Epicurus — "The truly wise man is he who does not grieve for what he has not, but rejoices i…"
The truly wise man is he who does not grieve for what he has not, but rejoices in what he has.
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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."
"It is not wealth that makes us happy, but the use we make of it."
"The noble soul occupies itself with wisdom and friendship."
"The wise man laughs at fate, since he knows that some things happen by necessity, others by chance, and others through his own agency."
"The beginning and the greatest good is prudence."
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.