by Arcturus Descending » Tue Oct 09, 2018 3:59 pm
barbarianhorde wrote:Arcturus Descending wrote:Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.
- Epicurus
Yo Epi, but was it wrong to hope for it in the first place?? Maybe you wouldn't have had it if you dint desire it dude.
*You Epi* lol. You made a good point here I think. Perhaps Epicurus was speaking more about hedonism here ~ too much desiring, too much over-the-top hoping. When we focus too much on what we do not have, we lose focus and the truth of what we do already have.
I do not think that hoping for something is necessarily wrong unless we are wasting time and energy on something which we, on some level, know that we can never have but we choose to ignore the truth of it.
But I do intuit that there is such a thing as too much hope and not enough *going after*...
I think that Epi was basically talking about balance here...the epicurean as opposed to the hedonist...the fine balance of *enjoying* perhaps something *lesser* but good now as opposed to craving *it all* and not appreciating THIS moment.
"Look closely. The beautiful may be small."
"Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me."
“Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt.”
Immanuel Kant
