The duration of a person’s life is only a moment; our substance is flowing away this very moment; the senses are dim; the composition of the body is decaying, the soul is chaos, our fate is unknowable, and reputation uncertain. In a word all bodily things are like a flowing river, and everything of the soul is dream and smoke, and life is all warfare and a stranger’s wanderings, and the reward is oblivion. What then could possibly guide us? Only one thing: Philosophy.

— Marcus Aurelius

Marcus Aurelius Quotes

Other people may try to impede your actions, but they can’t impede your thoughts and disposition. Using your reason and imagination, you can find a way to turn any impediment to your advantage.

— Marcus Aurelius

How foolish it is, then, to puff yourself up with pride or berate yourself with worry. Think of the boundless abyss of the past behind you and the infinite future stretching out ahead. From this perspective, how small are your achievements – and how petty your troubles.

— Marcus Aurelius

Did someone do me wrong? That’s their problem – they harmed their own character, not mine. I will stay focused on my own thoughts and actions.

— Marcus Aurelius

So it is that we have more respect for what our neighbours will think of us than we have for ourselves.

— Marcus Aurelius

Live such that, when your life is at its end, you may look back and recall how many beautiful things you’ve seen, how many pains you’ve patiently endured, how many pleasures you’ve passed by to stay on your path, and how many disagreeable people you’ve treated kindly.

— Marcus Aurelius

Remember that as it is a shame to be surprised if the fig-tree produces figs, so it is to be surprised if the world produces such and such things of which it is productive.

— Marcus Aurelius

Even if it were possible for you to be remembered eternally, what is remembrance worth to you? Nothing. What, then, should we strive for in life? Right thoughts, beneficial actions, honest speech, and a cheerful disposition. These things are in harmony with, and flow from, the eternal Source of all.

— Marcus Aurelius

Be like a promontory against which the waves are always breaking. It stands fast, and stills the waters that rage around it.

— Marcus Aurelius

Indeed, no one can thwart the purposes of your mind – for they can’t be touched by fire, steel, tyranny, slander, or anything.

— Marcus Aurelius

What is the best way to avenge a wrong? If you retaliate in kind, returning evil for evil, your attacker succeeds in dragging you down to their level. Instead, take the insult or injury and transform it into a means of becoming a better person. This is the only true vengeance.

— Marcus Aurelius

Reason is free from hatred, has no desire to harm anyone or anything, and will never direct you to do evil. Reason works to the benefit of all things.

— Marcus Aurelius

The universal nature out of the universal substance, as if it were wax, now moulds a horse, and when it has broken this up, it uses the material for a tree, then for a man, then for something else; and each of these things subsists for a very short time. But it is no hardship for the vessel to be broken up, just as there was none in its being fastened together.

— Marcus Aurelius

The Stoics would permit of no such compromise. Virtue, and virtue only, was what they demanded. Thevirtuous man might be a slave, a victim to disease, to poverty, might be deprived of all he loved, yet he would remain solely and absolutely happy. Virtue was one and indivisible. Whoever was not virtuous was vicious ; there was no middle course.

— Marcus Aurelius

We know too well that men are not divided into virtuous and vicious, but all possess some share of good and evil, and that most men desire what is right, and fail, whenthey do, from weakness rather than viciousness. The Stoics, who demanded absolute virtue and disregard of externals, had to confess that the wise men were few and the foolish legion.

— Marcus Aurelius

Don’t waste the rest of your life worrying about what others think and do. Direct your thoughts to a useful end. When you dissipate your mental energy on things you can’t control, you lose the opportunity to accomplish something yourself.

— Marcus Aurelius

If he is going wrong, teach him kindly and show him what he has failed to see. If you can’t do that, blame yourself – or perhaps not even yourself.

— Marcus Aurelius

That every event is the right one. Look closely and you’ll see. Not just the right one overall, but right. As if someone had weighed it out with scales. Keep looking closely like that, and embody it in your actions: goodness – what defines a good person.

— Marcus Aurelius

How easy it is to drive away or obliterate from one’s mind every impression which is troublesome or alien, and then to be immediately in perfect calm. p36.

— Marcus Aurelius

Nothing happens to anyone that he is not fitted by nature to bear.

— Marcus Aurelius Emperor of Rome

The best answer to anger is silence.

— Marcus Aurelius

Stoic Philosophy

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