Not What We Have But What

This saying is widely attributed to Epicurus and is consistent with his core teaching on pleasure (hedone). Epicurus carefully distinguished katastematic pleasure — the stable, peaceful state of having one's needs met (which he called ataraxia) — from kinetic pleasure, the fleeting excitement of active enjoyment. True abundance, he argued, is a quality of how fully one experiences what one has, not of the quantity one possesses. The attribution to a specific text is uncertain; the saying circulates in ancient Epicurean anthologies.