Quotes from Marcus Aurelius

Yes, keep on degrading yourself, soul. But soon your chance at dignity will be gone. Everyone gets one life. Yours is almost used up, and instead of treating yourself with respect, you have entrusted your own happiness to the souls of others.

Anger and the sorrow it produces are far more harmful than the things which make us angry.

Your mind will be like its habitual thoughts; for the soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts.

Within ten days you will seem a god to those to whom you are now a beast and an ape, if you will return to your principles and the worship of reason.

How good it is, when you have roast meat or suchlike foods before you, to impress on your mind that this is the dead body of a fish, this the dead body of a bird or pig.

Some things are hurrying into existence and others are hurrying out of it and of that which is coming into existence, part is already extinguished. In this flowing stream then, on which there is no abiding, what is there of things which hurry on by on which a man would set a high price. It would be just as if a man should fall in love with one of the sparrows which fly by but has already passed out of sight.

Meditate upon what you ought to be in body and soul when death overtakes you; meditate on the brevity of life, and the measureless gulf of eternity behind it and before, and upon the frailty of everything material.

No matter how good a life you lead, you won't please everyone. Someone will be glad to see you go.

All things from eternity are of like forms and come round in a circle.

Swiftly the remembrance of all things is buried in the gulf of eternity.

But death and life, success and failure, pain and pleasure, wealth and poverty, all these happen to good and bad alike, and they are neither noble or shameful—and hence neither good nor bad.

All is ephemeral, both what remembers and what is remembered.

All of us are creatures of a day; the rememberer and the remembered alike.

What else did you expect from helping someone out? Isn't it enough that you've done what your nature demands? You want a salary for it too? As if your eyes expected a reward for seeing, or your feet for walking. That's what they were made for.

Almost nothing material is needed for a happy life, for he who has understood existence.

The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. 21.

Its a dream, a fearful dream, life is

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.

In everything that you do, pause and ask yourself if death is a dreadful thing because it deprives you of this.

The universe is change, and life mere opinion

The soul of a man harms itself, first and foremost, when it becomes (as far as it can) a separate growth, a sort of tumour on the universe; because to resent anything that happens is to separate oneself in revolt from Nature, which holds in collective embrace the particular natures of all other things.

How many together with whom I came into the world are already gone out of it.

We should remark the grace and fascination that there is even in the incidentals of Nature's processes.. When a loaf of bread,. for instance,. is in the oven,. crack appear in it here and there; and these flaws,. though not intended in the baking,. have a rightness of their own,. and sharpen the appetite..

Everything of the body is a river. Everything of the soul is dream and vapour. Life is war and the abode of a stranger. The only fame after death is oblivion.