Epicurus — "It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor."
It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.
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More from Epicurus
"A calm mind is the greatest pleasure."
"Death is nothing to us; for that which is dissolved is without sensation, and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us."
"We must exercise ourselves in the things which bring happiness, since, if that be present, we have everything, and if that be absent, all our actions are directed to attaining it."
"It is folly for a man to pray to the gods for that which he has the power to obtain by himself."
"We must release ourselves from the prison of business and politics."
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.