornton Wilder
#10. Those desires that do not bring pain if they are not satisfied are not necessary; and they are easily thrust aside whenever to satisfy them appears difficult or likely to cause injury.
Epicurus
#11. The guilty man may escape, but he cannot be sure of doing so.
Epicurus
#12. But the universe is infinite.
Epicurus
#13. The time when most of you should withdraw into yourself is when you are forced to be in a crowd.
Epicurus
#14. Earthquakes may be brought about because wind is caught up in the earth, so the earth is dislocated in small masses and is continually shaken, and that causes it to sway.
Epicurus
#15. Only the just man enjoys peace of mind.
Epicurus
#16. In the case of most pains let this remark of Epicurus aid thee, that the pain is neither intolerable nor everlasting, if thou bear in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination ...
Marcus Aurelius
#17. If a little is not enough for you, nothing is.
Epicurus
#18. The noble soul occupies itself with wisdom and friendship.
Epicurus
#19. Why are you afraid of death? Where you are, death is not. Where death is, you are not. What is it that you fear.
Epicurus
#20. Without confidence, there is no friendship.
Epicurus
#21. If the gods listened to the prayers of men, all humankind would quickly perish since they constantly pray for many evils to befall one another.
Epicurus
#22. Injustice is not evil in itself, but only in the fear and apprehension that one will not escape those who have been set up to punish the offense.
Epicurus
#23. Justice is a contract of expediency, entered upon to prevent men harming or being harmed.
Epicurus
#24. Do everything like someone is gazing at you.
Epicurus
#25. After upwards of two thousand years Epicurus has been exonerated from the reproach that the doctrines of his philosophy recommended the pleasures of sensuality and voluptuousness as the chief good. Calumny may rest on genius a considerable part of a world's duration; what then is the value of fame?
William Benton Clulow
#26. It is vain to ask of the gods what man is capable of supplying for himself.
Epicurus
#27. Of all the gifts that wise Providence grants us to make life full and happy, friendship is the most beautiful.
Epicurus
#28. Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.
Epicurus
#29. You may see me, fat and shining, with well-cared for hide, ... a hog from Epicurus' herd.
[Lat., Me pinguem et nitidum bene curata cute vises,
... Epicuri de grege porcum.]
Horace
#30. We must, therefore, pursue the things that make for happiness, seeing that when happiness is present, we have everything; but when it is absent, we do everything to possess it.
Epicurus
#31. My garden does not whet the appetite; it satisfies it. It does not provoke thirst through heedless indulgence, but slakes it by proffering its natural remedy. Amid such pleasures as these have I grown old.
Epicurus
#32. A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do without servility to mobs or monarchs.
Epicurus
#33. What will happen to me if that which this desire seeks is achieved, and what if it is not?
Epicurus
#34. Misfortune seldom intrudes upon the wise man; his greatest and highest interests are directed by reason throughout the course of life.
Epicurus
#35. Vain is the word of a philosopher which does not heal any suffering of man. For just as there is no profit in medicine if it does not expel the diseases of the body, so there is no profit in philosophy either, if it does not expel the suffering of the mind.
Epicurus
#36. I never desired to please the rabble. What pleased them, I did not learn; and what I knew was far removed from their understanding.
Epicurus
#37. Epicurus says, "gratitude is a virtue that has commonly profit annexed to it." And where is the virtue that has not? But still the virtue is to be valued for itself, and not for the profit that attends it.
Seneca The Younger
#38. The key point, as Epicurus' disciple Lucretius wrote in verses of unrivalled beauty, was to abandon the anxious and doomed attempt to build higher and higher walls and to turn instead toward the cultivation of pleasure.
Stephen Greenblatt
#39. So long as we exist, death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist
Epicurus
#40. Be moderate in order to taste the joys of life in abundance.
Epicurus
#41. I spit upon luxurious pleasures, not for their own sake, but because of the inconveniences that follow them.
Epicurus
#42. The greater the difficulty, the more the glory in surmounting it.
Epicurus
#43. There are infinite worlds both like and unlike this world of ours. For the atoms being infinite in number ... are borne on far out into space.
Epicurus
#44. He who least needs tomorrow, will most gladly greet tomorrow.
Epicurus
#45. 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.
Epicurus
#46. I would like Epicurus and Buddha to become one.
Osho
#47. Launch your boat, blessed youth, and flee at full speed from every form of culture.
Epicurus
#48. 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.
Epicurus
#49. If you wish to make Pythocles rich, do not add to his store of money, but subtract from his desires.
Epicurus
#50. If thou wilt make a man happy, add not unto his riches but take away from his desires.
Epicurus
#51. It is folly for a man to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obtain by himself.
Epicurus
#52. For a wrongdoer to be undetected is difficult; and for him to have confidence that his concealment will continue is impossible.
Epicurus
#53. Empty is the argument of the philosopher which does not relieve any human suffering.
Epicurus
#54. Fortune seldom troubles the wise man. Reason has controlled his greatest and most important affairs, controls them throughout his life, and will continue to control them.
Epicurus
#55. Of all the things which wisdom provides to make us entirely happy, much the greatest is the possession of friendship.
Epicurus
#56. Death is nothing to us, because a body that has been dispersed into elements experiences no sensations, and the absence of sensation is nothing to us.
Epicurus
#57. Riches do not exhilarate us so much with their possession as they torment us with their loss.
Epicurus
#58. When we exist, death is not yet present, and when death is present, then we do not exist.
Epicurus
#59. Freedom is the greatest fruit of self sufficiency.
Epicurus
#60. With the Epicureans it was never science for the sake of science but always science for the sake of human happiness.
Epicurus
#61. The wealth required by nature is limited and is easy to procure; but the wealth required by vain ideals extends to infinity.
Epicurus
#62. We cannot live pleasantly without living wisely and nobly and righteously.
Epicurus
#63. Thus that which is the most awful of evils, death, is nothing to us, since when we exist there is no death, and when there is death we do not exist.
Epicurus
#64. A world is a circumscribed portion of sky ... it is a piece cut off from the infinite.
Epicurus
#65. Death is nothing to us. When we exist, death is not; and when death exists, we are not. All sensation and consciousness ends with death and therefore in death there is neither pleasure nor pain. The fear of death arises from the belief that in death, there is awareness.
Epicurus
#66. The impassive soul disturbs neither itself nor others.
Epicurus
#67. Death, the most dreaded of evils, is therefore of no concern to us; for while we exist death is not present, and when death is present we no longer exist.
Epicurus
#68. For I thought Epicurus and Lucretius
By Nature meant the Whole Goddam Machinery.
Robert Frost
#69. Many friends are the key to happiness
Epicurus
#70. So death, the most terrifying of ills, is nothing to us, since so long as we exist, death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist. It does not then concern either the living or the dead, since for the former it is not, and the latter are no more.
Epicurus
#71. As if they were our own handiwork we place a high value on our characters.
Epicurus
#72. Lucretius, who follows [Epicurus] in denouncing love, sees no harm in sexual intercourse provided it is divorced from passion.
Lucretius
#73. Tranquil pleasure constitutes human beings' supreme good
Epicurus
#74. The honor paid to a wise man is a great good for those who honor him.
Epicurus
#75. And in declaring true every theory that does not contravene the evidence of the senses, Epicurus does not blink the fact that the philosopher may arrive at more than one explanation for a given phenomenon - in some cases, even at explanations that are mutually exclusive or contradictory.
Titus Lucretius Carus
#76. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Epicurus
#77. 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.
Matthew Stewart
#78. Let no one delay the study of philosophy while young nor weary of it when old.
Epicurus
#79. What men fear is not that death is annihilation but that it is not.
Epicurus
#80. We have been born once and there can be no second birth. Fir all eternity we shall no longer be. But you, although you are not master of tomorrow, are postponing your happiness ...
Epicurus
#81. It is not the young man who should be considered fortunate but the old man who has lived well, because the young man in his prime wanders much by chance, vacillating in his beliefs, while the old man has docked in the harbor, having safeguarded his true happiness.
Epicurus
#82. The purpose of all knowledge, metaphysical as well as scientific, is to achieve what Epicurus called ataraxia, freedom from irrational fears and anxieties of all sorts - in brief, peace of mind.
Epicurus
#83. A strict belief in fate is the worst of slavery, imposing upon our necks an everlasting lord and tyrant, whom we are to stand in awe of night and day.
Epicurus
#84. In a philosophical dispute, he gains most who is defeated, since he learns most.
Epicurus
#85. panta rei ("All things are in flux"),
Epicurus
#86. First Theory . There is no Providence at all for anything in the Universe; all parts of the Universe, the heavens and what they contain, owe their origin to accident and chance; there exists no being that rules and governs them or provides for them. This is the theory of Epicurus ...
Maimonides
#87. Live your life without attracting attention.
Epicurus
#88. Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.
Epicurus
#89. It is not so much our friends' help that helps us as the confident knowledge that they will help us.
Epicurus
#90. All other love is extinguished by self-love; beneficence, humanity, justice, philosophy, sink under it.
Epicurus
#91. Thanks be to blessed Nature that she has made what is necessary easy to obtain, and what is not easy unnecessary.
Epicurus
#92. 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.
Epicurus
#93. The words of that philosopher who offers no therapy for human suffering are empty and vain.
Epicurus
#94. All sensations are true; pleasure is our natural goal.
Epicurus
#95. Epicurus (341-270 B.C.) was the last major Greek philosopher of the classical era to make significant original contributions to the study of language, developing a socio-anthropological theory of the origin of language.
Richard E. McDorman
#96. Lucretius was passionate, and much more in need of exhortations to prudence than Epicurus was. He committed suicide, and appears to have suffered from periodic insanity - brought on, so some averred, by the pains of love or the unintended effects of a love philtre.
Lucretius
#97. If God listened to the prayers of men, all men would quickly have perished: for they are forever praying for evil against one another.
Epicurus
#98. If a person fights the clear evidence of his senses he will never be able to share in genuine tranquillity
Epicurus
#99. Justice ... is a kind of compact not to harm or be harmed.
Epicurus
#100. It is not possible to live happily if one does not lead a beautiful, righteous, and wise life, or to lead a beautiful, righteous, and wise life if one is not happy. EPICURUS
Matthieu Ricard
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