Real pleasure

 Athenaeus wrote an epigram praising Epicurus. The heart of it goes like this: 

The scope of nature’s wealth is modest.

But empty judgments have no scope, no limits.

 

Hedonism — the idea that pleasure is a guide to goodness — was controversial in ancient Athens. But I think it’s almost incomprehensible today. The pleasures Epicurus claimed as ethical guides were natural pleasures, rather than human inventions.

It seems to me that if Epicurus could be with us today, he’d urge us to take a walk in the fresh air and forget about our own devices for a while.

• Source: Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers; translated by R.D. Hicks; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991, Vol. II, p. 540. I’ve departed from Hicks’s translation.