“Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.”
Seneca · Letters to Lucilius
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It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.
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About this quote
Meaning
Seneca is turning the ordinary definition of poverty on its head. Most people assume poverty is simply a matter of having too little. Seneca argues that the real measure is desire, not possession. A person with modest means who is satisfied with what they have is, in the truest sense, wealthy. A person with abundant resources who is constantly hungry for more lives in a state of perpetual scarcity, because the gap between what they have and what they want never closes. Contentment, not accumulation, is the cure for poverty.
Context
This line appears in Letter 2 of the Letters to Lucilius, an early letter in the collection in which Seneca begins laying out his core Stoic principles about the good life. The letter discusses the importance of settling the mind rather than restlessly moving from place to place or idea to idea. The observation about poverty and craving fits within the broader Stoic argument that our suffering comes less from our circumstances than from our judgments about those circumstances. Wanting what you do not have is a choice the mind makes, and it is a choice that can be undone.
About the author
Lucius Annaeus Seneca, known as Seneca the Younger, was a Roman philosopher and writer of the first century of the common era. A leading voice of Stoic thought in the Latin world, he wrote philosophical essays, tragedies, and letters that have influenced readers from the Renaissance to the present day. His Letters to Lucilius remain one of the finest introductions to Stoic ideas about wealth, time, and the good life.
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