"Epicurus" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fairly epitomized, there is not one that is true—not one of which the essential falsity is not evident, obvious, conspicuous to even the most delinquent observation. Yet with the smartness and smirk of a graduating seminary girl refuting Epicurus she marshals them against the awful truth that every year in Europe and the United States alone more than five thousand human beings the of hydrophobia—a fact which her controversial conscience does not permit her to mention. The names on this needless death-roll are mostly those of children, the ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... ghost of Menander, saying: For the love of me love Terence. It is through love of Terence that moderns are able to love Menander; and what is preserved of Terence has not apparently given us the best of the friend of Epicurus. [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] the lover taken in horror, and [Greek text] the damsel shorn of her locks, have a promising sound for scenes of jealousy and a too masterful display of lordly authority, leading ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... their bodies, and in the internal belief of their souls. Of these wise and good men some granted the existence of the supposed deities, but denied that they cared about the actions of mankind any more than those of the inferior animals. A merry, jovial, careless life, such as the followers of Epicurus would choose for themselves, was what they assigned for those gods whose being they admitted. Others, more bold or more consistent, entirely denied the existence of deities who apparently had no proper object or purpose, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the entire, the spotless, and undecaying robe of Truth. What impiety,' he added, 'the confronting and paralleling the sacred verity of St. Paul with the offals and sweepings of antiquity, that met as accidently and absurdly as Epicurus his atoms to ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... Deorum Natura.—The dialogue is placed in 77 B.C. In Book i. Velleius attacks other philosophies and explains the system of Epicurus. He is then refuted by Cotta. In Book ii. Balbus, speaking as a Stoic, discusses the existence of the gods, nature, the government of the world and providence. In Book iii. Cotta criticizes the views of Balbus. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... magazine and thought for a while about these diverse men. In the days of his integrity he would have defended his attitude to the last—an Epicurus in Nirvana, he would have cried that to struggle was to believe, to believe was to limit. He would as soon have become a churchgoer because the prospect of immortality gratified him as he would have considered entering the leather business because the intensity of the ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... injunctions for "feeding the brute", is the longest in the book, and gives an extraordinarily interesting picture of the domestic economy of our ancestors.[19] The Menagier must have been brother to Chaucer's Franklin, 'Epicurus owene sone': ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... present essay will be to bring into a clearer light the remarkable contributions made by the body to the workings of the soul, and the great and real influence of the animal system of sensations upon the spiritual. But this is as like the philosophy of Epicurus as the holding of virtue to be the summum ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... compunction, repulsive expansion; and the stinging anguish, duplex motion. The author hints that he has written other works, to which he gives no clue. I have heard that Behmen was pillaged by Newton, and Swedenborg[583] by Laplace,[584] and Pythagoras by Copernicus,[585] and Epicurus by Dalton,[586] &c. I do not think this mention will revive Behmen; but it may the whizgig, a very pretty toy, and philosophical withal, for few of those who used it could ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... always in motion, and which can neither be stopped nor broken in pieces, nor in any way destroyed or deprived of the least of their properties, was known by the name of the Atomic theory. It was associated with the names of Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius, and was commonly supposed to admit the existence only of atoms and void, to the exclusion of any other basis ...
— Five of Maxwell's Papers • James Clerk Maxwell
... Master-Cook conceives himself to be a pupil of Epicurus, whose favourite but ambiguous axiom, that "Voluptuousness is the sovereign good," was interpreted by the bon-vivans of antiquity ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... or at any rate problematical, evils, we often incur real suffering. "The man," said Epicurus, "who is not content with little is content with nothing." How often do we "labor for that which satisfieth not." More than we use is more than we need, and only a burden to the bearer. [16] We most of us give ourselves an immense amount of useless trouble; encumber ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... life is passing swiftly over; and the night cometh, wherein no man can work. The night once come, our happiness, our unhappiness,—it is all abolished; vanished, clean gone; a thing that has been: 'not of the slightest consequence' whether we were happy as eupeptic Curtis, as the fattest pig of Epicurus, or unhappy as Job with potsherds, as musical Byron with Giaours and sensibilities of the heart; as the unmusical Meat-jack with hard labour and rust! But our work,—behold that is not abolished, ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... Q. 'Did Epicurus maintain any doctrines such as are here ascribed to him?'—A. 'Perhaps not explicitly, either in words or by any other mode of direct sanction: on the contrary, I believe he denied them— and disclaimed them ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... OF THE SCEPTICS, who conduct the higher Analysis of Ethical Philosophy.—Pyrrho demonstrates the Uncertainty of Knowledge.—Inevitable Passage into tranquil Indifference, Quietude, and Irreligion, as recommended by Epicurus.—Decomposition of the Socratic and Platonic Systems in the later Academies.—Their Errors and Duplicities.—End of the ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... Orator took into keeping a youth called Cnosion greatly to the indignation of his wife. Xenophon loved Clinias and Autolycus; Aristotle, Hermeas, Theodectes[FN373] and others; Empedocles, Pausanias; Epicurus, Pytocles; Aristippus, Eutichydes and Zeno with his Stoics had a philosophic disregard for women, affecting only pederastia. A man in Athenaeus (iv. c. 40) left in his will that certain youths he had loved should fight like gladiators at his funeral; and Charicles in Lucian abuses Callicratidas ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... of the unknown painter who had ventured to make it. Nor did he. Turning over a page he also contrived to turn the laugh yet once again, this time against the too-presuming artist. Finding, perhaps, the coarsest of the sketches, one in keeping with the "fat and splendid pig from the drove of Epicurus," he in his turn wrote the name of Holbein above the wanton boor at his carousals. It was a reprisal not more delicate than the spirit with which subjects too sacred to have been named in the same breath with Folly,—the very words of our ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... Lucilia, 'a declaiming advocate of Epicurus, or a street-lecturer upon Plato, or turned priest of Apollo's new temple, it would have all been quite ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... gave to it a supremacy so rigid as to threaten the extinction of the affections. The Epicureans, on the other hand, fastening upon the emotions as the measure of truth, emphasised the happiness of the individual as the chief good—a doctrine which led some of the followers of Epicurus to justify even sensual enjoyment. It is not necessary to dwell upon the details of Epicureanism, for though its description of the 'wise man,' as that of a person who prudently steered a middle course between passion and asceticism, was one which exercised ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... are two busts on brackets, Thespis and Epicurus, or possibly Epicharmus. The space directly above this pediment is occupied by a window-like opening five by four feet, the traditional Elizabethan music-room, in all probability, which, Mr. W.J. Lawrence has shown us, occupied this position both in Shakespeare's day and for some ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams
... "The Irish thought themselves oppress'd by the Law that forbid them to draw with their Horses Tails."—Brightland's Gram., Pref., p. iii. "So willingly are adverbs, qualifying deceives."—Cutler's Gram., p. 90. "Epicurus for experiment sake confined himself to a narrower diet than that of the severest prisons."—Ib., p. 116. "Derivative words are such as are compounded of other words, as common-wealth, good-ness, false-hood."—Ib., p. 12. "The distinction here insisted on ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... with yawns. It is the malediction of mortals to want what they lack until they get it, when they want it no more. Epicurus said that or, if he did not, Lucretius said it for him. 'Surgit amari aliquid.' But here I am running into quotations when the only ones that interest anybody are those in the Street. Conditions here are revolting. Nowhere ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... 100: Their joys are their own)—Ver. 961. Westorhovius remarks that he seems here to be promulgating the doctrine of Epicurus, who taught that the Deities devoted themselves entirely to pleasure and did not trouble themselves about mortals. Donatas observes that these are the doctrines of Epicurus and that the whole sentence is copied from the Eunuch of Menander; ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... inspiration of the devils. Few were the men who, like Erasmus, could compare Christ with Socrates, Plato and Seneca; fewer still those who could say with Franck, "Heretic is a title of honor, for truth is always called heresy." The names of Marcion and Pelagius, Epicurus and Mahomet, excited a passion of hatred hardly comprehensible to us. The {584} refutation of the Koran issued under Luther's auspices would have been ludicrous had ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... the Emperor Nan, with whom ended the long sovereignty of Kau (Chow) dynasty. He was thus a contemporary of Plato (whose last twenty-three years synchronised with his first twenty-three), Aristotle, Zeno, Epicurus, and Demosthenes, and he is well worthy of being ranked with ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... were difficult problems to master, for the intellect of this wonderful child demanded stronger food, and she was introduced into philosophy. My father himself belonged to the school of Epicurus, and succeeded far beyond his expectations in rousing Cleopatra's interest in his master's teachings. She had been made acquainted with the other great philosophers also, but always returned to Epicurus, and induced the rest of us to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Epicurus assumed the existence of matter, force and motion,—Stoff und Kraft. He held that all space was filled with molecules of matter in a state of rapid motion in every direction. These molecules were subject to gravity and endowed with ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... philosopher Progress of scepticism The Sophists Socrates His exposure of error Socrates as moralist The method of Socrates His services to philosophy His disciples Plato Ideas of Plato Archer Butler on Plato Aristotle His services The syllogism The Epicureans Sir James Mackintosh on Epicurus The Stoics Zeno Principles of the Stoical philosophy Philosophy among the Romans Cicero ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... which, in the doctrine of Immortality according to Socrates or Plato, had the care of each man while alive, and after death conveyed him to the general place of judgment (Phaedon, p. 130), is more properly described as a Guardian Angel than the gods of Epicurus can be said to pour storms on the heads of their worshippers. Epicurus only represented them as inactive and ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... been different. The Atomic theory of Democritus seems to us now, in many ways, the most wonderful achievement of Greek thought, but it had a small range of influence in Greece, and would have had less if it had not convinced the brilliant mind of Epicurus. The Epicureans developed it, and it may be that the views which they put forward as to the history of the human race are mainly their own superstructure. These philosophers rejected entirely the doctrine ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... foreign-born pupil of Plato's by the name of Aristotle, who did a remarkable work in organizing the known knowledge of his time; [7] the school of the Stoics, founded by Zeno in 308 B.C.; and the school of the Epicureans, founded by Epicurus in 306 B.C. Each of these schools offered a philosophical solution of the problem of life, and Plato and Aristotle wrote treatises on education as well. Each school evolved into a form of religious brotherhood which perpetuated ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... sorrows?" he wrote again to his faithful D'Argens. "My spirits have forsaken me; all gayety is buried with the loved noble ones to whom my heart was bound." He had lost his mother and his devoted sister Wilhelmina. "You as a follower of Epicurus put a value upon life; as for me, I regard death from the Stoic point of view. I have told you, and I repeat it, never shall my hand sign a humiliating peace. Finish this campaign I will, resolved to dare ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... most complain of in Jeremy Taylor's ethics; namely, that he constantly refers us to the deeds or 'phenomena' in time, the effluents from the source, or like the 'species' of Epicurus; while the corrupt nature is declared guiltless and irresponsible; and this too on the pretext that it was prior in time to the commandment, and therefore not against it. But time is no more predicable of eternal ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... for Democritus the man. Let us return now to his theory of atoms. This theory, it must be confessed, made no very great impression upon his contemporaries. It found an expositor, a little later, in the philosopher Epicurus, and later still the poet Lucretius gave it popular expression. But it seemed scarcely more than the dream of a philosopher or the vagary of a poet until the day when modern science began to penetrate the mysteries of matter. When, finally, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... of the doctrines of Epicurus, which he took as a reasonable mean between the harshness of stoicism and the low morality of the Cyrenaics. In his odes, especially those written on public occasions, he uses, as all public men did, the language ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... presiding deity of good feeding was in the Olympian synod—as I'm an unworthy candidate I forget that topic of learning; but no matter, non constat. Oh, ye pagan professors of ating and drinking, Bacchus, and Epicurus, and St. Heliogabalus, Anthony of Padua, and Paul the Hermit, who poached for his own venison, St. Tuck, and St. Takem, St. Drinkem, and St. Eatem, with all the other reverend worthies, who bore the blushing honors of the table thick upon your noses, come and ...
— Going To Maynooth - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... studied law at the universities of Bonn, Berlin, and Jena. But "to please himself" he studied history and philosophy, winning great distinction in these branches of learning. He graduated in 1841, as a Doctor of Philosophy, with an essay on the philosophy of Epicurus, and it was his purpose to settle at Bonn as a professor of philosophy. The plan was abandoned, partly because he had already discovered that his bent was toward political activity, and partly because the Prussian government had made scholastic ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... he was a clever craftsman his lot was not hard. His body was secure, his belly full, his hands and brain pleasantly busy. He lived amongst intelligent people and handsome objects, permitting himself such reasonable emotions as were recommended by his master, Epicurus. He awoke each morning to a quiet day of ordered satisfaction, the prescribed toll of unexacting labour, a little sensual pleasure, a little rational conversation, a cool argument, a judicious appreciation ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... pleasure, opposing the unfeeling austerity of the Stoics by the softness of pleasurable emotions, his principle was soon disregarded; while his word, perhaps chosen in the spirit of paradox, was warmly adopted by the sensualist. Epicurus, of whom Seneca has drawn so beautiful a domestic scene, in whose garden a loaf, a Cytheridean cheese, and a draught which did not inflame thirst,[45] was the sole banquet, would have started ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... at Florence, in the time of the superb Manfred, who was half a Mussulman, men who were said to be of the sect of Epicurus, and who sought for arguments against the existence of God. Guido Cavalcanti disdained the ignorant folk who believed in the immortality of the soul. The following phrase by him was quoted: 'The death of man ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... dainties of sea and land till, wearied through all varieties, their refections became a study with them, and they were fain to feed by invention: novices in true epicurism! which by mediocrity, paucity, quick and healthful appetite, makes delights smartly acceptable; whereby Epicurus himself found Jupiter's brain in a piece of Cytheridian cheese, and the tongues of nightingales in a dish of onions. Hereby healthful and temperate poverty hath the start of nauseating luxury; unto whose clear ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... EPICURUS. Life and writings. His successors. Virtue and vice referred by him to Pleasures and Pains calculated by Reason. Freedom from Pain the primary object. Regulation of desires. Pleasure good if not leading to pain. Bodily feeling the foundation of ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... was a conversation on Greek philosophy, of which the Romans as yet knew nothing. When the doctrine of Epicurus was mentioned, that man's life was given to be spent in the pursuit of joy, Fabricius greatly amused the company by crying out, "O Hercules! grant that the Greeks may be heartily of this mind so long as we have to fight ...
— Young Folks' History of Rome • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... and philosophy, upheld in a final swoon by Hegel and Hamilton, has just yielded its last breath in the arms of M. Cousin: so M. Renan informs us.[50] To choose a side between the defenders of the idea of God and its opponents; to choose between Plato and Epicurus, between Origen and Celsus, between Descartes and Hobbes, between Leibnitz and Spinoza, would be to make one's self the Don Quixote of thought. An honest man may find amusement in reading the Amadis of Gaul; the Knight of la Manche went mad through putting faith in the adventures of that hero. ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... by thousands of colored lamps, all apparently lit at once by a single flash of electricity. A magnificent repast was spread for the Laureate and his guest, in a lofty, richly frescoed banqueting-hall,—a repast voluptuous enough to satisfy the most ardent votary that ever followed the doctrines of Epicurus. Wonderful dainties and still more wonderful wines were served in princely profusion—and while the strangely met and sympathetically united friends ate and drank, delicious music was played on stringed instruments by unseen performers. When, at intervals, ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... with the present hour. Try and imagine that each day which dawns upon you is your last; then each succeeding day will come unexpected and delightful. I practise what I preach: come and take a look at me; you will find me contented, sleek, and plump, 'the fattest little pig in Epicurus' sty.'" And he impresses the same lesson on another friend, Bullatius, who was for some reason restless at home and sought relief in travel. "What ails you to scamper over Asia or voyage among ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... in whose praise some learned have not wrote. The art of murder Machiavel hath penn'd;[114] Whoredom hath Ovid to uphold her throne, And Aretine of late in Italy, Whose Cortigiana teacheth[115] bawds their trade. Gluttony Epicurus doth defend, And books of the art of cookery confirm, Of which Platina hath not writ the least. Drunkenness of his good behaviour Hath testimonial from where he was born; That pleasant work De Arte Bibendi, A drunken Dutchman spew'd out few ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... profligate experience of capitals, the sage is saddened with the knowledge that comeliness, at best, is but an exquisite hypocrisy. I have striven also, vainly, for contentment in the luxuries of voluptuous living. The talisman of Epicurus has evaded my grasp—the glittering bauble![5] The ravishing ideal JOY, has been to me not as the statue to Pygmalion: I have grovelled down in adoration at its feet, and have found it the same immobile, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... virtue, not for its obligation but for its grace: he delights in the world, in man, in woman, for the lovely light that sparkles from them. Beauty, the spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds over the universe. Epicurus relates that poetry hath such charms that a lover might forsake his mistress to partake of them. And the true bards have been noted for their firm and cheerful temper. Homer lies in sunshine; Chaucer ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... discourses, but whole bookes of other Authors, as in one, he brought in Euripides his Medea. And Apollodorus was wont to say of him, that if one should draw from out his bookes what he had stolne from others, his paper would remaine blanke. Whereas Epicurus cleane contrarie to him in three hundred volumes he left behind him, had not made use of one allegation. [Footnote: Citation.] It was my fortune not long since to light upon such a place: I had languishingly traced after some French words, so naked and shallow, ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... man spent two hours with me, without saying a word on the subject of literature, but to please me he had no need to talk of books, for he was a disciple of Epicurus and Socrates, and the evening was spent in telling little stories, in bursts of laughter, and in accounts of the various kinds of pleasure obtainable at Geneva. Before leaving me he asked me to come and sup with him ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... of Plautus and Diderot; on the second from the top the plays of Shakespeare in a blue edition; on the third from the bottom Don Quixote, in four volumes, covered with brown paper; a green Milton; the "Comedies of Aristophanes"; a leather book, partially burned, comparing the philosophy of Epicurus with the philosophy of Spinoza; and in a yellow binding Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn." On the second from the bottom was lighter literature: "The Iliad"; a "Life of Francis of Assisi"; Speke's "Discovery of the Sources of the Nile"; the "Pickwick Papers"; "Mr. Midshipman ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... can raise a proper emulation in men of capacity, and divert them from those idle or selfish pursuits in which they are too generally engaged? How amiable is humanity when accompanied with so much industry! What an honor is such a man! How happy must he be! The benevolent man, says Epicurus, is like a river, which, if it had a rational soul, must have the highest delight to see so many corn fields and pastures flourish and smile, as it were, with plenty and verdure, and all by the overflowing of its bounty and diffusion of its ...
— Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe • Thaddeus Mason Harris
... his most exquisite mood. For his most characteristic, one must go to the concluding pages of Urn Burial, where, from the astonishing sentence beginning—'Meanwhile Epicurus lies deep in Dante's hell'—to the end of the book, the very quintessence of his work is to be found. The subject—mortality in its most generalised aspect—has brought out Browne's highest powers; and all ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... eye no glitter can ever dazzle, no mist suffuse. The many cannot but resent that air of lofty intelligence, that pale and subtle smile. But he will hold a place forever among that limited number who, like Lucretius and Epicurus—without rage or defiance, even without unbecoming mirth—look deep into the tangled mysteries of things; refuse credence to the absurd, and allegiance to the arrogant authority, sufficiently conscious of fallibility to be tolerant of all opinions; with a faith too wide for doctrine ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... deplor'd, him the nymph of the fount, The crystalline streams. Then perish his picture—his statue decay— A tribute more lasting the Muses shall pay. If true, what philosophers all will assure us, Who dissent from the doctrine of great Epicurus, That the spirit's immortal (as poets allow): In reward of his labours, his virtue and pains, He is footing it now in the Elysian plains, Indulged, as a token of Proserpine's favour, To preside at her balls ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... Devotion to it; but who fell short of replacing what they subverted by such better Hope as others, with no better Revelation to guide them, had yet made a Law to themselves. Lucretius indeed, with such material as Epicurus furnished, satisfied himself with the theory of a vast machine fortuitously constructed, and acting by a Law that implied no Legislator; and so composing himself into a Stoical rather than Epicurean severity of Attitude, sat down to contemplate ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam • Omar Khayyam
... first offered by Epicurus. He felt that the universality of the religious sentiment is a fact which demands a cause; and he found it, or presumed he found it not in a spiritual God, which he claims can not exist, nor in corporeal god which no one has seen, but in "phantoms ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... take Dante and his contemporaries as evidence, we shall find that ancient philosophy first came into contact with Italian life in the form which offered the most marked contrast to Christianity, that is to say, Epicureanism. The writings of Epicurus were no longer preserved, and even at the close of the classical age a more or less one-sided conception had been formed of his philosophy. Nevertheless, that phase of Epicureanism which can be studied in Lucretius, and especially in Cicero, is quite sufficient to make men familiar ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... concerning that strange, enigmatic, personal essence, which had seemed to go out altogether, along with the funeral fires. And the old Greek who more than any other was now giving form to his thoughts was a very hard master. From Epicurus, from the thunder and lightning of Lucretius—like thunder and lightning some distance off, one might recline to enjoy, in a garden of roses—he had gone back to [128] the writer who was in a certain sense the teacher of both, Heraclitus of Ionia. His difficult ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... career! The accusation against Chase he reduced to a charge of indecorum, and he was ready to admit that the manner of his friend "bore a stronger resemblance to that of Lord Thurlow than of Lord Chesterfield," but, said he, our judges ought not to be "like the gods of Epicurus lolling upon their beds of down, equally careless whether the laws of their country are obeyed or violated, instead of ACTIVELY discharging ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... to ask for. One of his friends bought for him a little volume containing a translation from the Greek philosopher Epictetus, a work full of wise maxims about life and duty. Then he bought other ancient authors, Plato, Plutarch, Epicurus, and others. He became a sort of Methodist philosopher, for he heard the Methodist preachers diligently on Sundays, and read his Greek philosophy in the evenings. He tells us that the account of Epicurus living in his garden upon a halfpenny a day, ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... applied to what excites feelings and has attributes, but not to feelings and attributes themselves; and if we called extension, virtue, &c., beings, we should be accused of believing in the Platonic self-existing ideas, or Epicurus's sensible forms—in short, of deeming attributes substances. To fill this gap, the abstract, entity, was made into a concrete, equivalent to being. Yet even entity implies, though not so much as being, the notion of substance. In fact, every word originally connoting simply existence, ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... pupil and mistress of Epicurus, who called her his "dear little Leontium" as appears by a fragment of one of his letters in Laertius. This Leontium was a woman of talent; "she had the impudence (says Cicero) to write against Theophrastus;" and Cicero, at the same time, gives ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... ex tempore,—I rejoice in the last particularly, as it is an excellent man[90]. I wish there had been more inconvenience and less gratification to my self-love in it, for then there had been more merit. We are all selfish—and I believe, ye gods of Epicurus! I believe in Rochefoucault about men, and in Lucretius (not Busby's translation) about yourselves. Your bard has made you very nonchalant and blest; but as he has excused us from damnation, I don't envy you your blessedness much—a little, to be sure. I remember, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... his judgments are noble. He thought with Epicurus that it is more delightful to do than to ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... The gardens of Epicurus, and of Pisistratus, Cimon, and Theophrastus, were the most famous of any in the Grecian empire. Those of Herculaneum may be seen in the 2nd vol. of the paintings found there. The luxurious gardens ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... trees, To plant the grove, or turn the barren mould Oh happy he, whom, when his years decline, (His fortune and his fame by worthy means Attain'd, and equal to his mod'rate mind; His life approv'd by all the wise and good, Even envy'd by the vain) the peaceful groves Of Epicurus, from this stormy world Hereine in rest; of all ungrateful cares Absolv'd, and sacred from the selfish crowd. Happiest of men I if the same soil invites A chosen few, companions of his youth, Once fellow-rakes ...
— The Botanical Magazine, Vol. 6 - Or, Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis
... his poetry Lucretius inherited as part of his birthright. This is the sense of Roman greatness. It pervades the poem, and may be felt in every part; although to Athens, and the Greek sages, Democritus, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Heraclitus, and Epicurus, as the fountain-heads of soul-delivering culture, he reserves his most magnificent periods of panegyric. Yet when he would fain persuade his readers that the fear of death is nugatory, and that the future will be to them even ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... only, does he express hearty admiration for a philosopher. Demonax is 'the best of all philosophers'; but then he admired him just because he was so little of a philosopher and so much a man of ordinary common sense. And Epicurus is 'the thinker who had grasped the nature of things and been in solitary possession of truth'; but then that is in the Alexander, and any stick was good enough to beat that dog with. The fact is, Lucian was much too well satisfied with his own judgement to think that he could possibly require ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... that either Epicurus, or that libertine school of Cyrene, or what the Cynic impudence uttered, was ever questioned by the laws. Neither is it recorded that the writings of those old comedians were suppressed, though the acting of them were forbid; and that Plato commended the reading of Aristophanes, the ...
— Areopagitica - A Speech For The Liberty Of Unlicensed Printing To The - Parliament Of England • John Milton
... and often must be, advantageous not merely to the individual but to the race. And here we find the key to one of the oddest passages in his works, that in which he attributes his inspiration to two saints, St. Augustine and St. Epicurus! He says— ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... knowledge; I no sooner taste it, than I perceive myself naked, and stript of all things - yea even of my very self. I see myself, and the whole frame of nature, shrink into fleeting ideas, which, like Epicurus's ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... outcrop of evolution-doctrine in the long interval between Aristotle and Bacon seems to be very difficult, and some of the instances that have been cited strike one as forced. Epicurus and Lucretius, often called poets of evolution, both pictured animals as arising directly out of the earth, very much as Milton's lion long afterwards pawed its way out. Even when we come to Bruno who wrote that "to the sound of the harp of the Universal Apollo (the World Spirit), ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... of the West readily connected their faith with those of the East, those of the Orient hastened to learn the traditions of Rome and the legends of Athens. While the Philosophers of Greece, all (except the disciples of Epicurus) more or less Platonists, seized eagerly upon the beliefs and doctrines of the East,—the Jews and Egyptians, before then the most exclusive of all peoples, yielded to that eclecticism which prevailed among their masters, the ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... pain let this thought be present, that there is no dishonor in it, nor does it make the governing intelligence worse, for it does not damage the intelligence either so far as the intelligence is rational[A] or so far as it is social. Indeed in the case of most pains let this remark of Epicurus aid thee, that pain is neither intolerable nor everlasting, if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination: and remember this too, that we do not perceive ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
... her that Jean Jacques had ceased to care for the charms which once he had so proudly proclaimed. There was in her the strain of the religion of Epicurus. She desired always that her visible corporeal self should be admired and desired, that men should say, "What a splendid creature!" It was in her veins, an undefined philosophy of life; and she had ever measured the love of Jean Jacques by his ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... have] been built on troubled waters, gave us occasion for jests and laughter; for they wanted to persuade us, that at this sacred portal the incense melted without fire. The Jew Apella may believe this, not I. For I have learned [from Epicurus], that the gods dwell in a state of tranquillity; nor, if nature effect any wonder, that the anxious gods send it from the ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... Epicurus, in exalting cookery and eating and drinking to a plane of philosophical importance, was a true friend of his race, and showed himself the most sensible and wisest of all the Greek philosophers. A psychometrical critic of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... philosophers; there's Epicurus And Aristippus, a material crew! Who to immoral courses would allure us By theories quite practicable too; If only from the Devil they would insure us, How pleasant were the maxim (not quite new), ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... in conversation with a friend who loves sceptical paradoxes. To my expression of the opinion that a wise magistrate can justly be jealous of certain tenets of philosophy such as those of Epicurus, which, denying a divine existence, and consequently a Providence and a future state, seem to loosen the ties of ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... the existing order of Nature is admitted to be comparatively recent,—but the eternal existence of Matter and Motion; and attempts to account for the origin of the world and of the races by which it is peopled, either by ascribing it, with Epicurus, to a fortuitous concourse of atoms, or, with more modern Speculatists, to a law of progressive development. This has been called the Epicurean Hypothesis, because Epicurus, while nominally admitting ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... in a place of honour in the temple of Apollo at Delphi. Apelles painted a portrait of Lais, and, for his skill as an artist, Alexander rewarded him with the gift of his favourite concubine; Pindar wrote odes to the hetairae; Leontium, one of the order, sat at the feet of Epicurus to imbibe ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... there was neither honesty nor dishonesty, justice nor injustice, good nor evil. He was very solitary, lived to be ninety years old, was highly esteemed in his country, and created chief priest. He lived in the time of Epicurus and Theophrastus, about the 120th Olympiad. His followers were called Phyrrhonians; besides which they were named the Ephecticks and Aphoreticks, but more generally Scepticks. This sect made their chiefest good to consist in a sedateness of mind, exempt from all passions; ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... But Epicurus seemed to think That man was made to eat and drink, A doctrine quite as orthodox, I sometimes think, as old man Soc's; For what philosophy's complete That can not take an hour to eat? I like old Socry, to be sure, But ...
— The Loom of Life • Cotton Noe
... are things of the past. All my anxiety about the good of the state, all meditating of speeches to be delivered in the senate, all getting up of briefs I have cast to the winds. I have thrown myself into the camp of my old enemy Epicurus not, however, with a view to the extravagance of the present day, but to that refined splendour of yours I mean your old style when you had money to spend (though you never had more landed estate). Therefore prepare! You have to ...
— Letters of Cicero • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... epoch in the annals of human intelligence. Aristotle says of Anaxagoras, as the originator of the thought in question, that he appeared as a sober man among the drunken. Socrates adopted the doctrine from Anaxagoras, and it forthwith became the ruling idea in philosophy—except in the school of Epicurus, who ascribed all events to chance. "I was delighted with the sentiment," Plato makes Socrates say, "and hoped I had found a teacher who would show me Nature in harmony with Reason, who would demonstrate in ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... been my refinement of feeling, I was not deterred from eating venison for a week afterwards, day by day, and assenting to its delicious flavour, which, for the satisfaction of the son of Epicurus who may read these lines, I would state, tasted very strongly of the moss on which the animal had fed, and comprehended every charming idea he can form ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... theory considers the universe eternal, but not its form. This was the system of Epicurus and most of the ancient philosophers and poets, who imagined the world either to be produced by fortuitous concourse of atoms existing from all eternity, or to have sprung out of the chaotic form which preceded ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... only fair to the Stoics to add that paradoxes were quite the order of the day in Greece, though they greatly outdid other schools in producing them. Socrates himself was the father of paradox. Epicurus maintained as staunchly as any Stoic that "No wise man is unhappy", and, if he be not belied, went the length of declaring that the wise man, if put into the bull of Phalaris would exclaim: "How delightful! How ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock
... in that very room, he lying in the same place, a fortnight ago. Since that day he had not seen Minnie, except casually; and, indeed, she seemed very busy and very happy, if one might judge by her lighted face and her laden arm. Something keener than philosophy, subtiler than Epicurus, pricked Fred, as Minnie vanished into the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... and none O'er them keeps watch." He thus in answer spake: "They shall be closed all, what-time they here From Josaphat[1] return'd shall come, and bring Their bodies, which above they now have left. The cemetery on this part obtain, With Epicurus, all his followers, Who with the body make the spirit die. Here therefore satisfaction shall be soon, Both to the question ask'd, and to the wish [2] Which thou conceal'st in silence." I replied: "I keep not, guide beloved I from thee ...
— Song and Legend From the Middle Ages • William D. McClintock and Porter Lander McClintock
... how in every charm supreme! Whose votaries feast on raptures ever new! O for the voice and fire of seraphim, To sing thy glories with devotion due! Blessed be the day I 'scaped the wrangling crew, From Pyrrho's maze, and Epicurus' sty; And held high converse with the godlike few, Who to the enraptured heart, and ear, and eye, Teach beauty, virtue, truth, and love, ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie
... St. Clare The Red Lily Mother of Pearl The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard The Garden of Epicurus Thais The Merrie Tales of Jacques Tournebroche Joan of Arc. Two volumes. $8 net per set. Postage extra. The Comedian's Tragedy The Amethyst Ring M. Bergeret in Paris The Lettered Life Pierre Noziere The ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... deceive yourselves, my dear brothers in Epicurus!" said the superintendent; "I will not make a comparison between the most humble sinner on the earth and the God we adore, but remember, he gave one day to his friends a repast which is called the Last Supper, and which was nothing ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... opinions concerning the gods, while they denied any Divine Providence or care for man, while they rejected prayer, prophecy, divination, and regarded fear as the foundation of religion, they yet believed, as their master Epicurus had believed, in the existence of the immortal gods. These beings he regarded as possessing all human attributes, except those of weakness and pain. They are immortal and perfectly happy; exempt from disease ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... prose, spoken with much art, by men who were neither actors nor poets, but to whom youth and solitude gave an unaccustomed eloquence, which appeared to them better than everything else in the world. "Why," said La Fontaine, "does not our master Epicurus descend into the garden? Epicurus never abandoned his pupils, ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... entertainments were celebrated, and justly so. At her receptions one always heard the best singers and players of the season, and Epicurus' soul could rest in peace, for her chef had an international reputation. Oh, remember, you music-fed ascetic, many, aye, very many, regard the transition from Tschaikowsky to terrapin, from Beethoven to burgundy with ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... "Nay, Epicurus have I never read, and what I know of his doctrine by hearsay revolteth me. I am for God and Reason, ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... to ask what are the conditions and the varieties of this perfection of function, in other words, how it comes about that we perceive beauty at all, or have any inkling of divinity. Only the other philosophers, those that wallow in Epicurus' sty, know anything about the latter question. But it is easier to be impressed than to be instructed, and the public is very ready to believe that where there is noble language not without obscurity ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... English growth of this century, the philosophy so called probably takes its origin from the days when man first began to speculate on moral matters. Bentham and the two Mills, Austin, and George Grote, have repeated in England the substance of what Protagoras and Epicurus taught in Greece, two thousand years before. It is the system of Ethics to which all must incline, who ignore the spiritual side of man's nature and his hopes of a better world. It is a morality of ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... attributes—the more we can connect him with the affairs and sympathies of earth, the greater will be his influence upon our conduct—the more fondly we shall contemplate his attributes, the more timidly we shall shrink from his vigilance, the more anxiously we shall strive for his approval. When Epicurus allowed the gods to exist, but imagined them wholly indifferent to the concerns of men, contemplating only their own happiness, and regardless alike of our virtues or our crimes;—with that doctrine he robbed man of the divinity, as effectually as if he ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... step, and the poet who secures us from peril and dejection by his counter-charm. Philosophers in most places are unwelcome: but there is no better reason why Shaftesbury and Hobbes should be excluded from our gallery, than why Epicurus should have been from Cicero's or Zeno from Lucullus's. Of our sovereigns, I think Alfred, Cromwell, and William III alone are eligible; and they, because they opposed successfully the subverters of the laws. Three viceroys of Ireland will deservedly be placed in the same receptacle; Sir ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 9. - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 26, 1850 • Various
... I go on with a series of selfish and silly details? I merely wish to assure you that it was not the frivolous forgetfulness of a mind, occupied by what is called pleasure (not in the true sense of Epicurus), that kept me away; but a perception of my, then, unfitness to share the society of those whom I value and wish not to displease. I hate being larmoyant, and making a serious face among those ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... because more positive and constructive, personality was that of Epicurus. This philosopher was born at Samos, in the year 341 B.C., of Athenian parents. He came to Athens in his eighteenth year. Xenocrates was then teaching at {212} the Academy, Aristotle at the Lyceum, but Epicurus heard neither the one nor the other. After some wanderings he returned to Athens and ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... Birth-day: at this very day Was Cassius borne. Giue me thy hand Messala: Be thou my witnesse, that against my will (As Pompey was) am I compell'd to set Vpon one Battell all our Liberties. You know, that I held Epicurus strong, And his Opinion: Now I change my minde, And partly credit things that do presage. Comming from Sardis, on our former Ensigne Two mighty Eagles fell, and there they pearch'd, Gorging and feeding from our Soldiers hands, Who to Philippi heere consorted vs: This Morning are they ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... behind the safety of shorthand. And how he takes advantage of his opportunities! He remains to the end something of a Puritan in his standards and his public carriage, but in his diary he reveals himself as a pig from the sty of Epicurus, naked and only half-ashamed. He never, it must be admitted, entirely shakes off his timidity. At a crisis he dare not confess in English even in a cipher, but puts the worst in bad French with a blush. In some instances ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... rest, but being trodden upon and crushed, are three, that is burner, wild thyme, and water mints. Therefore, you are to set whole alleys of them, to have the pleasure where you walk or tread." Sir William Temple says Epicurus studied, exercised, and taught his philosophy in his garden. Milton, we know, passed many hours together in his garden at Chalfont; Cowley poured forth the greatness of his soul in his rural retreat at Chertsey; and Lord Shaftesbury wrote his "Characteristics," ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 350, January 3, 1829 • Various
... as regards the poets of ancient times, this assertion is, perhaps, right; though, if there be any truth in what AElian and Seneca have left on record, of the obscurity, during their lifetime, of such men as Socrates and Epicurus, it would seem to prove that, among the ancients, contemporary fame was a far more rare reward of literary or philosophical eminence than among us moderns. When the "Clouds" of Aristophanes was exhibited before the assembled deputies of the towns of Attica, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... battles of these four-footed warriors Homer should return from beyond the shores of Acheron.[11] Ah! could he but do so, and bring with him too the rival of old Epicurus,[12] what would the latter say as to the examples I have narrated? He would say only what I have already said, namely, that in the lower animals natural instinct is sufficient to explain all the wonders I have told: that ...
— The Original Fables of La Fontaine - Rendered into English Prose by Fredk. Colin Tilney • Jean de la Fontaine
... Stoic fortitude of mind in the cold this morning; but afterwards, in my hot bath, I joined the school of Epicurus. I was a Materialist at breakfast; after it an Idealist, as I smoked my first cigarette and turned the world to transcendental vapour. But when I began to read the Times I had no doubt of the existence ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... Epicurus differed but little from the propounders of the code of revolutionary despotism. All societies, he said, are founded on contract for mutual protection. Good and evil are conventional terms, for the thunderbolts ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... modern discoveries. These reach back to the most remote antiquity, and to follow their development we should have to write the history of human thought which they have always accompanied since the time of Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius. The first observers who noticed that the volume of a body could be diminished by compression or cold, or augmented by heat, and who saw a soluble solid body mix completely with the water which ...
— The New Physics and Its Evolution • Lucien Poincare
... morality despised a satisfaction which they had small means of enjoying. You would not be so frightened if I had spoken of happiness instead of pleasure: it sounds less shocking, and your mind wanders from the sty of Epicurus to his garden. But I will speak of pleasure, for I see that men aim at that, and I do not know that they aim at happiness. It is pleasure that lurks in the practice of every one of your virtues. Man performs actions because they ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... and discouraged. This is not the situation for unfolding all the blossoms of human delight, nor for studying to allay every rising uneasiness. He would be a rare ethical philosopher that would permit full scope to such an operation within his grounds; neither Epicurus nor Bentham could come up to this mark. But even if the thing were permitted, the lights are not there; it is only by combining the parent psychology and the hedonic derivative, that the work can be done. It is neither disrespect nor disadvantage to duty, that it is not mentioned ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... man who, thus afflicted, does not seek succour in the gospel, which has brought life and immortality to light. The precepts of Epicurus, who teaches us to endure what the laws of the universe make necessary, may silence, but not content us. The dictates of Zeno, who commands us to look with indifference on external things, may dispose us to conceal our sorrow, but cannot assuage it. Real alleviation ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... diversions until the dawn. The next day the friar who had laved his part with so much facetiousness, with more of the manner of a brigand than a religious, more suitable for the school of Sardanapalus or of Epicurus than for the life of a cloister, said that he had lost more than eighty doubloons, or gold ounces—it appearing that his sleeve refused to protect that which he had made ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... ancient in the world, nor at all countenanced from primitive times: Our Saviour had but a low esteem of it, as appears by His treatment of the Pharisees and Sadducees, who followed the doctrines of Plato and Epicurus. St Paul likewise, who was well versed in all the Grecian literature, seems very much to despise their philosophy, as we find in his writings, cautioning the Colossians to "beware lest any man spoil them through philosophy and vain deceit." ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... had found the schools full of it at Athens, and had taken his part in their teaching. It had been pleasant to him to call himself a disciple of Plato, and to hold himself aloof from the straitness of the Stoics, and from the mundane theories of the followers of Epicurus. It had been well for him also to take an interest in that play. But to suppose that Cicero, the modern Cicero, the Cicero of the world—Cicero the polished gentleman, Cicero the soft hearted, Cicero the hater, Cicero the lover, Cicero the human—was a believer ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... of this place. I would prefer going hungry in body than in soul. I am speaking against neither, for I believe in the fulness of life, in amply supplying all its wants; but the kingdom of God is more to me than this world. I would be Plato in love, Zeno in self-strength, and Epicurus in aesthetics; but if I have to ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... necessarily contain the germs of a mysterious system equally favored by Plato and by Epicurus; we will leave it for you to meditate upon, enveloped as it is in the veil which ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... arts among us does not therefore prove the newness of the globe, as was claimed by Epicurus, one of our predecessors in reverie, who supposed that by chance the eternal atoms in declining, had one day formed our earth. Pomponace said: "Se il mondo non e eterno, per tutti santi e ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... too, and Mr. Hammerdown will sell by the orders of Diogenes' assignees, or will be instructed by the executors, to offer to public competition, the library, furniture, plate, wardrobe, and choice cellar of wines of Epicurus deceased. ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Roman poets declare themselves pupils of the Greeks. Lucretius writes only to expound the philosophy of Epicurus; Catullus imitates the poets of Alexander; Vergil, Theocritus and Homer; Horace translates the ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... romance, "A Few Days in Athens," though the first of Miss Wright's works, and written when she was very young, displays considerable power and eloquence. It is the most pleasing of all her writings. It is intended to portray the doctrines of Epicurus, and gives a picture of the Gargettian, in the "Gardens of the Academy," surrounded by his pupils, calculated to counteract many of the popular and erroneous notions entertained of that philosopher's teachings. The following dialogue between Epicurus and his favorite, Theon, will afford the readers ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... teaching either directly of indirectly may be traced the origin of the four principal Grecian schools: the ACADEMICIANS, established by Plato; the PERIPATETICS, founded by his pupil Aristotle; the EPICUREANS, so named from their master Epicurus; and ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... not so silly after all; but 'twould be highly unpleasant were Epicurus and Leucolophas to come ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... Democritus was taken up by Epicurus, who founded his school three hundred years before Christ—a school which lived and prospered for a very long time. Those who are interested in seeing how a materialistic psychology can be carried out in ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... without the innocence which renders ignorance charming, I am too severe in my strictures. It may be so; and I am aware that the good effects of the revolution will be last felt at Paris; where surely the soul of Epicurus has long been at work to root out the simple emotions of the heart, which, being natural, are always moral. Rendered cold and artificial by the selfish enjoyments of the senses, which the government fostered, is it surprising that simplicity of manners, and singleness of heart, ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... Ah! Sallust, when I am wedded to Ione, I trust I may yet redeem a youth of follies. We are both born for better things than those in which we sympathize now—born to render our worship in nobler temples than the stye of Epicurus.' ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... Caesar could assert in the senate, without scandal and almost without dissent, that death was the end of all things. Pliny, perhaps the greatest of all the Roman scholars, adopting the sentiment of all the school of Epicurus, describes the belief in a future life as a form of madness, a puerile and a pernicious illusion. The opinions of the Stoics were wavering and uncertain. Their first doctrine was that the soul of man has a future and independent, but not an eternal existence, that ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... satisfied that the animal within was the partially developed embryo of a fowl. Such was one of the fables gravely credited as a piece of natural history in Britain about three centuries ago, and such was the kind of evidence by which it was supported. And we know that the followers of Epicurus received from their master, without apparent suspicion, fables still more extravagant, and that wanted even such a shadow of proof to support them as satisfied the herbalist and the historian. The Epicureans ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... that his principle of utility was a new invention of his own. It would, as Mill has said, imply ignorance of the history of philosophy and of general literature not to be aware that in all ages of philosophy one of its schools has been utilitarian, not only from the time of Epicurus, but long before. But what is certain, and what would of itself be enough to entitle Helvetius to consideration, is that from Helvetius the idea of general utility as the foundation of morality was derived ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... and shook his head. "Bless you, no! My dear sir, there is nothing new. Epicurus and Lucretius outlined the whole Darwinian theory more than two thousand years ago. As for this eponym thing, why Saint Augustine called attention to it fifteen hundred years ago. In his 'De Civitate Dei,' he expressly says of these genealogical ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... Antidote against Atheisme (1652), and again in Divine Dialogues (1668), refutes Lucretius by asserting the usefulness of all created things in God's Providence and the essential design in Nature. His reference in Democritus Platonissans (st. 20) is typical: "though I detest the sect/ of Epicurus for their manners vile,/ Yet what is true I may not well reject." In bringing together Democritus' theories and neo-Platonic thought, More obviously has attempted reconciliation of two exclusive world views, but with ...
— Democritus Platonissans • Henry More
... Hogsnorton, where, according to popular saying, the pigs play upon the organ; a proverb which he interpreted allegorically, as having reference to the herd of Epicurus, of which litter Horace confessed himself a porker. His name of Erasmus he derived partly from his father having been the son of a renowned washerwoman, who had held that great scholar in clean linen all the ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... existence of the Power of all powers, and First Cause of all causes; so that we know that God is, though not what he is." See his "Human Nature," chap. xi. But was the God of Hobbes the inactive deity of Epicurus, who takes no interest in the happiness or misery of his created beings; or, as Madame de Stael has expressed it, with the point and felicity of French antithesis, was this "an Atheism with a God?" This consequence some of his adversaries would draw from his principles, ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... served me," resumes his friend—"the great fools!" But at last, at the end of 1851, his first contribution to Punch was received, and he was soon invited to join the Staff. He was not long in making a mark with "Miss Violet," but it was not among his strongest contributions. Nevertheless, "Epicurus Rotundus" was now a made man on the highway ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... doctrine. Moreover, I am a Roman, and the Romans, unlike the Greeks, are unable to pursue profound speculations in a subtle manner. If they adopt a philosophy it is above all in order to derive some practical advantages from it. Siro, who enjoyed great renown among us, taught me the system of Epicurus and thus freed me from vain terrors and turned me aside from the cruelties to which religion persuades ignorant men. I have embraced the views of Pythagoras concerning the souls of men and animals, both ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... are so pleased with themselves, or so assured of themselves, by reason of their subjection to their private passions, but that they seem divers persons in one and the same day. Seneca hath said it, and so do I: "Unus mihi pro populo erat";[44] and to the same effect Epicurus, "Hoc ego non multis sed tibi";[45] or (as it hath since lamentably fallen out) I may borrow the resolution of an ancient philosopher, "Satis est unus, satis est nullus."[46] For it was for the service ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... Houssaye seems to think he has found them; marked on the fly-leaves with an impression, in wax, of a seal engraved with the head of Epicurus. ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... thing best which he chiefly loves above other things, and therefore he deems himself very happy if he can obtain what he then most desires. Is not now clearly enough shown to thee the form of the false goods; namely, riches, and dignity, and power, and glory, and pleasure? Concerning pleasure, Epicurus the philosopher said, when he inquired concerning all those other goods which we before mentioned: then said he, that pleasure was the highest good, because all the other goods which we before mentioned gratify ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... penal statutes. For, except the banishment of Protagoras, and the death of Socrates, which last event proceeded partly from other motives, there are scarcely any instances to be met with, in ancient history, of this bigotted jealousy, with which the present age is so much infested. Epicurus lived at Athens to an advanced age, in peace and tranquillity: Epicureans[27] were even admitted to receive the sacerdotal character, and to officiate at the altar, in the most sacred rites of the established religion: And the public encouragement[28] ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... greatest advantage of our writing, which proceeds from conversation. In the age wherein those poets lived, there was less of gallantry than in ours; neither did they keep the best company of theirs. Their fortune has been much like that of Epicurus, in the retirement of his gardens; to live almost unknown, and to be celebrated after their decease. I cannot find that any of them had been conversant in courts, except Ben Jonson; and his genius lay not so much that way, as to make an improvement by it. ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... doubt if we earn Elysian Fields by comparison; we shall find the restful peace more enchanting we only long for (I suppose as long as one is mortal one longs for a something), a few charming women, then we would have a realm for Epicurus himself. Evening, and pure, soft tints everywhere, the long shadows blending to disappear in the dark, like the last waves of unrest, the young moon languidly rising to lighten loving faces of those in this haven of peace, the fragrance of yonder ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... regarding Lucretius' life.[32] The de rerum natura is addressed to C. Memmius.[33] From Cic. ad Fam. xiii. 1 (where Cicero tells us he employed his good offices with Memmius on behalf of Patro for the preservation of the gardens of Epicurus), it appears that he was not an Epicurean. Memmius is the only contemporary mentioned by ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... Epicurus, and Zeno, and having knocked with the hammer against the door, he waited, wrapped ...
— Thais • Anatole France |
