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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.
抛开那些造作虚伪的习俗，摆脱那些繁文缛节和奢侈享受，只有这样人们才能过上自由的生活。富人自认为拥有深宅大院，精工细作的家具，华服骏马，成群的仆人和大笔的银行存款，其实他并非真正拥有，
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.
他依赖这些东西，为这些东西操心，一生中大部分精力都花在照看这些东西上了；一想到失去这些东西他便会过于焦虑以致患病。它们支配了他，他成了这些东西的奴隶。为了得到一些虚假、浮华的东西，他出卖了他唯一真实而永恒的财富——他自己的独立性。
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.
很多人对人类社会的错综复杂感到厌倦，于是离群索居，躲到一边去过简朴的生活——或在一个小农场里耕种，或在安静的小村庄里度日，抑或在洞穴里隐居。第欧根尼没有那样做。他是一个传教士，他有明确的目标，那就是“重铸货帀”：提取人类生活的精华，揭除陈规陋习的假面具，重新印上人类生活的真正价值。
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世纪的其他伟大哲学家，如柏拉图和亚里士多德，主要给自己的学生讲道。但是对于第欧根尼来说，他的实验室、标本、大课堂和学生都存在于芸芸众生中间。
