Upbeat, Optimistic, and Joyful Epicurean Text Excerpts

    Starting this thread for textual excerpts that express upbeat, optimistic, and/or joyful feelings...

    Diogenes Laertius, book 10, excerpt:

    "Also that in his letters he wrote to Leontion, "O Lord Apollo, my dear little Leontion, with what tumultuous applause we were inspired as we read your letter." Then again to Themista, the wife of Leonteus : "I am quite ready, if you do not come to see me, to spin thrice on my own axis and be propelled to any place that you, including Themista, agree upon" ; and to the beautiful Pythocles he writes : "I will sit down and await thy divine advent, my heart's desire."....It is observed too that in his treatise On the Ethical End he writes in these terms : "I know not how to conceive the good, apart from the pleasures of taste, sexual pleasures, the pleasures of sound and the pleasures of beautiful form."

    De Rerum Natura, book 2, excerpt:

    Will add soon [sunshine, birds-song in forests]

    ...More to be added soon

    Feel free to post any other upbeat, optimistic, and joyful Epicurean text excerpts.

    Quote from Kalosyni

    De Rerum Natura, book 2, excerpt:

    Will add soon [sunshine, birds-song in forests]

    As I was listening to an audio recording of De Rerum Natura last week when sick in bed, this section cheered me up:

    De Rerum Natura, Book 2, section 142 (Humphries translation):

    When dawn bathes earth with morning light, and birds,

    All kinds of them, flying through pathless woods,

    Fill all the delicate air with liquid song,

    How suddenly at such a time the sun

    Clothes everything with light! This we can see,

    And so can all men, plain before the eyes.

    But the sun's warmth and that calm light come on

    Not through an empty void; their course is set

    More slowly, as if they parted waves of air

    The way a swimmer does. Not one by one

    Do the tiny particles of heat proceed,

    But rather en masse,...