Epicurus emphasized friendship as an important ingredient of happiness, and the school resembled in many ways a community of friends living together.

As an ethical guideline, Epicurus emphasized minimizing harm and maximizing happiness of oneself and others:

Epicurus emphasized friendship as an important ingredient of happiness, and the school seems to have been a moderately ascetic community which rejected the political limelight of Athenian philosophy.

Epicurus then, in his work On the Canon, says that the criteria of truth are the senses, the preconceptions and the feelings.

In Canto X Circle 6 (" Where the heretics lie ") of Dante's Inferno, Epicurus and his followers are criticized for supporting a materialistic ideal when they are mentioned to have been condemned to the Circle of Heresy.

Other adherents to the teachings of Epicurus included the poet Horace, whose famous statement Carpe Diem (" Seize the Day ") illustrates the philosophy, as well as Lucretius, as he showed in his De Rerum Natura.

Epicurus reasoned if there was an afterlife and immortality, the fear of death was irrational.

Epicurus argued that these swerves would allow us to be more responsible for our actions, something impossible if every action was deterministically caused.

Later, Epicurus formulated the problem of evil: if God is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent, why does evil exist?

The early Christian writer Lactantius criticizes Epicurus at several points throughout his Divine Institutes.

With many propagators including Democritus, Epicurus, Aristotle and their followers, this theory seems to have some contact with modern theories of what vision really is, but it remained only speculation lacking any experimental foundation.

Epicurus ' materialist theories that the gods were physical beings composed of atoms who were unconcerned with human affairs and had not created the universe, and his general teaching that one's own pleasure, rather than service to God, was the greatest good were essentially irreconcilable with Christian teachings.

In the Modern Age, scientists adopted atomist theories, while materialist philosophers embraced Epicurus ' hedonist ethics and restated his objections to natural teleology.

In 1685, the English diplomat and writer Sir William Temple wrote an essay Upon the garden of Epicurus ( published in 1692 ), which contrasted European theories of symmetrical gardens with asymmetrical compositions from China.

His ideas were likely partly derived from the atomic theories of Democritus and Epicurus.

In 1685, the English diplomat and writer Sir William Temple wrote an essay Upon the garden of Epicurus ( published in 1692 ), which contrasted European theories of symmetrical gardens with asymmetrical compositions from China.

The gods are immortal and blessed and men who ascribe any additional qualities that are alien to immortality and blessedness are, according to Epicurus, impious.

The atomic poems ( such as ' All Things are Governed by Atoms ') and natural philosophy of Margaret Cavendish were influenced by Epicurus.

This triad, as well as the egalitarianism of Epicurus, was carried forward into the American freedom movement and Declaration of Independence, by the American founding father, Thomas Jefferson, as " all men are created equal " and endowed with certain " inalienable rights ," such as " life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The only surviving complete works by Epicurus are three letters, which are to be found in book X of Diogenes Laertius ' Lives of Eminent Philosophers, and two groups of quotes: the Principal Doctrines, reported as well in Diogenes ' book X, and the Vatican Sayings, preserved in a manuscript from the Vatican Library.

Several of these Herculaneum papyri which are unrolled and deciphered were found to contain a large number of works by Philodemus, a late Hellenistic Epicurean, and Epicurus himself, attesting to the school's enduring popularity.

Epicurus says that there are two kinds of motion: the straight motion and the curved motion, and its motion traverse as fast as the speed of thought.

According to Epicurus, the basic means for our understanding of things are the ' sensations ' ( aestheses ), ' concepts ' ( prolepsis ), ' emotions ' ( pathe ) and the ' focusing of thought into an impression ' ( phantastikes epiboles tes dianoias ).

Following the lead of Aristotle, Epicurus also refers to impressions in the form of mental images which are projected on the mind.

Plethon derides Aristotle for discussing unimportant matters such as shellfish and embryos while failing to credit God with creating the universe, for believing the heavens are composed of a fifth element, and for his view that contemplation was the greatest pleasure ; the latter aligned him with Epicurus, Plethon argued, and he attributed this same pleasure-seeking to monks, whom he accused of laziness.

Besides Polemon, the statesman Phocion, Chaeron ( tyrant of Pellene ), the academic Crantor, the Stoic Zeno and Epicurus are said to have frequented his lectures.

Similar principles are stated by Zeno the Stoic, by Epicurus ( see Diogenes Laertius vii.

Sedgwick had chosen to follow the philosophy of Epicurus whom, with his followers, Dante put in hell ; ;

Entering the University of Leiden he took his degree in philosophy in 1689, with a dissertation De distinctione mentis a corpore ( on the difference of the mind from the body ), in which he attacked the doctrines of Epicurus, Thomas Hobbes and Spinoza.

Marx's doctoral thesis concerned the atomism of Epicurus and Democritus, which ( along with stoicism ) is considered the foundation of materialist philosophy.

Epicurus " presented a sustained argument that pleasure, correctly understood, will coincide with virtue ".

The opinion of the crowd is, Epicurus claims, that the gods " send great evils to the wicked and great blessings to the righteous who model themselves after the gods ," whereas Epicurus believes the gods, in reality, do not concern themselves at all with human beings.

According to Diskin Clay, Epicurus himself established a custom of celebrating his birthday annually with common meals, befitting his stature as hero ctistes ( or founding hero ) of the Garden.

Epicurus the Sage is a two-part comic book by William Messner-Loebs and Sam Kieth portraying Epicurus as " the only sane philosopher " by anachronistically bringing him together with many other well-known Greek philosophers.

For Epicurus the sovereign good was pleasure, and Descartes says that in fact this is not in contradiction with Zeno's teaching, because virtue produces a spiritual pleasure, that is better than bodily pleasure.

Epicurus is generally credited with first expounding the problem of evil, and it is sometimes called " the Epicurean paradox " or " the riddle of Epicurus ":

Therefore, according to Epicurus, with whom a person eats is of greater importance than what is eaten.

Epicurus seems to have had a strong sense of social contract, with justice and law being rooted in mutual agreement and advantage, as evidenced by these lines, among others, from his Principal Doctrines ( see also Epicurean ethics );

The biographies of the former begin with Anaximander, and end with Clitomachus, Theophrastus and Chrysippus ; the latter begins with Pythagoras, and ends with Epicurus.

On this matter, gives evidence that Machiavelli may have seen himself as having learned something from Democritus, Epicurus and classical materialism, which was however not associated with political realism, or even any interest in politics.

The brunt of this chapter allegedly narrates the opinions, not of Hume, but of one of Hume's anonymous friends, who again presents them in an imagined speech by the philosopher Epicurus.

In 1584 Giordano Bruno suggested that the stars were like the Sun, and may have other planets, possibly even Earth-like, in orbit around them, an idea that had been suggested earlier by the ancient Greek philosophers, Democritus and Epicurus, and by medieval Islamic cosmologists such as Fakhr al-Din al-Razi.

Epicurus also calls them " the meanings that underlie the words " ( hypotetagmena tois phthongois: semantic substance of the words ) in his letter to Herodotus.

After the death of Alexander the Great, Perdiccas expelled the Athenian settlers on Samos to Colophon, including the family of Epicurus, who joined them there after completing his military service.

Timocrates, however, soon fell out with both his brother and Epicurus and devoted the rest of his life to spreading malicious slander about them.

He was of the opinion of Epicurus, that the soul dies with the body, and maintained that human happiness consisted in temporal pleasures ; but he did not follow these in the way that Epicurus did, that is by making long fasts to have afterwards pleasure in eating dry bread ; but was fond of good and delicate viands, and ate them without waiting to be hungry ; and for this sin he is damned as a Heretic in this place.