Everything you’re trying to reach – by taking the long way round – you could have right now, this moment. If you’d only stop thwarting your own attempts. If you’d only let go of the past, entrust the future to Providence, and guide the present toward reverence.
60. An arrow has one motion and the mind another. Even when pausing, even when weighing conclusions, the mind is moving forward, toward its goal. 61. To enter others’ minds and let them enter yours.
En primer lugar, nada hagas sin reflexionar ni sin fin alguno, y en segundo, no lleves otro fin sino el bien de la sociedad.
4. MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER To avoid the public schools, to hire good private teachers, and to accept the resulting costs as money well-spent.
All things are drawn toward what is like them, if such a thing exists. All earthly things feel the earth’s tug. All wet things flow together. And airy things as well, so they have to be forcibly prevented from mixing. Fire is naturally drawn upward by that higher fire, but ready to ignite at the slightest touch of other, earthly flame.
From my tutor: not to become a 5Green or Blue supporter at the races, or side with the Lights or Heavies in the amphitheatre; to tolerate pain and feel few needs; to work with my own hands and mind my own business; to be deaf to malicious gossip.
35. We have various abilities, present in all rational creatures as in the nature of rationality itself. And this is one of them. Just as nature takes every obstacle, every impediment, and works around it – turns it to its purposes, incorporates it into itself – so, too, a rational being can turn each setback into raw material and use it to achieve its goal.
Nature willed the creation of the world. Either all that exists follows logically or even those things to which the world’s intelligence most directs its will are completely random. A source of serenity in more situations than one.
Remind yourself that your task is to be a good human being; remind yourself what nature demands of people. Then do it, without hesitation, and speak the truth as you see it. But with kindness. With humility. Without hypocrisy.
Remember how long you have been putting this off, how many times you have been given a period of grace by the gods and not used it. It is high time now for you to understand the universe of which you are a part, and the governor of that universe of whom you constitute an emanation: and that there is a limit circumscribed to your time – if you do not use it to clear away your clouds, it will be gone, and you will be gone, and the opportunity will not return.
To read carefully, and not to be satisfied with a superficial understanding of a book; nor hastily to give my assent to those who talk overmuch.
1. Nature is pliable, obedient. And the logos that governs it has no reason to do evil. It knows no evil, does none, and causes harm to nothing. It dictates all beginnings and all endings.
Socrates used to call popular beliefs “the monsters under the bed” – only useful for frightening children with.
To investigate and analyze, with understanding and logic, the principles we ought to live by.
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.
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.
How many traits do you have that would make a lot of people glad to be rid of you?
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?
But literature served only as a preparation for the real goal. This was rhetoric, the key to an active political career under the empire, as it had been under the Republic.
Cast aside all that is extraneous and superfluous, and cling to the few things that really matter.