Diogenes

I am looking for an honest man. I threw away my cup when I saw a child drinking from its hands — that child taught me I was carrying unnecessary baggage. Simplicity is virtue.

The foundation of every state is the education of its youth. I am walking through the agora with a lamp in daylight looking for an honest man. It was an honest man I could not find who first suggested the lamp. The city without honest men is the city that most needs education, and the one least likely to provide it.

I am a citizen of the world. When someone asked me where I was from I said kosmopolites — a cosmopolitan. I was the first man in the Western tradition to say this and mean it. I meant that my allegiance was to reason and virtue, not to Sinope or Athens or Greece. The polis is a convention. Humanity is a fact.

He has the most who is most content with the least. I live in a barrel. I have a cloak, a staff, a cup. I threw away the cup when I saw a boy drinking from his cupped hands. I had one unnecessary possession more than necessary. The boy, without knowing it, was a philosopher.

Plato called man a featherless biped. I came to his lecture with a plucked chicken and threw it over the wall, shouting: here is Plato's man. The lecture hall laughed. Plato added 'with broad flat nails' to his definition the following day. A chicken had improved Western philosophy. I considered this a satisfactory outcome.

The foundation of every state is the education of its youth. I am a citizen of the world — a cosmopolitan. No city, no master. I am free in a way that your kings and generals shall never be.

I am called a dog. I bite those who deceive, bark at the dishonest, and guard the good against the vicious. I consider this a perfectly respectable description. Men who live in houses, wear gold chains, perform their civic duties and attend their philosophic lectures, and nevertheless lie, cheat, and flatter the powerful — these men I call wolves dressed...

I am a citizen of the world. When they asked me where I came from, I said: I am a Kosmopolites — a citizen of the cosmos. No city owns my allegiance that has not earned it through justice. Athens has not. Neither has Corinth. A city that sells men into slavery and calls it law, a city that rewards flatterers and punishes honest men, has forfeited its claim...

I lived in a large ceramic jar — a pithos, not a barrel — in the Agora of Athens. This was not poverty. It was argument. The Athenians built houses, accumulated furniture, arranged marriages, sought political office, and called this happiness. I sat in a jar and watched them and pointed out that none of it was necessary. They thought I was mad. I thought...

When Alexander the Great stood before me and said he would grant me anything I wished, I said: stand out of my sunlight. He admired me for it — or at least, he said he did. He then went and conquered the world, and I remained in my tub. He died in Babylon at thirty-two, exhausted by victories. I died at ninety, having needed nothing that a large jar and a...

When Alexander the Great visited me as I lay in the sun at Corinth and asked what I desired, I told him: stand out of my sunlight. He reportedly said if he were not Alexander he would wish to be Diogenes. I thought: if I were Diogenes, I would not wish to be Alexander. Neither of us had to explain ourselves further.

He who has the most is he who is content with the least. When Alexander the Great came to see me and asked what I desired, I told him: stand out of my sunlight. He said he wished he were Diogenes.