Epicurus — "Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you…"
Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.
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More from Epicurus
"A free man cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not an easy thing to do without at the same time becoming a slave to mobs or kings."
"The beginning and root of all good is the pleasure of the stomach."
"The flesh cries out for an end to hunger, an end to thirst, an end to cold. If a man has these, and is confident of having them in the future, he might contend in happiness even with Zeus."
"The greatest fruit of self-sufficiency is freedom."
"The limit of a pleasant life is not exceeded by him who has put an end to the pain of want and has arranged his life to be safe from all disturbance."
About Epicurus (341-270 BCE)
Greek philosopher who founded the Garden school in Athens, whose materialist atomism and pleasure-as-tranquility ethics shaped Hellenistic thought. Closely associated with Lucretius (Roman successor whose De Rerum Natura preserved Epicurean physics). For an intellectual contrast, see the Stoics (Zeno, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius), the Hellenistic ethical school of discipline-of-acceptance — Stoic 'live according to nature' and Epicurean 'pleasure and absence of pain' framed every ancient ethical decision — every Roman of Cicero's era was implicitly choosing one path or the other. The Stoic-Epicurean rivalry was the central philosophical debate of the Hellenistic and Roman world for 400 years.
The standard scholarly entry points to Epicurus's work: A.A. Long (UC Berkeley, Classics) — Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics (1974); Tim O'Keefe (Georgia State University, ancient philosophy) — Epicureanism (2010); David Sedley (Cambridge, Classics) — Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom (1998). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Epicurus.