Book 10
1.134
It were better, indeed, to accept the legends of the gods than to bow beneath that yoke of destiny which the natural philosophers have imposed. The one holds out some faint hope that we may escape if we honour the gods, while the necessity of the naturalists is deaf to all entreaties. Nor does he hold chance to be a god, as the world in general does, for in the acts of a god there is no disorder; nor to be a cause, though an uncertain one, for he believes that no good or evil is dispensed by chance to men so as to make life blessed, though it supplies the starting-point of great good and great evil. He believes that the misfortune of the wise is better than the prosperity of the fool.
1.135
It is better, in short, that what is well judged in action should not owe its successful issue to the aid of chance.
1.135
Exercise thyself in these and kindred precepts day and night, both by thyself and with him who is like unto thee; then never, either in waking or in dream, wilt thou be disturbed, but wilt live as a god among men. For man loses all semblance of mortality by living in the midst of immortal blessings.
1.135
Elsewhere he rejects the whole of divination,This short note on divination is clumsily inserted between the last words of the epistle and the expositor’s natural reference to other works of Epicurus treating of ethics; Usener conjectures that it may have come from a Scholium attached to the epistle. as in the short epitome, and says, No means of predicting the future really exists, and if it did, we must regard what happens according to it as nothing to us.
1.135
Such are his views on life and conduct; and he has discoursed upon them at greater length elsewhere.
