The Essential Marcus Aurelius (Tarcher Cornerstone Editions)

by Marcus Aurelius

Begin each day by saying to yourself: Today I am going to encounter people who are ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, and hostile. People have these characteristics because they do not understand what is good and what is bad.

Damn thats true

Each and every hour make up your mind steadfastly as a Roman and as a man to accomplish the matter presently at hand with genuine solemnity, loving care, independence, and justice, and to provide yourself with relief from all other worries; and you will achieve this if you perform every action in your life as if it were your last, putting aside all aimlessness and emotional resistance to the choices of reason, and all pretense, selfishness, and discontent with what has been allotted to you.

Yup

Go ahead, soul, be destructive, but you may not have another opportunity to honor yourself, for each person has only one life—and yours is almost finished; yet you still do not respect yourself, but locate your own happiness in the minds of others.

Not easily will you find a person who is unhappy due to ignorance of what goes on in another person’s soul; but those who do not follow the movements of their own soul will surely be unhappy.

The longest and shortest lives thus amount to the same, for the present moment is equal for everyone, and what we lose turns out never to have belonged to us in the first place; and so what has been lost is only a mere moment.

Small indeed is the life which each person lives, and tiny is the corner of the earth where he lives. Small too is even the longest after-glory, which is handed off, as in a relay race, to others who will soon be dead, not having known even themselves, let alone someone who died long ago.