
“Those who want fewest things are nearest to the Gods.”
Diogenes Laertius
Variant: [H]e was nearest to the gods in that he had the fewest wants.
Socrates, 11.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 2: Socrates, his predecessors and followers
“Those who want fewest things are nearest to the Gods.”
Diogenes Laertius
Variant: [H]e was nearest to the gods in that he had the fewest wants.
“[H]e was nearest to the gods in that he had the fewest wants.”
Diogenes Laertius
A Vindication of Natural Society (1756)
Context: The most obvious division of society is into rich and poor; and it is no less obvious, that the number of the former bear a great disproportion to those of the latter. The whole business of the poor is to administer to the idleness, folly, and luxury of the rich; and that of the rich, in return, is to find the best methods of confirming the slavery and increasing the burdens of the poor. In a state of nature, it is an invariable law, that a man's acquisitions are in proportion to his labours. In a state of artificial society, it is a law as constant and as invariable, that those who labour most enjoy the fewest things; and that those who labour not at all have the greatest number of enjoyments. A constitution of things this, strange and ridiculous beyond expression! We scarce believe a thing when we are told it, which we actually see before our eyes every day without being in the least surprised.
Source: Striking Thoughts (2000), p. 16
Context: In Science we have finally come back to the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, who said everything is flow, flux, process. There are no "things." NOTHINGNESS in Eastern language is "no-thingness". We in the West think of nothingness as a void, an emptiness, an nonexistence. In Eastern philosophy and modern physical science, nothingness — no-thingness — is a form of process, ever moving.
As quoted in Abstract Expressionism, Davind Anfam, Thames and Hudson Ltd London, 1990, p. 137
1950s
Litany for Dictatorships (1935)
Context: For those who still said "Red Front" or "God save the Crown!"
And for those who were not courageous
But were beaten nevertheless.
For those who spit out the bloody stumps of their teeth
Quietly in the hall,
Sleep well on stone or iron, watch for the time
And kill the guard in the privy before they die,
Those with the deep-socketed eyes and the lamp burning.
“For those who want ‘to change life”, ‘to reinvent love,’ God is nothing but a hindrance.”
500
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)