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.
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.
If you wish to make Pythocles wealthy, don’t give him more money; rather, reduce his desires.
This science explains to us the meaning of terms, the nature of predication, and the law of consistency and contradiction; secondly, a thorough knowledge of the facts of nature relieves us of the burden of superstition, frees us from fear of death, and shields us against the disturbing effects of ignorance, which is often in itself a cause of terrifying apprehensions;.
So long as we exist, death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist.
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.
A free man cannot acquire many possessions, because this is no easy feat without becoming a hireling of mobs or dynasts. And yet he has a constant abundance of everything, and if he should chance to gain many possessions, he could easily portion them out so as to win his neighbors’ good will.
I am grateful to blessed Nature, because she made what is necessary easy to acquire and what is hard to acquire unnecessary.
The greatest fruit of self-sufficiency is freedom.
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.
By pleasure we mean the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul. It.
It is not an unbroken succession of drinking-bouts and of merrymaking, not sexual love, not the enjoyment of the fish and other delicacies of a luxurious table, which produce a pleasant life; it is sober reasoning, searching out the grounds of every choice and avoidance, and banishing those beliefs through which the greatest disturbances take possession of the soul.
If death is we are not, if we are death is not.
The impassive soul disturbs neither itself nor others.
Death means nothing to us.
Of all the things that wisdom provides for the happiness of the whole man, by far the most important is the acquisition of friendship.
Send me a pot of cheese, so that I may be able to indulge myself whenever I wish.
The just person enjoys. the greatest peace of mind, while the unjust is full of the utmost disquietude.
We must free ourselves from the prison of everyday affairs and politics.
I write this not for the many, but for you; each of us is enough of an audience for the other.
The esteem of others is outside our control; we must attend instead to healing ourselves.