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Quote checked against the text

“It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.” — attributed to Seneca

Attested

Yes. The sentence is in the text, at Letters to Lucilius, 2, §6; Richard Mott Gummere’s 1917–1925 edition is quoted below.

Yes. The sentence is in Letter 2, On discursiveness in reading, in Gummere’s translation (1917–1925), sixth section, word for word: “It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.” The variants that circulate with “hankers after more” come from another translation of the same line.

The line is Seneca’s comment on a saying he has just borrowed from Epicurus, crossing into the enemy’s camp as a scout, not as a deserter: contented poverty is an honourable estate. If it is contented, he answers, it is not poverty at all. He then asks what it matters how much a man has laid up in his safe or in his warehouse if he covets his neighbour’s property and reckons not his past gains but his hopes of gains to come.

Letter 2 is one of the 30 letters we hold in Gummere’s text, out of 124, read in full at Letter 2. The sentence about reading few authors, from the same letter, has its own entry, “Linger among a limited number of master thinkers, and digest their works.”.

What we searched

Each fragment is searched, normalized, in every file of the editions below. The block is the search and its result, replayed at each build.

The wording was searched in the 30 letters of Gummere’s translation (1917–1925) we hold, out of 124, and in the ten dialogues we have from Stewart’s 1889 volume.

$ node tools/seo/grep-quote.mjs --lang en "man who has too little" "craves more"
George Long, 1862 — Meditations · 12 books, 487 chapters (1 file)
  "man who has too little"  0 hits
  "craves more"  0 hits
Richard Mott Gummere, 1917–1925 — Letters to Lucilius · 30 letters of 124 (30 files)
  "man who has too little"  1 hit
    letter-02.txt l. 12  …is not the man who has too little, but the…
  "craves more"  1 hit
    letter-02.txt l. 12  …the man who craves more, that is…
Aubrey Stewart, 1889 — Minor Dialogues · 10 dialogues, 6 aligned with Baillard chapter for chapter (10 files)
  "man who has too little"  0 hits
  "craves more"  0 hits
Elizabeth Carter, 1758 — Enchiridion · 52 chapters (Carter’s numbering) (1 file)
  "man who has too little"  0 hits
  "craves more"  0 hits
George Long, 1877 — Discourses (selection) and Enchiridion · a selection of the Discourses, without book or chapter numbers, plus the Enchiridion (1 file)
  "man who has too little"  0 hits
  "craves more"  0 hits

$ node tools/seo/grep-quote.mjs --lang fr "celui qui désire davantage" "c'est de désirer plus"
Auguste Couat, 1904 — Pensées · 12 books, 487 chapters (IV, 19–20 and VII, 47–48 merged by the translator) (12 files)
  "celui qui désire davantage"  0 hits
  "c'est de désirer plus"  0 hits
Jules Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire, 1876 — Pensées · 12 books, 487 chapters — second French edition, shown beside Couat (12 files)
  "celui qui désire davantage"  0 hits
  "c'est de désirer plus"  0 hits
Joseph Baillard, 1861 — Lettres à Lucilius · 29 letters of 124 (29 files)
  "celui qui désire davantage"  0 hits
  "c'est de désirer plus"  1 hit
    lettre-02.txt l. 6  …point d’avoir peu, c’est de désirer plus, qu’on est…
Joseph Baillard, 1861 — Dialogues et traités · 11 works, 6 aligned with Stewart chapter for chapter (11 files)
  "celui qui désire davantage"  0 hits
  "c'est de désirer plus"  0 hits
Jean-Marie Guyau, 1875 — Manuel · 53 chapters (modern numbering) (1 file)
  "celui qui désire davantage"  0 hits
  "c'est de désirer plus"  0 hits
Victor Courdaveaux, 1862 — Entretiens · 9 chapters of the Discourses (I, 1 · I, 15 · I, 18 · I, 24 · I, 25 · II, 13 · II, 18 · III, 16 · III, 24) (9 files)
  "celui qui désire davantage"  0 hits
  "c'est de désirer plus"  0 hits

This sentence appears 2 times in the list of circulating quotes we collected on 2026-08-09.

What the text says

It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.

Richard Mott Gummere, 1917–1925 · Letters to Lucilius, 2, §6

How to cite

The passage, in the edition quoted above:

Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, 2, §6 (trans. Richard Mott Gummere, 1917–1925)

Other sentences checked

All sentences attributed to SenecaAll quote checks

Every passage in Stoïque carries its reference. The 171 passages of Seneca are in Stoic+, each with its locator.

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