Live while you are alive
……. it is typical of religion-based moralities to hold that much of what affords pleasure and brings achievement in real human lives is actually a barrier to moral success, and might indeed damn us.The Choice of Hercules by A. C. Grayling, Wiedenfeld & Nicholson 2007
"Are not the majority of men disappointed with their lot, languishing in quiet desperation in their chains? * A recurring subject in literature for centuries, with echoes of Karl Marx. Epicurus would shrug off such sentiments. He would urge us to be positive, be thankful for our blessings and enjoy food, drink and good company, …
Americans are reading less and their reading proficiency is declining at troubling rates, reports the National Endowment for the Arts*. This is especially true of children aged 9 and upwards. The percentage of 17 year olds reading every day for fun dropped from 32 in 1984 to 22 in 2004, with average reading scores showing …
The British eat 97 % of the world’s baked beans (fact). Baked beans are very Epicurean. They should be eaten at dead of night by torchlight under the blankets in boarding school dormitories. Eaten at breakfast time they are the wrong color and are boring. Epicurus himself would have been a baked bean lover. This …
Historical note: Excavation work has restarted on the famous Villa dei Papyri in Herculaneum after an eight-year gap. "It is impossible, absolutely impossible, to excavate this villa without finding fantastic things," said AndrewWallace-Hadrill, the director of the Herculaneum Conservation Project. "We may find the lost scrolls of Aristotle, or we may find something even more …
