Quotes from Marcus Aurelius

The greatest part of what we say and do is really unnecessary. If a man takes this to heart, he will have more leisure and less uneasiness.

Pray look upon the plants and birds, the ants, spiders, and bees, and you will see them all exerting their nature, and busy in their station. Pray, shall not a man act like a man?

Where a man can live, he can also live well.

Can we wonder that men perish and are forgotten, when their noblest and most enduring works decay? Death comes even to monumental structures, and oblivion rests on the most illustrious names.

Though you break your heart, men will go on as before.

Reverence the gods, and help men. Short is life.

Once you have done a man a service, what more reward would you have? Is it not enough to have obeyed the laws of your own nature, without expecting to be paid for it?

The universal order and the personal order are nothing but different expressions and manifestations of a common underlying principle.

Nothing happens to any man that he is not formed by nature to bear.

A man should be upright, not be kept upright.

The main thing we were made for is to work with others.

He who eats my bread, does my will.

Do every act of your life as if it were your last.

Everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be.

If unwilling to rise in the morning, say to thyself, 'I awake to do the work of a man.'

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil and recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own – not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me.

Every little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.

The most complete revenge is not to imitate the aggressor.

Why should we feel anger at the world? As if the world would notice?

When you are offended at anyone's fault, turn to yourself and study your own failings. By attending to them, you will forget your anger and learn to live wisely.

So much worse are the consequences of anger than its causes.

Death is a release from the impressions of the senses, and from desires that make us their puppets, and from the vagaries of the mind, and from the hard service of the flesh.

People who labor all their lives but have no purpose to direct every thought and impulse toward are wasting their time-even when hard at work.

Art thou angry with him whose armpits stink? Art thou angry with him whose mouth smells foul?