Epicurus — "The limit of a pleasant life is not exceeded by him who has put an end to the pa…"
The limit of a pleasant life is not exceeded by him who has put an end to the pain of want and has arranged his life to be safe from all disturbance.
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More from Epicurus
"We should envy no one, for good men do not deserve envy, and as for the bad, the more they prosper, the more they harm themselves."
"Of all the things which wisdom provides for the happiness of the whole life, by far the most important is the acquisition of friendship."
"The pleasure of the soul is superior to that of the body."
"The truly wise man is he who does not grieve for what he has not, but rejoices in what he has."
"The man who says that all things happen of necessity cannot criticize one who says that not all things happen of necessity."
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.