Meditations

by Marcus Aurelius

that the longest-lived and those who will die soonest lose the same thing. The present is all that they can give up, since that is all you have, and what you do not have, you cannot lose.

You need to avoid certain things in your train of thought: everything random, everything irrelevant. And certainly everything self-important or malicious. You need to get used to winnowing your thoughts, so that if someone says, “What are you thinking about?” you can respond at once (and truthfully) that you are thinking this or thinking that. And it would be obvious at once from your answer that your thoughts were straightforward and considerate ones—the thoughts of an unselfish person, one unconcerned with pleasure and with sensual indulgence generally, with squabbling, with slander and envy, or anything else you’d be ashamed to be caught thinking.

Your ability to control your thoughts—treat it with respect. It’s all that protects your mind from false perceptions—false to your nature, and that of all rational beings. It’s what makes thoughtfulness possible, and affection for other people, and submission to the divine.

Life is short. That’s all there is to say. Get what you can from the present—thoughtfully, justly.

Unrestrained moderation.

Love the discipline you know, and let it support you. Entrust everything willingly to the gods, and then make your way through life—no one’s master and no one’s slave.

Then what should we work for? Only this: proper understanding; unselfish action; truthful speech. A resolve to accept whatever happens as necessary and familiar, flowing like water from that same source and spring.

Human lives are brief and trivial. Yesterday a blob of semen; tomorrow embalming fluid, ash.

The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts.

Matter. How tiny your share of it. Time. How brief and fleeting your allotment of it. Fate. How small a role you play in it.

Soon you’ll be ashes, or bones. A mere name, at most—and even that is just a sound, an echo.

Remember, nothing belongs to you but your flesh and blood—and nothing else is under your control.

Perceptions like that—latching onto things and piercing through them, so we see what they really are. That’s what we need to do all the time—all through our lives when things lay claim to our trust—to lay them bare and see how pointless they are, to strip away the legend that encrusts them.

Death. The end of sense-perception, of being controlled by our emotions, of mental activity, of enslavement to our bodies.

Revere the gods; watch over human beings. Our lives are short. The only rewards of our existence here are an unstained character and unselfish acts.

It’s normal to feel pain in your hands and feet, if you’re using your feet as feet and your hands as hands. And for a human being to feel stress is normal—if he’s living a normal human life.

If we limited “good” and “bad” to our own actions, we’d have no call to challenge God, or to treat other people as enemies.

The only thing that isn’t worthless: to live this life out truthfully and rightly. And be patient with those who don’t.

Nothing is as encouraging as when virtues are visibly embodied in the people around us, when we’re practically showered with them.

Evil: the same old thing. No matter what happens, keep this in mind: It’s the same old thing, from one end of the world to the other. It fills the history books, ancient and modern, and the cities, and the houses too. Nothing new at all. Familiar, transient.

But remembering that our own worth is measured by what we devote our energy to.

It doesn’t hurt me unless I interpret its happening as harmful to me. I can choose not to.

Treat what you don’t have as nonexistent. Look at what you have, the things you value most, and think of how much you’d crave them if you didn’t have them. But be careful. Don’t feel such satisfaction that you start to overvalue them—that it would upset you to lose them.

Care for other human beings. Follow God.

Look at the past—empire succeeding empire—and from that, extrapolate the future: the same thing. No escape from the rhythm of events. Which is why 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. Remember that.

you don’t need much to live happily. And just because you’ve abandoned your hopes of becoming a great thinker or scientist, don’t give up on attaining freedom, achieving humility, serving others, obeying God.

It’s silly to try to escape other people’s faults. They are inescapable. Just try to escape your own.

remember that your defining characteristic—what defines a human being—is to work with others. Even animals know how to sleep. And it’s the characteristic activity that’s the more natural one—more innate and more satisfying.

Remember that to change your mind and to accept correction are free acts too. The action is yours, based on your own will, your own decision—and your own mind.

Consider their ancestors’ anxiety—that there be a successor. But someone has to be the last. There, too, the death of a whole house.

Give yourself a gift: the present moment.

Fear of death is fear of what we may experience. Nothing at all, or something quite new. But if we experience nothing, we can experience nothing bad. And if our experience changes, then our existence will change with it—change, but not cease.

So this is how a thoughtful person should await death: not with indifference, not with impatience, not with disdain, but simply viewing it as one of the things that happen to us. Now you anticipate the child’s emergence from its mother’s womb; that’s how you should await the hour when your soul will emerge from its compartment.

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

To bear in mind constantly that all of this has happened before. And will happen again—the same plot from beginning to end, the identical staging. Produce them in your mind, as you know them from experience or from history: the court of Hadrian, of Antoninus. The courts of Philip, Alexander, Croesus. All just the same. Only the people different.

A straightforward, honest person should be like someone who stinks: when you’re in the same room with him, you know it.

Your three components: body, breath, mind. Two are yours in trust; to the third alone you have clear title.

This is how we become godlike—following God’s path, and reason’s goals.

That it’s all how you choose to see things. That the present is all we have to live in. Or to lose.

People ask, “Have you ever seen the gods you worship? How can you be sure they exist?” Answers: i. Just look around you. ii. I’ve never seen my soul either. And yet I revere it.