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Lorem ipsum.txt
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Lorem ipsum.txt
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But I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing
pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete
account of the system, and expound the actual teachings of the
great explorer of the truth, the master-builder of human happiness.
No one rejects, dislikes, or avoids pleasure itself, because it is
pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure
rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful.
Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to
obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally
circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him
some great pleasure. To take a trivial example, which of us ever
undertakes laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some
advantage from it? But who has any right to find fault with a man
who chooses to enjoy a pleasure that has no annoying consequences,
or one who avoids a pain that produces no resultant pleasure?
On the other hand, we denounce with righteous indignation and dislike
men who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of pleasure
of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the
pain and trouble that are bound to ensue. Equal blame belongs to
those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, that is to
say, through shrinking from toil and pain. These cases are perfectly
simple and easy to distinguish. In a free hour, when our power of
choice is untrammelled and when nothing prevents our being able to
do what we like best, every pleasure is to be welcomed and every
pain avoided. But in certain circumstances and owing to the claims
of duty or the obligations of business it will frequently occur
that pleasures have to be repudiated and annoyances accepted.
The wise man therefore always holds in these matters to this
principle of selection: he rejects pleasures to secure other
greater pleasures, or else he endures pains to avoid worse pains.
-- M. T. Cicero, translated by H. Rackham,
proving that "do you even lift?" is over two millennia old