Marcus Aurelius Quotes

“the greatest humourists are deep down usually angry men, who know that human nature ignores tirades, but is responsive to laughter.”
― Frank McLynn, Marcus Aurelius: A Life

“he passed through a village and a woman approached him with a request. ‘I don’t have the time,’ he replied. ‘Then stop being emperor’ was the devastating riposte.”
― Frank McLynn, Marcus Aurelius: A Life

“The beauty of pragmatism is that it enables one to make judgements based on supposed consequences, which always lie in the future and are thus immediately unverifiable.”
― Frank McLynn, Marcus Aurelius: A Life

“the idea of a supra-human Chief Justice, totally ‘objective’, may be a necessary political and social myth but it is an illusion for all that.”
― Frank McLynn, Marcus Aurelius: A Life

“A friend should always be quite clear what your attitude was on any subject, there should be no prevarication, and if people offended you or merited your disapproval, you should be utterly frank with them.”
― Frank McLynn, Marcus Aurelius: A Life

“It is no exaggeration to say that educated people in the second century were obsessed with dreams, and Marcus’s contemporary, the Greek Artemidorus, produced a book of dream interpretation that partly anticipated Freud in the important place it gave to sexuality and partly pre-empted Jung, in that it saw dreams as a guide to the future.25 Artemidorus distinguished between euhypnion - a routine dream whereby the mind sorted, processed and computerised the previous day’s events - and the more important oneiros - the dream relating to the future.26”
― Frank McLynn, Marcus Aurelius: A Life

“In the lower orders infanticide was the preferred method of birth control, but attitudes towards this swung sharply negative under the Antonines, in contrast to the tolerance in the late republic and first century of the empire.95 Avoiding reproduction out of financial meanness, or the desire to avoid the pain and suffering of child mortality, produced a distinctive mindset in the second century AD.”
― Frank McLynn, Marcus Aurelius: A Life

“Although women were in many respects second-class citizens under the Roman empire - and even the philosophical Marcus Aurelius did not regard a woman as his equal - nonetheless they enjoyed legal and property rights that were remarkable when set aside the lot of women in most traditional agrarian societies.76 Many elite women had large fortunes they could dispose of as they pleased; powerful both by their individual wealth and their potential as child-bearers, upper-class women were assiduously courted as valuable political and economic assets. The more intelligent females fully played up to this .77”
― Frank McLynn, Marcus Aurelius: A Life

“The priests received special treatment, for the last nine days of the festival of Mars were meant to be fast-days except for priests; the breaking of the fast on 25 March is thought by some scholars to be the origin of Mardi Gras, instead of the ‘fat Tuesday’ before Christian Lent.”
― Frank McLynn, Marcus Aurelius: A Life

“The psychological effects of wet-nursing are usually thought pernicious by modern experts, but it must be remembered that the Romans had a much more diffuse notion of family than that in the post-Industrial Revolution West. Child-minders were a fact of life in a culture that regarded marrying for love as eccentric, even deviant, and whose kinship boundaries were constantly shifting; divorce and remarriage among aristocratic families may have reached 50 per cent.64”
― Frank McLynn, Marcus Aurelius: A Life

“The only real avenue for social mobility was that of the freedman, for the manumitted slave could rise higher in Rome than in any other slave society. It takes an effort of imagination to conceive of a society where vast wealth was concentrated in so few hands; perhaps the nearest modern equivalent would be Saudi Arabia.34”
― Frank McLynn, Marcus Aurelius: A Life

“Marcus will probably never be hugely popular with committed Christians, if only because he persecuted them. But for others he holds out the prospect of spirituality for atheists, happiness without God, joy without heaven and morality without religion.”
― Frank McLynn, Marcus Aurelius: A Life

“Como sempre, a guerra proporciona grandes oportunidades aos homens ambiciosos que teriam permanecido na obscuridade em tempos de paz.”
― Frank McLynn, Marcus Aurelius: A Life

“O outro evidente sinal da grandeza de Marco Aurélio era o facto de ele próprio ser a refutação em pessoa do famoso ditado de Lord Acton: “o poder tende a corromper e o poder absoluto corrompe absolutamente”. Marco Aurélio detinha um poder absoluto, mas nunca o usou para fins egoístas, malévolos, despóticos ou corruptos.”
― Frank McLynn, Marcus Aurelius: A Life

“É irracional desejar a fama póstuma, pois as pessoas que de facto se recordam de nós também morreram e o nosso nome depressa passa a ser conhecido apenas por académicos especialistas e antiquários. Para além disso, de que serve tentar impressionar a posteridade – são pessoas que nunca vamos conhecer. O que valerá a sua opinião?”
― Frank McLynn, Marcus Aurelius: A Life

“É importante saber, com toda a certeza, que Marco Aurélio não se limita a defender o carpe diem de Horácio ou a aliciar-nos a viver cada dia como se fosse o último – embora também o faça. O que ele prega muito claramente é que o presente é tudo o que temos.”
― Frank McLynn, Marcus Aurelius: A Life

“Muitas das notas de Marco Aurélio a si próprio, (…) baseavam-se nos riscos de tirania de um imperador. Detestava especialmente Nero – um homem à mercê dos mais loucos impulsos, como um animal selvagem – ou, como Marco Aurélio descreveria imemoriavelmente “Um carácter obscuro: efeminado, grosseiro, selvagem, animalesco, pueril, cobarde, falso, tolo, mercenário e despótico.”
― Frank McLynn, Marcus Aurelius: A Life