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.
When forced, as it seems, by your environment to be utterly disquieted, return with all speed into your self, staying in discord no longer than you must. By constant recurrence to the harmony, you will gain more command over it.
Life is a campaign, a brief staying in a strange region.
The world is a living being – one nature, one soul. Keep that in mind.
Take the shortest route. The one that nature planned – to speak and act in the healthiest way. Do that, and be free of pain and stress, free of all calculations and pretension.
It’s normal to feel pain in your hands and feet, if you’re using your feet as feet and your hands as hands. And for a human being to feel stress is normal – if he’s living a normal life. And if it’s normal, how can it be bad?
My city and state are Rome. But as a human being? The world. So for me, “good” can only mean what’s good for both communities.
The only thing that isn’t worthless: to live this life out truthfully and rightly, and be patient with those who don’t.
Practice really hearing what people say. Do your best to get inside their mind.
No one can keep you from living as your nature requires. Nothings can happen to you that is not required by Nature.
It doesn’t hurt me unless I interpret its happening as harmful to me. I can choose not to.
If I and my two children cannot move the gods, the gods must have their reasons.
People find pressure 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.
External things are not the problem. It’s your assessment of them. Which you can erase right now.
Constantly contemplate the whole of time and the whole of substance, and consider that all individual things as to substance are a grain of a fig, and as to time the turning of a gimlet .
Consider when thou art much vexed or grieved, that man’s life is only a moment, and after a short time we are all laid out dead.
A rational nature admits of nothing but what is serviceable to the rest of mankind.
He who follows reason in all things is both tranquil and active at the same time, and also cheerful and collected.
There was a dream that was Rome. You could only whisper it. Anything more than a whisper and it would vanish, it was so fragile.
If you are pained by any external thing, it is not this that disturbs you, but your own judgment about it.