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
"The flesh cries out to not be hungry, thirsty, or cold. Anyone who has these things, and good hope of keeping them, might rival even Zeus in happiness."
"Justice is a contract of utility entered into to prevent men from harming or being harmed by one another."
"It is not possible to dispel the fear of the most important things unless one understands the whole nature of the universe."
"A free man cannot acquire many possessions, because this is difficult to do without serving either crowds or kings."
"When we are young, we should not hesitate to philosophize, and when we are old, we should not grow tired of philosophizing. For no one is too young or too old to attain health of the soul."
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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