Epictetus — "It is better to die of hunger, exempt from grief and fear, than to live in afflu…"
It is better to die of hunger, exempt from grief and fear, than to live in affluence with perturbation.
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More from Epictetus
"When you have to deal with a man who is angry, remember that he is not angry with you, but with himself; he is only venting his anger on you."
"If you want to be a philosopher, prepare to be mocked."
"It is not poverty that is feared, but the opinion about poverty."
"Don't demand that things happen as you wish, but wish that they happen as they do happen, and you will go on well."
"If you want to be a man of leisure, do not be a man of business. For if you are a man of business, you must be a man of trouble."
About Epictetus (c. 50-135 CE)
Greek Stoic philosopher and former slave whose Discourses (recorded by his student Arrian) shaped Marcus Aurelius and the modern Stoic revival. Closely associated with Seneca (earlier Roman Stoic) and Marcus Aurelius (his student-by-text on the imperial throne). For an intellectual contrast, see Epicurus, Greek philosopher of pleasure-as-tranquility — the Stoic-Epicurean rivalry was the central philosophical debate of the Hellenistic and Roman world for 400 years — Epicurean materialist hedonism is the precise alternative the Stoic discipline-of-acceptance was built against.
The standard scholarly entry points to Epictetus's work: A.A. Long (UC Berkeley, Classics) — Epictetus: A Stoic and Socratic Guide to Life (2002); Pierre Hadot (Collège de France) — Philosophy as a Way of Life (1995); Anthony R. Birley (Manchester, Roman historian) — Marcus Aurelius (1987) — the standard biography of Epictetus's most famous student. These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Epictetus.