Epicurus — "The quantity of pleasure is to be judged by the quantity of pain it removes."
The quantity of pleasure is to be judged by the quantity of pain it removes.
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More from Epicurus
"I was never anxious to please the mob, for I have not learned what pleases it."
"Natural wealth is both limited and easy to acquire; but the wealth defined by vain fancies is always beyond reach."
"Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for."
"The greatest wealth is contentment with a little."
"The limit of quantity in pleasures is the removal of all that is painful. Wherever and whenever this is present, pleasure is no longer increased, but has reached its stationary maximum."
About Epicurus (341-270 BCE)
Greek philosopher who founded the Garden school in Athens, whose materialist atomism and pleasure-as-tranquility ethics shaped Hellenistic thought. Closely associated with Lucretius (Roman successor whose De Rerum Natura preserved Epicurean physics). For an intellectual contrast, see the Stoics (Zeno, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius), the Hellenistic ethical school of discipline-of-acceptance — Stoic 'live according to nature' and Epicurean 'pleasure and absence of pain' framed every ancient ethical decision — every Roman of Cicero's era was implicitly choosing one path or the other. The Stoic-Epicurean rivalry was the central philosophical debate of the Hellenistic and Roman world for 400 years.
The standard scholarly entry points to Epicurus's work: A.A. Long (UC Berkeley, Classics) — Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics (1974); Tim O'Keefe (Georgia State University, ancient philosophy) — Epicureanism (2010); David Sedley (Cambridge, Classics) — Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom (1998). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Epicurus.
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