Epicurus Quotes

Top 10 Quotations from Epicurus

1. The art of living well and the art of dying well are one.

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

3. A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do without servility to mobs or monarchs.

4. Not what we have but what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.

5. Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.

6. Of all the things which wisdom provides to make us entirely happy, much the greatest is the possession of friendship.

7. It is folly for a man to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obtain by himself.

8. I have never wished to cater to the crowd; for what I know they do not approve, and what they approve I do not know.

9. Misfortune seldom intrudes upon the wise man; his greatest and highest interests are directed by reason throughout the course of life.

10. The misfortune of the wise is better than the prosperity of the fool.

Other Quotes:

Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo. It translates as "I was not; I was; I am not; I do not care".

"Natural wealth is both limited and easy to acquire, but the riches incited by groundless opinion have no end." —Epicurus’Fifteenth Principal Doctrine

"Human misery is caused by endless demands of uncontrolled desire. 

Misfortune must be cured through gratitude for what has been lost and the knowledge that it is impossible to change what has happened." —Vatican Saying 55

 “that indulgence which prevents a greater pleasure, or produces a greater pain, is to be avoided.”  

"Nature makes it easy to procure the things that make life worth living and easy to dismiss the things that are unnecessary for true happiness."

"Let no one delay the study of philosophy while he is young, and when he is old let him not become weary of the study; for no man can ever find the time unsuitable or too late to study the health of his soul."

“poor is not the one who possesses little but the one who desires more”, 

“nothing is enough to someone for whom enough is little”

 "One must rely on sharpness of perception to separate the notions of nature from those that are designed with difficulty or obscurity … Pay full attention to the power of the empirical reasoning." – Epicurus, On Nature, Book 18

"It is through the senses that we must by necessity form a judgment about the imperceptible by means of reason." - Epicure 

"Further, we must hold that to arrive at an accurate knowledge of the cause of things of the most moment is the business of natural science, and that happiness depends on this."

Letter to Herodotus:

"There are things that account for major disturbances in men’s minds. First, they assume that celestial bodies are blessed and eternal, yet have impulses, actions, and purposes quite inconsistent with divinity. Next, they anticipate and foresee eternal suffering as depicted in myths, or even fear the very lack of consciousness that comes with death as if this could be a concern to them. Finally, they suffer all this, not as a result of reasonable conjecture, but through some sort of unreasoning imagination; and since in imagination they set no limit to suffering, they are beset by turmoil as great as if there were a reasonable basis for their dread."

Letter to Menoeceus he wrote:

"When we say, then, that pleasure is the end and aim we do not mean the pleasures of the prodigal or the pleasures of sensuality, as we are understood to do by some through ignorance, prejudice, or willful misrepresentation. By pleasure, we mean the absence of pain in the body and trouble in the soul. It is not an unbroken succession of drinking bouts and of revelry, not sexual love, not the enjoyment of the fish and other delicacies of a luxurious table, which produces a pleasant life; it is sober reasoning, searching out the grounds of every choice and avoidance, and banishing those beliefs through which the greatest tumults take possession of the soul."

"A philosopher's words are empty if they do not heal the suffering of mankind. For just as medicine is useless if it does not remove sickness from the body, so philosophy is useless if it does not remove suffering from the soul."

"It is through the senses that we must by necessity form a judgment about the imperceptible by means of reason.."

"I have never wished to cater to the crowd; for what I know they do not approve, and what they approve I do not know."