Marcus Aurelius - Meditations (180 AD)

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It's time you realized that you have something in you more powerful and miraculous than the things that affect you and make you dance like a puppet.

Marcus Aurelius
If a man comes to his fortieth year, and has any understanding at all, he has virtually seen - thanks to their similarity - all possible happenings, both past and to come.

Marcus Aurelius
Life is short. That's all there is to say. Get what you can from the present - thoughtfully, justly.

Marcus Aurelius
Does what's happened keep you from acting with justice, generosity, self-control, sanity, prudence, honesty, humility, straightforward ness, and all other qualities that allow a person's nature to fulfill itself? So remember this principle when something threatens to cause you pain: the thing itself was no misfortune at all; to endure it and prevail is great good fortune.

Marcus Aurelius
In the end, what would you gain from everlasting remembrance? Absolutely nothing. So what is left worth living for? This alone: justice in thought, goodness in action, speech that cannot deceive, and a disposition glad of whatever comes, welcoming it as necessary, as familiar, as flowing from the same source and fountain as yourself.

Marcus Aurelius
It doesn't hurt me unless I interpret its happening as harmful to me. I can choose not to.

Marcus Aurelius
When you have trouble getting out of bed in the morning, remember that your defining characteristic-what defines a human being-is to work with others.

Marcus Aurelius
Even while a thing is in the act of coming into existence, some part of it has already ceased to be.

Marcus Aurelius
The cucumber is bitter? Then throw it out. There are brambles in the path? Then go around. That's all you need to know.

Marcus Aurelius
In one way an arrow moves, in another way the mind. The mind indeed, both when it exercises caution and when it is employed about inquiry, moves straight onward not the less, and to its object.

Marcus Aurelius
If this is neither my own badness, nor an effect of my own badness, and the common weal is not injured, why am I troubled about it? And what is the harm to the common weal?

Marcus Aurelius
Your days are numbered. Use them to throw open the windows of your soul to the sun. If you do not, the sun will soon set, and you with it.

Marcus Aurelius
It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinions than our own.

Marcus Aurelius
Keep in mind how fast things pass by and are gone - those that are now, and those to come. Existence flows past us like a river; the "what" is in constant flux, the "why" has a thousand variations. Nothing is stable, not even what's right here. The infinity of past and future gapes before us - a chasm whose depths we cannot see.

Marcus Aurelius
Our inward power, when it obeys nature, reacts to events by accommodating itself to what it faces - to what is possible. It needs no specific material. It pursues its own aims as circumstances allow; it turns obstacles into fuel. As a fire overwhelms what would have quenched a lamp. What's thrown on top of the conflagration is absorbed, consumed by it - and makes it burn still higher.

Marcus Aurelius
Does the light of the lamp shine without losing its splendour until it is extinguished; and shall the truth which is in thee and justice and temperance be extinguished before thy death?

Marcus Aurelius
Even the stoics agree that certainty is very hard to come at; that our assent is worth little, for where is infallibility to be found?

Marcus Aurelius
If any man should conceive certain things as being really good, such as prudence, temperance, justice, fortitude, he would not after having first conceived these endure to listen to anything which should not be in harmony with what is really good.

Marcus Aurelius
Outward objects cannot take hold of the soul, nor force their passage into her, nor set any of her wheels going. No, the impression comes from herself, and it is her own motions which affect her. As for the contingencies of fortune, they are either great or little, according to the opinion she has of her own strength.

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.

Marcus Aurelius
Time is a kind of river, an irresistible flood sweeping up men and events and carrying them headlong, one after the other, to the great sea of being.

Marcus Aurelius
Death, like birth, is one of nature's mysteries, the combining of primal elements and dissolving of the same into the same.

Marcus Aurelius
I am called to man's labour; why then do I make a difficulty if I am going out to do what I was born to do and what I was brought into the world for?

Marcus Aurelius
Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest been lived already, or is impossible to see. The span we live is small - small as the corner of the earth in which we live it.

Marcus Aurelius
I can at once become happy anywhere, for he is happy who has found himself a happy lot. In a word, happiness lies all in the functions of reason, in warrantable desires and virtuous practice.

Marcus Aurelius
Do you see what little is required of a man to live a well-tempered and god-fearing life? Obey these precepts, and the gods will ask nothing more.

Marcus Aurelius
The offender needs pity, not wrath; those who must needs be corrected, should be treated with tact and gentleness; and one must be always ready to learn better. 'The best kind of revenge is, not to become like unto them.'

Marcus Aurelius
Get rid of the judgement... get rid of the 'I am hurt,' you are rid of the hurt itself.

Marcus Aurelius
Stop talking about what the good man is like, and just be one.

Marcus Aurelius
Take away your opinion, and then there is taken away the complaint, 'I have been harmed.' Take away the complaint, 'I have been harmed,' and the harm is taken away.

Marcus Aurelius