Meditations

by Marcus Aurelius

Epithets for yourself: Upright. Modest. Straightforward. Sane. Cooperative. Disinterested. Try not to exchange them for others. And if you should forfeit them, set about getting them back.

Your actions and perceptions need to aim: at accomplishing practical ends at the exercise of thought at maintaining a confidence founded on understanding. An unobtrusive confidence—hidden in plain sight.

What people say or think about him, or how they treat him, isn’t something he worries about. Only these two questions: Is what he’s doing now the right thing to be doing? Does he accept and welcome what he’s been assigned? He has stripped away all other occupations, all other tasks. He wants only to travel a straight path—to God, by way of law.

To follow the logos in all things is to be relaxed and energetic, joyful and serious at once.

Like this a lot, as when I’m at my best I actually very much feel this way

When you wake up, ask yourself: Does it make any difference to you if other people blame you for doing what’s right? It makes no difference.

To stop talking about what the good man is like, and just be one.

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.

Stop whatever you’re doing for a moment and ask yourself: Am I afraid of death because I won’t be able to do this anymore?

So keep at it, until it’s fully digested. As a strong stomach digests whatever it eats. As a blazing fire takes whatever you throw on it, and makes it light and flame.

It stares you in the face. No role is so well suited to philosophy as the one you happen to be in right now.

As you move forward in the logos, people will stand in your way. They can’t keep you from doing what’s healthy; don’t let them stop you from putting up with them either. Take care on both counts. Not just sound judgments, solid actions—tolerance as well, for those who try to obstruct us or give us trouble in other ways. Because anger, too, is weakness, as much as breaking down and giving up the struggle. Both are deserters:

Hence justice. Which is the source of all the other virtues. For how could we do what justice requires if we are distracted by things that don’t matter, if we are naive, gullible, inconstant?

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

To live a good life: We have the potential for it. If we can learn to be indifferent to what makes no difference.

“If you don’t have a consistent goal in life, you can’t live it in a consistent way.” Unhelpful, unless you specify a goal. There is no common benchmark for all the things that people think are good—except for a few, the ones that affect us all. So the goal should be a common one—a civic one. If you direct all your energies toward that, your actions will be consistent. And so will you.

This advice from Epicurean writings: to think continually of one of the men of old who lived a virtuous life.

Mastery of reading and writing requires a master. Still more so life.

As you kiss your son good night, says Epictetus, whisper to yourself, “He may be dead in the morning.” Don’t tempt fate, you say. By talking about a natural event? Is fate tempted when we speak of grain being reaped?

Haunting to think how much more applicable this was back then

We need to pay attention to our impulses, making sure they don’t go unmoderated, that they benefit others, that they’re worthy of us. We need to steer clear of desire in any form

if it isn’t ceasing to live that you’re afraid of but never beginning to live properly … then you’ll be worthy of the world that made you.

What a beautiful way to put that

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

It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own.

What a great way to put that

How is it that the gods arranged everything with such skill, such care for our well-being, and somehow overlooked one thing: that certain people—in fact, the best of them, the gods’ own partners, the ones whose piety and good works brought them closest to the divine—that these people, when they die, should cease to exist forever? Utterly vanished. Well, assuming that’s really true, you can be sure they would have arranged things differently, if that had been appropriate. If it were the right thing to do, they could have done it, and if it were natural, nature would have demanded it. So from the fact that they didn’t—if that’s the case—we can conclude that it was inappropriate.

The student as boxer, not fencer. The fencer’s weapon is picked up and put down again. The boxer’s is part of him. All he has to do is clench his fist.

Another great analogy. The goal is to make philosophy a part of you, not something you just pick up while you read it

To undertake nothing: i. at random or without a purpose; ii. for any reason but the common good.

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. That’s how I know the gods exist and why I revere them—from having felt their power, over and over.

You’ve lived as a citizen in a great city. Five years or a hundred—what’s the difference? The laws make no distinction. And to be sent away from it, not by a tyrant or a dishonest judge, but by Nature, who first invited you in—why is that so terrible? Like the impresario ringing down the curtain on an actor: “But I’ve only gotten through three acts …!” Yes. This will be a drama in three acts, the length fixed by the power that directed your creation, and now directs your dissolution. Neither was yours to determine. So make your exit with grace—the same grace shown to you.

Last lines. Poignant Like a child who got chocolate they didn’t ask for, who then asks for more. Take what you are given, and make the most of it, not greedily thinking you deserve more or never eating it because you are afraid it will end. Mixing metaphors, but it’s like Pappy. Drink the bourbon

the camp-bed and the cloak: Symbols of an ascetic lifestyle. Marcus’s sleeping arrangements are recorded by the Historia Augusta: “He used to sleep on the ground, and his mother had a hard time convincing him to sleep on a cot spread with skins.”

“so many goods …”: Proverbial: the rich man owns “so many goods he has no place to shit.” The saying is at least as old as the fourth-century B.C. comic poet Menander, who quotes it in the surviving fragments of his play The Apparition.