Epicurus Quotes

58 Sourced Quotes

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
Natural justice is a symbol or expression of usefulness, to prevent one person from harming or being harmed by another.

Epicurus
As if they were our own handiwork we place a high value on our characters.

Epicurus
Most men are in a coma when they are at rest and mad when they act.

Epicurus
Natural wealth is limited and easily obtained; the wealth defined by vain fancies is always beyond reach.

Epicurus
If thou wilt make a man happy, add not unto his riches but take away from his desires.

Epicurus
Pleasure is the beginning and the end of living happily.

Epicurus
Not what we have But what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.

Epicurus
When someone admits one and rejects another which is equally in accordance with the appearances, it is clear that he has quitted all physical explanation and descended into myth.

Epicurus
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.

Epicurus
Remember that the future is neither ours nor wholly not ours, so that we may neither count on it as sure to come nor abandon hope of it as certain not to be.

Epicurus
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.

Epicurus
Justice has no independent existence; it results from mutual contracts, and establishes itself wherever there is a mutual engagement to guard against doing or sustaining mutual injury.

Epicurus
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
Moreover, the universe as a whole is infinite, for whatever is limited has an outermost edge to limit it, and such an edge is defined by something beyond. Since the universe has no edge, it has no limit; and since it lacks a limit, it is infinite and unbounded. Moreover, the universe is infinite both in the number of its atoms and in the extent of its void.

Epicurus
Accustom yourself to believe that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply awareness, and death is the privation of all awareness; therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life an unlimited time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality. For life has no terror; for those who thoroughly apprehend that there are no terrors for them in ceasing to live.

Epicurus
He who is not satisfied with a little, is satisfied with nothing.

Epicurus
No pleasure is in itself evil, but the things which produce certain pleasures entail annoyances many times greater than the pleasures themselves.

Epicurus
The term "incorporeal" is properly applied only to the void, which cannot act or be acted on. Since the soul can act and be acted upon, it is corporeal.

Epicurus
It is impossible for a man who secretly violates the terms of the agreement not to harm or be harmed to feel confident that he will remain undiscovered, even if he has already escaped ten thousand times; for until his death he is never sure that he will not be detected.

Epicurus