Daily Inspiration Quote by Epicurus

Epicurus isn’t posturing as a lone wolf; he’s drawing a boundary line around the entire machinery of public approval. The sentence is built like a trap: if the crowd rejects what he knows, the crowd is implicitly incompetent; if the crowd approves what he doesn’t know, the crowd’s tastes are not just different but alien. Either way, chasing popularity becomes irrational, because the feedback loop is broken. He’s not merely refusing to please people; he’s refusing to let “people” define the terms of a good life.

The subtext is strategic. Epicurus ran a school that treated philosophy as a daily practice aimed at ataraxia (tranquility), not as a performance for status. In Athens, where reputations were minted in the agora and sophists could turn rhetoric into celebrity, “the crowd” wasn’t an abstract public; it was a social force that rewarded spectacle, competition, and anxious striving. Epicurus answers with a kind of quiet sabotage: if you want serenity, stop outsourcing your self-worth to a fickle audience.

There’s also a sly humility inside the sting. “What they approve I do not know” admits a deliberate ignorance - not of reality, but of fashion. It’s a refusal to become bilingual in the language of trend. Read now, it lands as an anti-algorithm manifesto: don’t tailor your mind to metrics you didn’t choose, for an audience that can’t tell you why it claps.