Quotes from Marcus Aurelius

The gods gave me a father who ruled over me and rid me of any trace of arrogance and showed me that one can live in a palace without bodyguards, extravagant attire, chandeliers, statues, and other luxuries. He taught me that it is possible to live instead pretty much in the manner of a private citizen without losing any of the dignity and authority a ruler must possess to discharge his imperial duties effectively.

Be thou erect, or be made erect.

How very near us stand the two vast gulfs of time, the past and the future, in which all things disappear.

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.

The gods sustain and guide all their works.

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.

Do not suffer a sudden impression to overbear your judgment.

Because other people are fools, must you be so too?

Things that have a common quality ever quickly seek their kind.

Never act without purpose and resolve, or without the means to finish the job.

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?

The gods have provided me with clear and compelling signs of what it means to live in conformity to nature. They did their part. So far as their gifts, aid, and inspiration are concerned, nothing prevented me from following the path prescribed by nature. If from time to time I have strayed from this path, the fault lies with me and with my failure to heed the gods' signs, or rather, their explicit instructions.

What is not good for the beehive, cannot be good for the bees.

Reflect frequently upon the instability of things, and how very fast the scenes of nature are shifted. Matter is in perpetual flux. Change is always and everywhere at work; it strikes through causes and effects, and leaves nothing fixed and permanent.

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.

The longest-lived and the shortest-lived man, when they come to die, lose one and the same thing.

Be mindful at all times of the following: the nature of the whole universe, the nature of the part that is me, the relation of the one to the other, the one so vast, the other so small.

Is any man afraid of change? Why what can take place without change?

Look deep into the hearts of men, and see what delights and disgusts the wise.

Your manners will depend very much upon the quality of what you frequently think on; for the soul is as it were tinged with the colour and complexion of thought.

Nature insists on whatever benefits the whole.

When you find an unwillingness to rise early in the morning, make this short speech to yourself: I am getting up now to do the business of a man; and am I out of humour for going about that I was made for, and for the sake of which I was sent into the world? Was I then designed for nothing but to doze and keep warm beneath the counterpane? Well! but this is a comfortable way of living.

He was a man who looked at what ought to be done, not to the reputation which is got by a man's acts.

I bless the gods for not letting my education in rhetoric, poetry, and other literary studies come easily to me, and thereby sparing me from an absorbing interest in these subjects.