Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers

"For whom do you consider better than the man who both thinks piously about the gods, and is continuously fearless concerning death, and has reasoned out the end of nature; and who understands that the limit of good things is easy to fulfill and easy to procure, while the limit of evils has either short periods or small pains; and who laughs to scorn the destiny introduced by some as the mistress of all things, and rather says that some things happen by necessity, some from fortune, and some through ourselves, because necessity is unaccountable, while fortune he sees to be unstable, and what is through ourselves is without a master, to which blame and its opposite are naturally attached

(since it were better to follow the myth about the gods than to be enslaved to the destiny of the physicists; for the former suggests a hope of winning over the gods through honor, but the latter possesses an inexorable necessity); and who supposes that fortune is neither a god, as the multitude believes (for nothing is done disorderly by a god), nor an uncertain cause (for he does not think that good or evil is given to humans by fortune with a view to the blessed life, though the starting points of great goods or evils are supplied by it);

​and who considers it better to be unlucky with reason than to be lucky without reason; for in actions it is better that what has been well judged should fail to succeed because of fortune. "Practice, then, these things and what is kindred to them day and night with yourself and with one like yourself, and never will you be disturbed either awake or in a dream, but you will live as a god among men. For a man living among immortal goods is not at all like a mortal living creature." But he abolishes all divination in other works, as also in the Short Epitome; and he says: "Divination being non-existent, and even if it exists, the events that occur must be deemed nothing to us." So much concerning the practical aspects of life; and he has discussed these things more fully elsewhere.

​Now he differs from the Cyrenaics concerning pleasure; for they do not admit katastematic pleasure, but only kinetic pleasure; whereas he admits both kinds of pleasure in both soul and body, as he says in On Choice and Avoidance, in On the End, in the first book of On Ways of Life, and in the Letter to the Philosophers in Mytilene. In like manner also Diogenes in the seventeenth book of Selected Essays and Metrodorus in his Timocrates speak thus: "Pleasure being understood both as kinetic and as katastematic." And Epicurus himself in On Choices speaks thus: "For tranquility of soul and absence of pain are katastematic pleasures; while joy and merriment are viewed in activity as kinetic."

​Furthermore, against the Cyrenaics: for they hold that bodily pains are worse than mental pains—at any rate, those who transgress are punished in the body—whereas he holds that mental pains are worse; for the flesh is stormy only in the present, but the soul in the past, the present, and the future. In this way, then, the pleasures of the soul are also greater. And he uses as a proof that pleasure is the end the fact that living creatures, as soon as they are born, are well pleased with it, but recoil from pain naturally and apart from reason. We avoid pain, therefore, by direct feeling; so that even Heracles, consumed by the robe, cries out: "bites and shrieks aloud, and around him groaned the rocks, the mountain ridges of the Locrians, and the promontories of Euboea."