Life & Mortality Quote by Epicurus

Epicurus doesn’t soothe you about death; he disarms your favorite fantasy about it: that with enough planning, piety, or power, you can make yourself safe. The line opens with a concession that sounds almost modern in its pragmatism: plenty of miseries can be hedged against. You can store grain, build laws, buy insurance, cultivate friends. Then he snaps the hinge: death is the one risk you can’t securitize. “A city without walls” is the perfect civic metaphor for a thinker writing in a Greek world where walls meant survival and status. To be unwalled was to be exposed, to live with the constant possibility of breach.

The subtext is sharper than simple fatalism. Epicurus isn’t preaching despair; he’s mocking the misplaced energy we pour into impossible defenses. Fear of death, in his view, isn’t a rational response to an event but a corrosive background anxiety that gets exploited by ambitious rulers, anxious crowds, and one’s own craving for permanence. By insisting we are structurally undefended, he reframes the project of a good life: stop building fortifications in your mind.

Context matters: Epicurean philosophy aims at ataraxia, a steady calm achieved not through heroics but through clarity about limits. If death can’t be walled out, the sensible move is to stop living like a besieged citizen. The line works because it makes vulnerability feel public and ordinary, not a private failure. Everyone is exposed; the only question is what you do with that truth.