Quotes from Marcus Aurelius

3. Alexander and Caesar and Pompey. Compared with Diogenes, Heraclitus, Socrates? The philosophers knew the what, the why, the how. Their minds were their own. The others? Nothing but anxiety and enslavement.

alegre e sereno, e não busque a tranquilidade nos outros. Um homem deve se manter ereto, apoiado em si mesmo, e não se valer dos demais como muleta.

If souls can be neither created nor destroyed, does the air around us contain the souls of all who have lived before and all who are yet to be born?

You don't love yourself enough. Or you'd love your nature too, and what it demands of you. People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it, they even forget to wash or eat.

offences which are committed through desire are more blameable than those which are committed through anger. For he who is excited by anger seems to turn away from reason with a certain pain and unconscious contraction; but he who offends through desire, being overpowered by pleasure, seems to be in a manner more intemperate and more womanish in his offences.

Whatever happens to every man, this is for the interest of the universal: this might be sufficient. But further thou wilt observe this also as a general truth, if thou dost observe, that whatever is profitable to any man is profitable also to other men. But let the word profitable be taken here in the common sense as said of things of the middle kind [neither good nor bad].

At every instant the objects and events in the world around us bombard us with impressions. As they do so they produce a phantasia, a mental impression. From this the mind generates a perception (hypolepsis), which might best be compared to a print made from a photographic negative. Ideally this print will be an accurate and faithful representation of the original. But it may not be. It may be blurred, or it may include shadow images that distort or obscure the original.

This day I shalt have to do with an idle curious man, with an unthankful man, a railer, a crafty, false, or an envious man; an unsociable uncharitable man. All these ill qualities have happened unto them, through ignorance of that which is truly good and truly bad.

Think of how many people have died, and how many more animals have been killed and eaten by humans and each other, yet the Earth is not overflowing with corpses. Life continually renews itself. * * *

It should be a man's task, says the Imitation, 'to overcome himself, and every day to be stronger than himself.

never realizing that all you have to do is to be attentive to the power inside you and worship it sincerely

To-day I have got out of all trouble, or rather I have cast out all trouble, for it was not outside, but within and in my opinions.

And as for thy life, consider what it is; a wind; not one constant wind neither, but every moment of an hour let out, and sucked in again.

never realizing that all you have to do is to be attentive to the power inside you and worship it sincerely. To worship it is to keep it from being muddied with turmoil and becoming aimless and dissatisfied with nature—divine and human. What is divine deserves our respect because it is good; what is human deserves our affection because it is like us. And our pity too, sometimes, for its inability to tell good from bad

Some things are rushing into existence, others out of it. Some of what now exists is already gone. Change and flux constantly remake the world, just as the incessant progression of time remakes eternity. We find ourselves in a river. Which of the things around us should we value when none of them can offer a firm foothold?

26. You've seen that. Now look at this. Don't be disturbed. Uncomplicate yourself. Someone has done wrong … to himself. Something happens to you. Good. It was meant for you by nature, woven into the pattern from the beginning.

Cada ser nació con algún destino, como el caballo y la vid. ¿Te admiras de esto? También el sol nació destinado para una función, así como los otros dioses. Según ello, ¿para qué fuiste tú creado? ¿Para disfrutar? Reflexiona si puede sustentarse este pensamiento.

Is it not plain that the inferior exists for the sake of the superior? But the things which have life are superior to those which have not life, and of those which have life the superior are those which have reason.

To the jaundiced honey tastes bitter, and to those bitten by mad dogs water causes fear; and to little children the ball is a fine thing. Why then am I angry? Do you think that a false opinion has less power than the bile in the jaundiced or the poison in someone bitten by a mad dog?

If: this evil is not of my doing, nor the result of it, and the community is not endangered, why should it bother me? Where's the danger for the community?

18. The way people behave. They refuse to admire their contemporaries, the people whose lives they share. No, but to be admired by Posterity—people they've never met and never will—that's what they set their hearts on. You might as well be upset at not being a hero to your great-grandfather.

to be the same in all circumstances—intense pain, the loss of a child, chronic illness. And to see clearly, from his example, that a man can show both strength and flexibility.

Nothing happens to any man which he is not formed by nature to bear. The same things happen to another, and either because he does not see that they have happened, or because he would show a great spirit, he is firm and remains unharmed. It is a shame then that ignorance and conceit should be stronger than wisdom.

Be neither a great talker, nor a great undertaker.