Marcus Aurelius

Reverence the gods, and help men. Life is short.

When you have done a good deed and another has received it, why do you still ask for a third thing, as fools do, namely, that you may be thought to have done a good deed or that you may be rewarded?

The true man of honor is he who is ready to stand by a good cause even when it is unpopular.

Nothing has more power to broaden the mind than the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life.

Even in a palace, life can be lived well.

To live each day as if it were your last, without frenzy, without apathy, without pretense.

Take away your opinion, and then there is taken away the complaint, 'I have been harmed.' Take away the complaint, 'I have been harmed,' and the harm is taken away.

All things are interwoven, and the bond is holy; and there is hardly anything foreign to another; for they have been arranged together, and they constitute the same order.

He who is afraid of death is afraid of loss of sensation, or of a different kind of sensation. But if thou shalt have no sensation, neither wilt thou feel any harm; and if thou shalt acquire another kind of sensation, thou wilt be a different kind of living being, and thou wilt not cease to live.

Not to be distracted by external things, but to be content with what is within.

To refrain from evil actions is not enough; one must also refrain from evil thoughts.

Do not waste the remainder of thy life in thoughts about others, when thou dost not refer thy thoughts to some object of common utility. For thou wilt lose thy opportunity for doing anything else.

Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and the rememberer and the remembered: and all this in a nook of this part of the world; and not even here do all agree, no, not any one with himself: and the whole earth too is a point.

Consider how much more pain is brought on us by the anger and vexation caused by such acts than by the acts themselves, at which we are angry and vexed.

Fools! not to be able to reflect how many things a man may gain by means of not saying and doing what is useful to himself, and how few things by saying and doing what is useful to himself.

Look to the things themselves, and consider what they are when they shall lose their coverings and see their nakedness: how many things that seem great and terrible and wonderful are then seen to be of no account.

To say that 'men cannot live without women' is to confess that men are not self-sufficient, and that their well-being is dependent on something outside themselves.

What then is that which is able to conduct a man? One thing and only one, philosophy. But this consists in keeping the demon within a man free from violence and unharmed, superior to pains and pleasures, doing nothing without purpose, nor yet falsely and with hypocrisy, not feeling the need of another's doing or not doing anything; and besides, accepting all that happens, and all that is allotted, as coming from thence, wherever it is, from whence he himself came; and finally, waiting for death with a cheerful mind, as being nothing else than a dissolution of the elements of which every living being is compounded. If indeed there is no harm to the elements themselves in each continually changing into another, why should a man have any apprehension about the change and dissolution of all the elements? For it is according to nature, and nothing is evil which is according to nature.

Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the Universe loves nothing so much as to change existing things and to make new things like them. For everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be. But thou art thinking only of seeds of earth and not of much nobler seeds.

What is evil? It is that which you have often seen. And on all occasions, when thou art vexed at anything, remember that it is nothing else than that which thou hast often seen. And generally thou wilt find that the human life is a repetition of the same things, and that there is nothing new under the sun.