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.

This line expresses Epicurus’ therapeutic approach to philosophy in the early Hellenistic period (late 4th–early 3rd century BCE), when he founded his school, “the Garden,” at Athens. Epicurean ethics aimed at achieving ataraxia (tranquility) by removing the chief sources of human anxiety—especially fear of the gods and fear of death. The argument is preserved not in Epicurus’ lost treatises but in later summaries of his teaching, most notably in a letter transmitted by Diogenes Laertius. It belongs to Epicurus’ broader “tetrapharmakos” (fourfold remedy), which counsels that death is not to be feared because it is the absence of sensation and thus cannot be experienced as harm.

Epicurus argues that death cannot be an evil for the person who dies, because good and bad require sensation, and death is the end of sensation. While we exist, death is not present; when death is present, we no longer exist as subjects who could suffer it. The point is not to deny that dying can be painful or that bereavement is real, but to dissolve the metaphysical terror of being dead. By reframing death as “nothing to us,” Epicurus shifts attention to the quality of lived experience and to limiting needless fears that disturb peace of mind. The argument has become a classic statement of the “no subject of harm” view in later moral philosophy.

1) “Death is nothing to us; for that which is dissolved is without sensation, and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us.”
2) “Accustom thyself to believe that death is nothing to us; for all good and evil consist in sensation, but death is deprivation of sensation.”
3) “So long as we exist, death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist.”