When one woman asked 'What is a good time to have dinner,' the philosopher replied, 'If you are rich whenever you want, and if you are poor whenever you can.' Sometimes because they knew he was wise, and sometimes because his answers were quite funny. In time, he developed his own philosophical concept and started talking about it, attracting larger and larger crowds of people.Īs his reputation grew, people sought his advice on all sorts of things. Wasn't his father's greed that got him into trouble? Wasn't he himself depressed because he missed everything they had left behind? Diogenes concluded that the philosopher was right. In other words, such a person will not be able to reach a point where they are truly happy, so the fewer things a person wants, the more likely that person is to be happy.ĭiogenes, the boy who had lost almost everything, listened to Antisthenes and thought about his own situation. If one measures one's success by how many and valuable things one owns, then that person will not be able to own every possible thing he wants and will not stop wanting more and more things. In those days, Athens was a famous cultural center, and one of its most famous citizens was a philosopher named Antisthenes, who argued that a person does not possess things, but rather things come to possess the person. They were so poor they were almost starving. It wasn't easy for Diogenes to go from his home, good food, and a certain status in society to a life where he had none of these things. His childhood took an entirely different turn after his family was sent into exile in Athens because his father tried to circulate counterfeit money.

In 412 BC, in the ancient Greek city of Sinope, a boy named Diogenes was born.

Lost in the tumult of society, trapped by the pressing problems we have to solve, few of us manage to transcend our immediate reality and ask ourselves questions about the meaning of life, about right and wrong, about how human beings should live to deserve the title of Man.Īnd when we succeed, much of the credit goes to the philosophers, those who dig to the root of the human condition, leaving us with lessons that challenge us and help us elevate our thinking.ĭiogenes' Childhood - The Boy Who Lost Almost Everything One of the world's most famous philosophers who left behind unforgettable patterns of thought was Diogenes of Sinope, founder of the Cynic School, whose story we will tell in the following lines.

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