The Principal Doctrines

About this page

The Principal Doctrines (Kyriai Doxai) survive because Diogenes Laertius copied them at the end of his life of Epicurus. They are not all certainly by Epicurus himself; some may have been compiled from his writings by early followers. They are not in a strict order, so this page groups them by theme.

The wording below is a plain-English restatement, not a translation, and it smooths out some difficult Greek. For a faithful version, read a good translation such as the one in The Epicurus Reader by Inwood and Gerson. The numbers follow the traditional order, so you can compare any entry with a printed edition.

The gods, death and pleasure

1. PD 1 A blessed and undying being has no troubles of its own and causes none for others, so it is never moved by anger or favour.

   The first of the four remedies: there is nothing to fear from the gods.

2. PD 2 Death is nothing to us. What has broken up has no sensation, and what has no sensation is nothing to us.

   The second remedy. See the page on death and the gods.

3. PD 3 The most pleasure can be is the removal of all pain. Wherever pleasure is present, for as long as it lasts, there is no pain or distress of body or mind.

   Epicurus defines the goal negatively: a pain-free body and an undisturbed mind.

4. PD 4 Pain does not last long at its worst. Intense pain is brief, and even long illness leaves the body with more pleasure than pain.

   The fourth remedy, that pain is endurable, rests on this.

Pleasure, prudence and judgement

1. PD 5 You cannot live pleasantly without living sensibly, honourably and justly, and you cannot live sensibly, honourably and justly without living pleasantly.

   The virtues are not the goal, but they cannot be separated from it.

2. PD 8 No pleasure is bad in itself, but the things that produce some pleasures bring troubles many times greater than the pleasure.
3. PD 9 If every pleasure were gathered together in one place and time, so that it filled the whole body and mind, pleasures would never differ from one another.
4. PD 10 If the things that please the dissolute freed them from fear of death, pain and the heavens, and taught them the limit of desire, we would have no complaint against them.

   He is not condemning luxury as such. His objection is that it fails to give what it promises.

5. PD 18 Once the pain of need has been removed, bodily pleasure cannot grow; it only varies. The mind reaches its limit by reasoning about these things.
6. PD 19 Unlimited time contains no more pleasure than limited time, if you measure pleasure's limit by reason.
7. PD 20 The body takes the limits of pleasure to be endless and wants endless time to fill them. The mind, reasoning out what the body needs and dispelling fear of eternity, makes a complete life and does not need infinite time.
8. PD 21 Whoever knows the limits of life knows how easy it is to remove the pain of need and make a whole life complete. Such a person needs no things that involve struggle.
9. PD 16 Chance rarely interferes with the wise person, because reason has arranged the greatest and most important matters in life.

Nature and knowledge

1. PD 11 If we were never troubled by worries about the heavens or about death, we would have no need of natural science.
2. PD 12 It is impossible to dispel fear about the most important matters without understanding the nature of the universe, so unmixed pleasure cannot be had without natural science.

   Epicurus studied nature for the sake of peace of mind, not for its own sake.

3. PD 13 There is no use securing safety from other people while things above and below the earth remain a source of suspicion.
4. PD 22 We must take into account the real goal of life and all the clear evidence to which we refer our opinions. Otherwise everything will be full of confusion.
5. PD 23 If you fight against all your sensations, you will have nothing left to refer to when judging even those you say are false.
6. PD 24 If you throw out any one sensation, and fail to distinguish an opinion about what awaits confirmation from what is already present in sensation, feeling and thought, you will disturb the rest with your empty opinion and lose every standard.
7. PD 25 If at any time you do not refer each action to the goal of nature, and instead turn to some other aim, your actions will not match your principles.

Desire and wealth

1. PD 26 Desires that bring no pain if they go unsatisfied are not necessary. The urge for them is easy to get rid of when they are hard to obtain or seem likely to do harm.
2. PD 29 Some desires are natural and necessary, some natural but unnecessary, and some neither natural nor necessary, arising only from empty opinion.

   The basis of the desire sorter on the main page.

3. PD 30 Natural desires that bring no pain if unsatisfied, yet are pursued with intense effort, come from empty opinion. They persist because of the person's own empty belief, not because of their nature.
4. PD 15 The wealth nature requires is limited and easy to get. The wealth of empty opinion has no limit.
5. PD 14 A degree of security from other people comes with power and wealth, but the purest security comes from a quiet life withdrawn from the crowd.
6. PD 6 Any means by which you gain security from other people is a natural good.
7. PD 7 Some people want fame and position, thinking this will make them safe from others. If their life is safe, they have gained nature's good; if not, they do not have what they originally sought by nature.

Friendship

1. PD 27 Of all the things wisdom provides to make life as a whole blessed, friendship is by far the greatest.

   The best-known of the forty.

2. PD 28 The same understanding that gives confidence that nothing terrible lasts forever, or even for long, also sees that friendship gives the most security within the limits of this life.
3. PD 40 Those who could gain the greatest assurance from their neighbours lived together most pleasantly, with the surest guarantee of safety. They enjoyed the fullest closeness, and did not mourn a friend's early death as something to be pitied.
4. PD 39 The person who best organised confidence against outside threats made what could be made familiar into kin, and what could not, at least not alien. Whatever he could not do either of, he avoided, and he kept away from it, dealing with it only as far as was useful.
5. PD 17 The just person is the most free of disturbance, and the unjust person is full of the greatest disturbance.

Justice and law

1. PD 31 Natural justice is an agreement about what is useful, made so that people do not harm one another or get harmed.

   Epicurean justice is a compact for mutual benefit, not a rule written into the universe.

2. PD 32 Creatures that could not make agreements about not harming or being harmed have neither justice nor injustice. The same holds for peoples who could not or would not make such agreements.
3. PD 33 Justice was never a thing in itself. It is a compact made wherever people deal with one another, not to harm or be harmed.
4. PD 34 Injustice is not bad in itself. It is bad because of the fear that comes from suspecting that you will not escape those appointed to punish such acts.
5. PD 35 Whoever secretly breaks an agreement not to harm or be harmed cannot be confident of going undetected, even if it has remained hidden ten thousand times, because no one knows until death that they will always escape.
6. PD 36 In general justice is the same for everyone, because it is something useful in dealings with one another. But the particular circumstances of a country, and other conditions, mean that what is just is not the same everywhere.
7. PD 37 A law that is confirmed as useful in people's dealings is just. If a law turns out not to be useful, it is not just.
8. PD 38 Where circumstances have not changed and a law judged just proves not to fit the facts, it was never just. Where circumstances change and the same law is no longer useful, it was just while it served citizens' common benefit, and is just no longer once it stops doing so.