Epicurus — "The wise man counts it a greater advantage to be content with little than to be …"
The wise man counts it a greater advantage to be content with little than to be rich.
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More from Epicurus
"The wise man is not afraid of death; indeed, he welcomes it as a release from the bondage of the body."
"Against all things it is possible to provide security, but as against death we all live in an unwalled city."
"The time when you should most of all withdraw into yourself is when you are forced to be in a crowd."
"He who is not satisfied with a little is satisfied with nothing."
"Remember that you were born with two ears and one tongue, so that you may listen more and speak less."
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.