評論
打印
Live without conventions, which are artificial and false; escape complexities and extravagances: only so can you live a free life. The rich man believes he possesses his big house with its many rooms and its elaborate furniture, his expensive clothes, his horses and servants and his bank accounts. He does not.
拋開那些造作虛偽的習俗，擺脫那些繁文縟節和奢侈享受，只有這樣人們才能過上自由的生活。富人自認為擁有深宅大院，精工細作的家具，華服駿馬，成群的仆人和大筆的銀行存款，其實他并非真正擁有，
He depends on them, he worries about them, he spends most of his life's energy looking after them; the thought of losing them makes him sick with anxiety. They possess him. He is their slave. In order to procure a quantity of false, perishable goods he has sold the only true, lasting good, his own independence.
他依賴這些東西，為這些東西操心，一生中大部分精力都花在照看這些東西上了；一想到失去這些東西他便會過于焦慮以致患病。它們支配了他，他成了這些東西的奴隸。為了得到一些虛假、浮華的東西，他出賣了他唯一真實而永恒的財富——他自己的獨立性。
There have been many men who grew tired of human society with its complications, and went away to live simply—on a small farm, in a quiet village, or in a hermit's cave. Not so Diogenes. He was a missionary. His life's aim was clear to him: it was "to restamp the currency": to take the clean metal of human life, to erase the old false conventional markings, and to imprint it with its true values.
很多人對人類社會的錯綜復雜感到厭倦，于是離群索居，躲到一邊去過簡樸的生活——或在一個小農場里耕種，或在安靜的小村莊里度日，抑或在洞穴里隱居。第歐根尼沒有那樣做。他是一個傳教士，他有明確的目標，那就是“重鑄貨帀”：提取人類生活的精華，揭除陳規陋習的假面具，重新印上人類生活的真正價值。
The other great philosophers of the fourth century BC, such as Plato and Aristotle, taught mainly their own private pupils. But for Diogenes, laboratory and specimens and lecture halls and pupils were all to be found in a crowd of ordinary people.
公元前4世紀的其他偉大哲學家，如柏拉圖和亞里士多德，主要給自己的學生講道。但是對于第歐根尼來說，他的實驗室、標本、大課堂和學生都存在于蕓蕓眾生中間。
