riches
idea · 2 works · 4 mentions · 10 anchored passages
wealth · money · gold
in the texts
Letters to Lucilius
Material wealth, examined throughout as a potential burden or a matter of indifference to the wise mind.
" Nor do I know, Epicurus, whether that boastful poor man of yours despises riches if they fall to him, or how he will bear them.
Just as it makes no difference whether you lay a sick man on a wooden bed or a golden one—wherever you carry him, he will carry his sickness with him—so it makes no difference whether a sick mind is set among riches or in poverty.
"For many men the acquisition of riches has been not an end of their miseries, but a change of them.
On the Happy Life
Material wealth, treated as a Stoic 'indifferent' that is preferable but not identical with the good.
Moreover, which of the wise—of our own school, I mean, for whom the one good is virtue—denies that even these things which we call indifferent have some value in themselves and that some are preferable to others?
And what doubt is there that for the wise man there is here a greater matter for the unfolding of his soul in riches than in poverty, since in poverty there is but one kind of virtue—not to be bowed down or crushed—whereas in riches temperance and liberality and diligence and orderly management and magnificence have an open field?
For certain things, even though they be small in the sum of the matter and can be withdrawn without the ruin of the chief good, yet add something to the perpetual gladness that springs from virtue.