Diogenes Laertius lists the books under Aristippus' name: three volumes of a History of Libya addressed to Dionysius, a work in one book containing twenty-five dialogues, and essays including On Education and To Those Who Blame Him for Owning Old Wine and Mistresses. He then adds that Sosicrates of Rhodes says Aristippus wrote nothing whatever.
What survives instead is the manner of the man, recorded in anecdote. Asked what he had gained from philosophy, he said: the ability to feel at ease in any society. Reproached for living well while other Socratics lived poorly, he answered that he possessed his pleasures rather than being possessed by them — for the point is not to abstain from what is pleasant, but never to be mastered by it.
His doctrine passed to his daughter Arete and through her to his grandson, and became the Cyrenaic school: that the good is the smooth motion of the present moment, that only one's own feeling is ever certainly known, and that neither the remembered nor the expected pleasure is worth as much as the one at hand.
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