Pain is the raw “quale” of badness. You can deem some future goal to be good, and worth the pain, but you can’t judge pain good, except in an abstract, meaningless sense, disconnected from any implications for your actions.
I think the quote originator, and Marcus Aurelius and the Stoics, might say that you can instead think pain neither good nor bad, but simply there. Certainly, it is hard to act as if pain is good, but the idea is that the rational person can subordinate that reflexive reaction, after a moment’s thought (perhaps less with training) and move beyond it.
Pain is the raw “quale” of badness. You can deem some future goal to be good, and worth the pain, but you can’t judge pain good, except in an abstract, meaningless sense, disconnected from any implications for your actions.
I think the quote originator, and Marcus Aurelius and the Stoics, might say that you can instead think pain neither good nor bad, but simply there. Certainly, it is hard to act as if pain is good, but the idea is that the rational person can subordinate that reflexive reaction, after a moment’s thought (perhaps less with training) and move beyond it.