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
"The pleasure which is sought after by the many is not true pleasure, but only the absence of pain."
"The wise man counts it a greater advantage to be content with little than to be rich."
"The wise man is not perturbed by the most disturbing things."
"We should rather laugh than be sad at the misfortunes of others."
"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.