Alexander Rios

“Without the reference points of pleasure and pain, people invent imaginary and abstract standards for ethics that are divorced from reality and generate vast amounts of unnecessary suffering. Pleasure is the only >real< ethical guide. It returns our conversations about ethics to the natural context where these conversations belong: the well-being of sentient beings.”
― Hiram Crespo, Tending the Epicurean Garden

“Is it intelligent to make ourselves miserable while living in the past, haunted by memories while being inexorably swallowed by them? Whenever we reminisce about our past life, we are advised in our tradition to be in a state of gratefulness. Be mindful of nurturing unnecessary grief and staying stuck in old pain.”
― Hiram Crespo, Tending the Epicurean Garden

“Air, I should explain, becomes wind when it is agitated.”
― Lucretius, On the Nature of Things

“At this stage you must admit that whatever is seen to be sentient is nevertheless composed of atoms that are insentient. The phenomena open to our observation do not contradict this conclusion or conflict with it. Rather they lead us by the hand and compel us to believe that the animate is born, as I maintain, of the insentient”
― Lucretius