Death does not concern us, because as long as we exist, death is not here. And when it does come, we no longer exist.

This sentiment is Epicurus’s classic argument against fearing death, preserved not in his lost treatises but in later testimony—most notably his Letter to Menoeceus, a short ethical letter summarizing Epicurean teaching. Epicurus (341–270 BCE) founded the Garden at Athens and taught that philosophy should cure mental distress by dispelling irrational fears, especially fear of the gods and fear of death. In the Letter, he urges readers to pursue ataraxia (tranquility) and argues that death is “nothing to us” because all good and bad consist in sensation, and death is the privation of sensation. The point is therapeutic: to free one from anxiety that poisons life.

Epicurus frames death as a non-experience: while we are alive, death is absent; when death arrives, the subject who could suffer it no longer exists. The argument targets the common fear of being dead, which he treats as a category mistake—imagining oneself as a spectator of one’s own nonexistence. By tying value (good and bad) to sensation, Epicurus concludes that death cannot harm us, since harm requires a subject capable of feeling it. The ethical payoff is practical: releasing the fear of death removes a major source of human misery and makes it easier to enjoy finite life without superstition or dread.

“Accustom thyself to believe that death is nothing to us; for all good and evil consists in sensation, but death is deprivation of sensation. And therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to it an infinite time, but by taking away the craving for immortality. For there is nothing terrible in life for the man who has truly comprehended that there is nothing terrible in not living. So he is foolish who says that he fears death, not because it will be painful when it comes, but because it is painful in anticipation. For that which gives no trouble when it comes is but an empty pain in anticipation. Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.”

1) “Death is nothing to us; for when we exist, death is not yet present, and when death is present, we no longer exist.”
2) “Why should I fear death? If I am, then death is not. If death is, then I am not.”
3) “When we are, death is not; and when death is, we are not.”