The Art of Happiness (Penguin Classics) Paperback – 2 May 2013

Brilliant - one of those books you'll want to read again and again. It reads in a very modern way (thanks to the excellent translation) and confronts lots of the issues that people struggle with today - how to live happily and ethically in a corrupt world where politics and politicians have disappointed us all. Not a complete answer but a good philosophy to be going on with.

It was a present so great that arrived on time. Great service at the post office point collection.Thank you

NF,F,NS,NC be at ease...

A very useful collection with an excellent introduction.

I bought this for a friend and they are delighted with this book 📚.

superb introduction to the subject

Epicurus didn’t actually leave very much in the way of writings, so to get a book out of it, you have to pad it out with an awful lot of commentary and footnotes and so on. This book, let’s face it, has very little to do with “The Art of Happiness” – it might have been more accurately titled “The Ideas (or Philosophy) of Epicurus and his followers”. There is of course some stuff you would expect, on being decent and virtuous to live a good life; there is an incredible amount of stuff about atoms, what they are and how they act and so on, together with some ancient ideas about things like earthquakes and volcanoes. We all should know that, even when geniuses, the ancient Greeks had not fully developed the concepts now used to establish scientific truth (practical experiments and falsifiable hypotheses), so they tended to pontificate about things and then just insist that they were “reasonable” or “necessary” – even where we know these days that they were seriously barking up the wrong trees.All this stuff about atoms, and there is plenty of it, is of historical and philosophical interest, and I agree they were brilliant even to come up with the concept of atoms – but it’s still virtually all rubbish in terms of what is known by modern physics; and it has zero connection with human happiness.I was surprised to find out how anti-sex Epicurus was – and of course that always works out so well for humanity, doesn’t it, such as the centuries of guilt and suffering and gender prejudice resulting in the cultural sexual neuroses of, for example, Roman Catholicism and Islam. Not a great contribution to emotionally and psychologically balanced human happiness.If you want some serious wisdom and inspiration from a couple of thousand years back, you would be a thousand times better off with the “Meditations” of Marcus Aurelius.So if you’re a philosophy student, maybe you need this book. But if you’re just an interested reader looking for “The Art of Happiness” – you are really not going to find it in here. I don’t even begin to understand some of the other reviews – I feel as if they were reading a different book from me. In my opinion, which is as fallible as anyone else's of course, this will not teach you anything about how to acquire more happiness or to live more happily. If you want something modern and much more helpful, try Jonathan Haidt's "The Happiness Hypothesis".

Good book. Thank you