Miscellanies 2.20.119

If, at any rate, it were possible without it to drink, take food, or beget children, it would be shown that there is no other need for it. For pleasure is neither an activity nor a disposition, nor indeed any part of us, but it entered life as a helper, as they say salt did, for the digestion of food. But it, throwing off the reins and taking control of the house, … first begets desire, which is an irrational longing and appetite for what gratifies it; and it persuaded even Epicurus to set pleasure as the goal of the philosopher. He deifies, at any rate, a stable condition of the flesh and the confident hope about it. For what else is luxury but pleasure-loving gluttony and a superfluous excess for the self-indulgence of the dissolute? Diogenes writes expressively in a tragedy: “Those whose hearts are crammed with the pleasures of unmanly and filthy luxury, not willing to toil even a little,” and what follows, which is said shamefully but worthily of lovers of pleasure.