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
"It is not what we have, but what we enjoy, that constitutes our abundance."
"The man who best knows how to meet external threats makes into one family all the creatures he can."
"Luxury and gluttony are not the path to pleasure, but moderation and self-sufficiency."
"Against all things it is possible to provide security, but as against death we all live in an unwalled city."
"The greatest disturbance of the soul is not pain, but the fear of pain."
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.