Meditations

by Marcus Aurelius

Stop allowing your mind to be a slave, to be jerked about by selfish impulses, to kick against fate and the present, and to mistrust the future.

The value of attentiveness varies in proportion to its object. You’re better off not giving the small things more time than they deserve.

So remember this principle when something threatens to cause you pain: the thing itself was no misfortune at all; to endure it and prevail is great good fortune.

You don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you.

Don’t you see how much you have to offer—beyond excuses like “can’t”? And yet you still settle for less.

You’ll have a better grasp of the harmony if you keep on going back to it.

Change and flux constantly remake the world, just as the incessant progression of time remakes eternity.

The way people behave. They refuse to admire their contemporaries, the people whose lives they share. No, but to be admired by Posterity—people they’ve never met and never will—that’s what they set their hearts on. You might as well be upset at not being a hero to your great-grandfather.

The only rewards of our existence here are an unstained character and unselfish acts.

Things push and pull on each other, and breathe together, and are one.

“And why should we feel anger at the world? As if the world would notice!”

To watch the courses of the stars as if you revolved with them.

observing life for forty years is as good as a thousand. Would you really see anything new?

It’s quite possible to be a good man without anyone realizing it.

Don’t let your imagination be crushed by life as a whole.

External things are not the problem. It’s your assessment of them. Which you can erase right now.

Concrete objects can pull free of the earth more easily than humans can escape humanity.

Think about your life: childhood, boyhood, youth, old age. Every transformation a kind of dying. Was that so terrible?

Remembering that the whole class has to exist will make you more tolerant of its members.

Or by doing them a favor and expecting something in return, instead of looking to the action itself for your reward.

Because anger, too, is weakness, as much as breaking down and giving up the struggle.

None of us is forbidden to pursue our own good.

You have to know an awful lot before you can judge other people’s actions with real understanding.

we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own.