Most of these excerpts are taken from Gregory Hayes’s 2003 translation of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. The order that they appear here mirror the order in which they appear in that text.
Book 1
To avoid the public schools, to hire good private teachers, and to accept the resulting costs as money well-spent.
The recognition that I needed to train and discipline my character.
To read attentively – not to be satisfied with “just getting the gist of it.”
To pay attention to nothing, no matter how fleetingly, except the logos
What it means to live as nature requires.
Not to be constantly correcting people.
Not to be constantly telling people (or writing them) that I’m too busy, unless I really am. Similarly, not to be always ducking my responsibilities to the people around me because of “pressing business.”
Not to shrug off a friend’s resentment -even unjustified resentment – but try to put things right.
Self-control and resistance to distractions.
Optimism in adversity – especially illness.
A personality in balance: dignity and grace together.
Doing your job without whining.
Other people’s certainty that what he said was what he thought, and what he did was done without malice.
Never taken aback or apprehensive. Neither rash nor hesitant – or bewildered, or at a loss. Not obsequious – but not aggressive or paranoid either.
Generosity, charity, honesty.
The sense of gave of staying on the path rather than being kept on it.
That no one could ever have felt patronized by him – or in a position to patronize him.
A sense of humor.
The way he handled the material comforts that fortune had supplied him in such abundance – without arrogance and without apology.
That he had so few secrets.
He looked to what needed doing and not the credit to be gained from doing it.
Book 2
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 have 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. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.
Remember how long you’ve been putting this off.
You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life?
Don’t ever forget these things:
The nature of the world.
My nature.
How I relate to the world.
What proportion of it I make up.
That you are a part of nature, and no one can prevent you from speaking and acting in harmony with it, always.
In comparing sins, the ones committed out of desire are worse than the ones committed out of anger.
You could leave life right now.
Everything a person needs to avoid real harm is placed within him. If there is anything harmful on the other side of death, the ability to avoid that is within you.
Be attentive to the power inside you and worship it sincerely.
What is human deserving our affection because it is like us. And our pity too, sometimes, for its inability to tell good from bad.
The human soul degrades itself when it turns its back on another person.
It’s a natural thing. And nothing natural is evil.
Book 3
Anyone with a feeling for nature will find it all gives pleasure.
You need to narrow your thoughts, so that if someone says, “What are you thinking about?” you can respond at once (and truthfully) that you are thinking this or thinking that. And it would be obvious from your answer that your thoughts were straightforward and considerate ones – the thoughts of an unselfish person.
We carry our fate with us – and it carries us.
Care nothing for their praise – men who can’t even meet their own standards.
Stand up straight – not straightened.
Say so and stand your ground without making a show of it. Just make sure you’ve done your homework first.
Neither servility nor arrogance. Neither cringing nor disdain. Neither excuses nor evasions.
Stop drifting. Sprint for the finish. Be your own savior while you can.
Say nothing that is not true. Do nothing unjust.
Book 4
Take into consideration:
Rational beings exist for one another.
Doing what’s right sometimes requires patience.
No one does the wrong thing deliberately.
The number of people who have feuded and envied and hated and fought and died and been buried.
And keep your mouth shut.
Providence or atoms.
Look at things like a man, like a human being.
That sort of person is bound to do that. You might as well resent a fig tree for secreting juice.
Choose not to be harmed – and you won’t feel harmed.
Don’t feel harmed – and you haven’t been.
It can ruin your life only if it ruins your character. Otherwise it cannot harm you.
It was for the best. So Nature had no choice but to do it.
Tranquility comes when you stop caring what they say.
Praise is extraneous.
Is an emerald suddenly flawed because no one admires it?
Ask yourself at every moment, “Is this necessary?”
Look into their mind, at what the wise do and what they don’t.
Harm is found in your capacity to see it.
You need to realize that what happens to everyone – bad and good alike – is neither good nor bad.
Know this: Human lives are short and trivial. Yesterday a blob of semen; tomorrow embalming fluid, ash. To pass through life as nature demands. To give it up without complaint. Like an olive that ripens and falls, praising its mother, thanking the tree it grew upon.
Be like the rock that the waves keep crashing over. It stands unmoved and the raging of the sea falls still around it.
Book 5
At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work – as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for – the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?”
– But it’s nicer here…
So you were born to feel “nice”? Instead of doing things and experiencing them?? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your hob as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands?
– But we have to sleep sometime…
Agreed. But nature set a limit on that – as it did on eating and drinking. And you’re over the limit. You’ve had more than enough of that. But not of working. There you’re still below your quota.
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. Do you have less respect for you own nature than the engraver does for engraving, the dancer for the dance, the miser for money or the social climber for status? When they’re really possessed by what they do, they’d rather stop eating and sleeping than give up practicing their arts.
Is helping others less valuable to you? Not worth your effort?
What happens to each of us is ordered. It furthers our destiny, for there is a single harmony.
Anywhere you can lead your life, you can lead a good one.
Nothing happens to anyone that he can’t endure.
The infinity of past and future gapes before us – a chasm whose depths we cannot see.
So other people hurt me? That’s their problem.
Good fortune is good character, good intentions, and good actions.
Book 6
Just that you do the right thing. The rest doesn’t matter.
Cold or warm.
Tired or well-rested.
Despised or honored.
Dying … or busy with other assignments.
The best revenge is to not be like that.
The elements move upward, downward, in all directions. The motion of virtue is different – deeper. It moves at a steady pace on a road hard to discern, and always forward.
Not to assume is impossible because you find it hard. But to recognize that if it’s humanly possible, you can do it too.
It’s the truth I’m after, and the truth never harmed anyone. What harms us is to persist in self-deceit and ignorance.
When you deal with irrational animals, with things and circumstances, be generous and straightforward. You are rational; they are not.
If someone asked you how to write your name, would you clench your teeth and spit out the letters one by one? If he lost his temper, would you lose yours as well? Or would you just spell out the individual letters?
How cruel – to forbid people to want what they think is good for them. And yet that’s just what you won’t let them do when you get angry at their misbehavior. They’re drawn toward what they think is good for them.
– But it’s not good for them.
Them show them that. Prove it to them. Instead of losing your temper.
Disgraceful – for the soul to give up when the body is still going strong.
Fight to be the person philosophy tried to make you.
The only rewards of our existence here are an unstained character and unselfish acts.
I am composed of a body and a soul.
Things that happen to the body are meaningless. It cannot discriminate among them.
Nothing has meaning to my mind except its own actions. Which are within its own control. And it’s only the immediate ones that matter. Its past and future actions too are meaningless.
Do your best to convince them. But act on your own, if justice requires it. If met with force, then fall back on acceptance and peaceability. Use the setback to practice other virtues.
Remember that our efforts are subject to circumstances; you weren’t aiming to do the impossible.
– Aiming to do what, then?
To try. And you succeeded. What you set out to do is accomplished.
Ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say or do.
Self-indulgence means tying it to the things that happen to you.
Sanity means tying it to your own actions.
You don’t have to turn this into something. It doesn’t have to upset you. Things can’t shape our decisions by themselves.
Practice really hearing what people say. Do your best to get inside their minds.
What injures the hive injures the bee.
Book 7
I can control my thoughts as necessary; then how can I be troubled? What is outside my mind means nothing to it.
Our worth is measured by what we devote our energy to.
Don’t be ashamed to need help. Like a soldier storming a wall, you have a mission to accomplish. And if you’ve been wounded and you need a comrade to pull you up? So what?
It doesn’t hurt me unless I interpret its happening as harmful to me. I can choose not to.
No matter what anyone says or does, my task is to be good. Like gold or emerald or purple repeating to itself, “ No matter what anyone says or does, my task is to be emerald, my color undiminished.”
To feel affection for people even when they make mistakes is uniquely human. You can do it, if you simply recognize: that they’re human too, that they act out of ignorance, against their will, and that you’ll both be dead before long. And, above all, that they haven’t really hurt you. They haven’t diminished your ability to choose.
Nature takes substance and makes a horse. Like a sculptor with wax. And then melts it down and uses the material for a tree. Then for a person. Then for something else. Each existing only briefly.
When people injure you, ask yourself what good or harm they thought would come of it. If you understand that, you’ll feel sympathy rather than outrage or anger. Your sense of good and evil may be the same as theirs, or near it, in which case you have to excuse them. Or your sense of good and evil may differ from theirs. In which case they’re misguided and deserve your compassion. Is that so hard?
Treat what you don’t have as nonexistent.
Discard your misperceptions.
Stop being jerked like a puppet.
Limit yourself to the present.
Other people’s mistakes? Leave them to their makers.
And why should we feel anger at the world? As if the world would notice!
The only proper response for me to make is this: “You are much mistaken, my friend, if you think that any man worth his salt cares about the risk of death and doesn’t concentrate on this alone: whether what he’s doing is right or wrong.”
It’s like this, gentlemen of the jury: The spot where a person decides to station himself, or wherever his commanding officer stations him – well, I think that’s where he ought to take his stand and face the enemy, and not worry about being killed, or about anything but doing his duty.
Look at the past – empire succeeding empire – and from that, extrapolate the future: the same thing. No escape from the rhythm of events.
The main thing we were made for is to work with others.
There is a well of goodness within you, and it will spring up, if only you would ever dig.
Pain is neither unbearable nor unending, as long as you keep in mind its limits and don’t magnify them in your imagination.
Nature did not blend things so inextricably that you can’t draw your own boundaries – place your own well-being in your own hands. It’s quite possible to be a good man without anyone realizing it. Remember that.
Perfection of character: to live your last day, every day, without frenzy, or sloth, or pretense.
It’s silly to try to escape other people’s faults. They are inescapable. Just try to escape your own.
You’ve given aid and they’ve received it. And yet, like an idiot, you keep holding out for more: to be credited with a Good Deed, to be repaid in kind. Why?
Book 8
Nothing is good except what leads to fairness, and self-control, and courage, and free will.
Don’t be overheard complaining about life at court. Not even to yourself.
No time for reading. For controlling your arrogance, yes. For overcoming pain and pleasure, yes. For outgrowing ambition, yes. For not feeling anger at stupid and unpleasant people—even for caring about them —for that, yes.
Remorse is annoyance at yourself for having passed up something that’s to your benefit. But if it’s to your benefit it must be good—something a truly good person would be concerned about. But no truly good person would feel remorse at passing up pleasure. So it cannot be to your benefit, or good.
What is this, fundamentally? What is its nature and substance, its reason for being? What is it doing in the world? How long is it here for?
When you have to deal with someone, ask yourself: What does he mean by good and bad? If he thinks x or y about pleasure and pain (and what produces them), about fame and disgrace, about death and life, then it shouldn’t shock or surprise you when he does x or y. In fact, I’ll remind myself that he has no real choice.
A good doctor isn’t surprised when his patients have fevers, or a helmsman when the wind blows against him.
Remember that to change your mind and to accept correction are free acts too. The action is yours, based on your own will, your own decision—and your own mind.
If it’s in your control, why do you do it? If it’s in someone else’s, then who are you blaming? Atoms? The gods? Stupid either way.
Blame no one. Set people straight, if you can. If not, just repair the damage. And suppose you can’t do that either. Then where does blaming people get you?
No pointless actions.
Everything is here for a purpose, from horses to vine shoots. What’s surprising about that? Even the sun will tell you, “I have a purpose,” and the other gods as well. And why were you born? For pleasure? See if that answer will stand up to questioning.
They all die soon—praiser and praised, rememberer and remembered.
This is what you deserve. You could be good today. But instead you choose tomorrow.
Joy for humans lies in human actions.
Human actions: kindness to others, contempt for the senses, the interrogation of appearances, observation of nature and of events in nature.
Either pain affects the body (which is the body’s problem) or it affects the soul. But the soul can choose not to be affected, preserving its own serenity, its own tranquility. All our decisions, urges, desires, aversions lie within. No evil can touch them.
To erase false perceptions, tell yourself: I have it in me to keep my soul from evil, lust and all confusion. To see things as they are and treat them as they deserve. Don’t overlook this innate ability.
To speak to the Senate—or anyone—in the right tone, without being overbearing. To choose the right words.
You have to assemble your life yourself—action by action. And be satisfied if each one achieves its goal, as far as it can. No one can keep that from happening.
—But there are external obstacles. . . .
Not to behaving with justice, self-control, and good sense.
—Well, but perhaps to some more concrete action.
But if you accept the obstacle and work with what you’re given, an alternative will present itself—another piece of what you’re trying to assemble. Action by action.
You have torn yourself away from unity—your natural state, one you were born to share in. Now you’ve cut yourself off from it.
But you have one advantage here: you can reattach yourself. A privilege God has granted to no other part of no other whole—to be separated, cut away, and reunited.
Don’t let your imagination be crushed by life as a whole. Don’t try to picture everything bad that could possibly happen. Stick with the situation at hand, and ask, “Why is this so unbearable? Why can’t I endure it?” You’ll be embarrassed to answer.
Then remind yourself that past and future have no power over you. Only the present—and even that can be minimized. Just mark off its limits. And if your mind tries to claim that it can’t hold out against that . . . well, then, heap shame upon it.
People find pleasure in different ways. I find it in keeping my mind clear. In not turning away from people or the things that happen to them. In accepting and welcoming everything I see. In treating each thing as it deserves.
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?
My spirit will be gracious to me there—gracious and satisfied—as long as its existence and actions match its nature.
What humans experience is part of human experience.
Nothing that can happen is unusual or unnatural, and there’s no sense in complaining. Nature does not make us endure the unendurable.
The cucumber is bitter? Then throw it out.
There are brambles in the path? Then go around them.
That’s all you need to know. Nothing more.
No carelessness in your actions. No confusion in your words. No imprecision in your thoughts. No retreating into your own soul, or trying to escape it. No overactivity.
A man standing by a spring of clear, sweet water and cursing it. While the fresh water keeps on bubbling up. He can shovel mud into it, or dung, and the stream will carry it away, wash itself clean, remain unstained.
You want praise from people who kick themselves every fifteen minutes, the approval of people who despise themselves. (Is it a sign of self-respect to regret nearly everything you do?)
He can stop being harmed as soon as he decides to.
Other people’s wills are as independent of mine as their breath and bodies. We may exist for the sake of one another, but our will rules its own domain. Otherwise the harm they do would cause harm to me. Which is not what God intended—for my happiness to rest with someone else.
What doesn’t transmit light creates its own darkness.
People exist for one another. You can instruct or endure them.