Happiness Quote by Epicurus

Happiness, Epicurus insists, is an editing job, not a shopping spree. The line lands like a rebuke to the eternal human error: treating contentment as a quantity you can accumulate rather than a temperature you can regulate. “Add not unto his riches” isn’t anti-wealth so much as anti-miscalculation. Riches are an unreliable lever because they inflate the very mechanism you’re trying to satisfy. Give someone more, and you often enlarge the mental container that now needs filling. Desire is the true variable.

The intent is practical, almost clinical. Epicurus is writing against the grain of status-driven Greek life, where honor, luxury, and public appetite were endlessly escalated. His philosophy of ataraxia (untroubledness) isn’t a mood; it’s a strategy: reduce the number of things that can hurt you by reducing the number of things you feel you must have. The subtext is quietly radical: the happiest person is the one least governable by circumstance. If your peace depends on external supply chains - money, admiration, novelty - you’re always one shortage away from misery.

The phrasing “take away” matters. It suggests desire isn’t a sacred inner truth to be obeyed but a removable burden, like a fever you can lower. Epicurus isn’t selling deprivation for its own sake; he’s advocating a reorientation toward simple pleasures and necessary needs. In a culture - and an economy - built on stoking wants, his advice reads less like ancient wisdom and more like a form of resistance.