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
"The pleasure of the soul is superior to that of the body."
"The study of nature is not a luxury, but a necessity for a happy life."
"We should envy no one, for good men do not deserve envy, and as for the bad, the more they prosper, the more they harm themselves."
"Natural wealth is both limited and easy to acquire; but the wealth defined by vain fancies is always beyond reach."
"The wise man counts it a greater advantage to be content with little than to be rich."
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.