Q0020

Epicurus

A verified English rendering from the curated archive.

English

Pleasure is the beginning and end of the happy life — not the pleasures of profligates, but freedom from pain in the body and from disturbance in the soul.
Thinker Epicurus
School Epicureanism
Source Letter to Menoeceus
Theme Life
Another quotation More from this thinker

Source context

This English passage is associated with Letter to Menoeceus, within the tradition of Epicureanism. The wording below is a verified rendering prepared for careful reading rather than a claim of unique translation authority.

A short reading

Read in the register of life, the sentence asks the reader to test an assumption rather than to collect a slogan. In Epicurus's wider work, similar claims are usually offered as prompts for judgment: what would have to be true for the sentence to hold, and what would follow if it did?

How to cite this quotation

APA: Epicurus. (n.d.). Pleasure is the beginning and end of the happy life — not the pleasures of profligates, but freedom from pain in the body and from disturbance in the soul. In Philosophy Blind Box. https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0020

MLA: Epicurus. “Pleasure is the beginning and end of the….” Philosophy Blind Box, https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0020.

Chicago: Epicurus. “Pleasure is the beginning and end of the….” Philosophy Blind Box. Accessed 2026. https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0020.

Same thinker

More from Epicurus

  1. Death is nothing to us: for what has been dissolved has no sensation, and what has no sensation is nothing to us.
  2. Of all that wisdom provides for the happiness of a whole life, by far the greatest is the possession of friendship.
  3. Nature's wealth has its bounds and is easy to procure; but the wealth of vain fancies recedes to an infinite distance.
  4. It is impossible to live pleasantly without living wisely, finely, and justly.
  5. The cry of the flesh is not to be hungry, not to be thirsty, not to be cold.

All quotations by Epicurus

Same theme

More on life

  1. The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being.
  2. Leisure without study is death — a tomb for a living man.
  3. A free man thinks of nothing less than of death; and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life.
  4. The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
  5. Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.

Browse the life theme