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Epicurus

Nor is life a spectator sport. It is a full contact event requiring your action and participation. You are part of "Team Humanity" and you need to give it your all. Do what you love to do (as long as it does not hurt others) with passion and enjoyment and you will no doubt do it well. Learn to balance your life and share your passion and enjoyment with others, in particular, those you care about most. Sharing your life interests with others will enrich them as well if you believe and feel passionately about what you do. The act of sharing with others will help you balance your own existence as well. It will insure that you don't simply engage in narrow, selfish pursuits to the exclusion of other aspects of your life and the important people in it. The act of sharing means you have to reach out, engage and understand the interests of others in order to involve them in yours as well.

Epicurus' Letter to Menoeceus is about life and explains it from a philosopher's point of view. In it he discusses pleasure, pain, death, fear, judgment, destiny, ignorance and many other debatable issues that humans experience. The one idea that struck my attention is from a passage about pleasure and morals. He doesn't use the word moral but rather implies that morals are connected to pleasure. The passage states, "Pleasure is our first and kindred good. It is the starting-point of every choice and of every aversion, and to it we come back, inasmuch as we make feeling the rule by which to judge of every good thing." Epicurus simply indicates For example, a man or woman who is willing to give up their life for their country would be pleasing himself or herself as well as the country. That is a huge sacrifice that one may make in order to fulfill their desire to do something good. Epicurus suggests that pleasure is our first thought that is good. So in order for something to be good it must be pleasurable to anyone including yourself. He also states that pleasure is our...

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