If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

The saying expresses an ideal of sufficiency rooted in two complementary goods: cultivation of the mind (a library) and cultivation of life’s material and sensory needs (a garden). Read this way, it praises a balanced, self-contained happiness—learning, reflection, and moral improvement alongside simple pleasures, health, and a degree of self-reliance. It also implies a critique of status-driven abundance: one does not need wealth, power, or luxury to live well if one has intellectual nourishment and a sustaining connection to nature. Although widely attributed to Cicero, the sentiment aligns more broadly with classical and later humanist ideals of the good life than with a securely attested Ciceronian text.

["If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.", "A garden and a library are all you need.", "If you have a garden and a library, you have all you need."]