Quotes from Marcus Aurelius

If it doesn't harm your character, how can it harm your life?

That you don't know for sure it is a mistake. A lot of things are means to some other end. You have to know an awful lot before you can judge other people's actions with real understanding.

Give yourself a gift: the present moment. People out for posthumous fame forget that the Generations To Come will be the same annoying people they know now. And just as mortal. What does it matter to you if they say x about you, or think y?

The mind is the ruler of the soul. It should remain unstirred by agitations of the flesh—gentle and violent ones alike. Not mingling with them, but fencing itself off and keeping those feelings in their place. When they make their way into your thoughts, through the sympathetic link between mind and body, don't try to resist the sensation. The sensation is natural. But don't let the mind start in with judgments, calling it "good" or "bad.

The world is maintained by change—in the elements and in the things they compose. That

You have embarked, made the voyage, and come to shore; get out. If indeed to another life, there is no want of gods, not even there. But if to a state without sensation, you will cease to be held by pains and pleasures, and to be a slave to the vessel, which is as much inferior as that which serves it is superior: for the one is intelligence and deity; the other is earth and corruption.

How ridiculous not to flee from one's own wickedness, which is possible, yet endeavour to flee from another's, which is not.

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.

You should always look on human life as short and cheap. Yesterday sperm: tomorrow a mummy or ashes.

consider how much more pain is brought on us by the anger and vexation caused by such acts than by the acts themselves, at which we are angry and vexed. Ninth

Your principles have life in them. For how can they perish, unless the ideas that correspond to them are extinguished? And it is up to you to be constantly fanning them into new flame.

For the sole thing of which any man can be deprived is the present; since this is all he owns, and nobody can lose what is not his.

The fraction of infinity, of that vast abyss of time, allotted to each of us. Absorbed in an instant into eternity. The fraction of all substance, and all spirit. The fraction of the whole earth you crawl about on. Keep all that in mind, and don't treat anything as important except doing what your nature demands, and accepting what Nature sends you.

The soul of man is thus an emanation from the godhead, into whom it will eventually be re-absorbed. The divine ruling principle makes all things work together for good, but for the good of the whole. The highest good of man is consciously to work with God for the common good, and this is the sense in which the Stoic tried to live in accord with nature. In the individual it is virtue alone which enables him to do this; as Providence rules the universe, so virtue in the soul must rule man.

in the ways of Nature there is no evil to be found.

Consider the past; such great changes of political supremacies. Thou mayest foresee also the things which will be. For they will certainly be of like form, and it is not possible that they should deviate from the order of the things which take place now: accordingly to have contemplated human life for forty years is the same as to have contemplated it for ten thousand years. For what more wilt thou see?

Human lives are brief and trivial. Yesterday a blob of semen; tomorrow embalming fluid, ash. To pass through this brief life as nature demands. To give it upwithout complaint. Like an olive that ripens and falls. Praising its mother, thanking the tree it grew on.

See how soon everything is forgotten, and look at the chaos of infinite time on each side of [the present], and the emptiness of applause, and the changeableness and want of judgment in those who pretend to give praise, and the narrowness of the space within which it is circumscribed [and be quiet at last]. For the whole earth is a point, and how small

I do my duty: other things trouble me not; for they are either things without life, or things without reason, or things that have rambled and know not the way.

You have a mind? —Yes. Well, why not use it? Isn't that all you want—for it to do its job?

A better wrestler. But not a better citizen, a better person, a better resource in tight places, a better forgiver of faults.

Big drama of existence is not the death but never having began to live

He that sinneth, sinneth unto himself. He that is unjust, hurts himself, in that he makes himself worse than he was before. Not he only that committeth, but he also that omitteth something, is oftentimes unjust.

Is any man afraid of change? Why what can take place without change? What then is more pleasing or more suitable to the universal nature? And canst thou take a bath unless the wood undergoes a change? And canst thou be nourished, unless the food undergoes a change? And can anything else that is useful be accomplished without change? Dost thou not see then that for thyself also to change is just the same, and equally necessary for the universal nature? Through