A Groundless Pain

Whatever causes no annoyance when it is present, causes only a groundless pain in the expectation.  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.  It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer.

-- Epicurus (341 BC - 270 BC), Greek philosopher, "Letter to Menoeceus", as translated in "Stoic and Epicurean" (1910) by Robert Drew Hicks, p. 169