Epicureanism Quotes

“This is not to say that there is a clear line of demarcation between the living and the non-living. For the ancients, mould and mildew were not clearly differentiated from rust; from our perspective, prions and viruses are also indeterminate. They can reproduce their kind and they employ resources from their hosts to do so, but they do not have life cycles as plants and animals do.”
― Catherine Wilson, Epicureanism: A Very Short Introduction

“Newton accepted the Epicurean void, but he argued that it was pervaded by forces—the force of gravity, electrical and magnetic forces, and also certain short-range attractive and repulsive forces that, in lieu of hooks and eyes, explained the cohesion of substances and their solidity. He went on to speculate that perhaps the quantity of solid matter in the universe was only as much as would fill a nutshell, and that forces acting in a mostly void universe produced the phenomenon of solid, resistant matter.”
― Catherine Wilson, Epicureanism: A Very Short Introduction

“All qualities, relations, and categories are thus fluctuating and changeable and relative to observers. A day might come when ‘slave’ has only a historical meaning.”
― Catherine Wilson, Epicureanism: A Very Short Introduction

“Unlike many later atomists, and unlike his Stoic rivals, Epicurus rejected determinism not only in the physical realm but also in the realm of human agency.”
― Catherine Wilson, Epicureanism: A Very Short Introduction

“Fourth, they sometimes ‘swerved’. The swerve was a deviation from the basic downward path. It occurred frequently enough to cause the entanglement of many atoms; the result was a universe containing objects of a sufficient size to be experienced instead of a universe in which individual imperceptible atoms simply rained down. The atomic swerve, Epicurus thought, could supply the basis for free will, if only by providing a model of spontaneous, unpredictable, undetermined action.”
― Catherine Wilson, Epicureanism: A Very Short Introduction

“Third, the atoms ‘oscillated’ within objects when bumped into by their neighbours.”
― Catherine Wilson, Epicureanism: A Very Short Introduction

“Following this logic, Epicurus concluded that there must exist ‘atoms’ (literally, the a-tomic or ‘uncuttable’). They must be of such a hardness and such a smallness that they can resist all blows and all attempts to divide them. They must have dimensions—be extended—if they are to make up the substance of the world, but their parts cannot be removed from them. There must also, crucially, be void space between the atoms so they can move, come together, and disperse.”
― Catherine Wilson, Epicureanism: A Very Short Introduction