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;
and equal blame belongs to those who fail in their duty
through weakness of will, which is the same as saying 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
is 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.
-- Translation by H. Rackham, from his 1914 edition of De
Finibus.
However, since textual fidelity was unimportant to the goal of
having
random text to fill a page, it has degraded over the
centuries, into "Lorem ipsum...".
The point of using this text, or some other text of incidental
intelligibility, is that it has a more-or-less normal (for
English and Latin, at least) distribution of ascenders,
descenders, and word-lengths, as opposed to just using "abc
123 abc 123", "Content here content here", or the like.