Quotes from Marcus Aurelius

But death certainly, and life, honour and dishonour, pain and pleasure, all these things equally happen to good men and bad, being things which make us neither better nor worse. Therefore they are neither good nor evil.

Nothing befalls anything which that thing is not naturally made to bear. The same experience befalls another, and he is unruffled and remains unharmed; either because he is unaware that it has happened or because he exhibits greatness of soul. Is it not strange that ignorance and complaisance are stronger than wisdom...?

You've seen that. Now look at this. Don't be disturbed. Uncomplicate yourself. Someone has done wrong … to himself. Something happens to you. Good. It was meant for you by nature, woven into the pattern from the beginning. Life is short. That's all there is to say. Get what you can from the present—thoughtfully, justly. Unrestrained moderation.

Finally, therefore, remember your retreat into this little domain which is yourself, and above all be not disturbed nor on the rack, but be free and look at things as a man, a human being, a citizen, a creature that must die.

Reject your sense of injury, and the injury itself disappears.

Remember: Matter. How tiny your share of it. Time. How brief and fleeting your allotment of it. Fate. How small a role you play in it.

Don't be ashamed to need help. Like a soldier storming a wall, you have a mission to accomplish. And if you've been wounded and you need a comrade to pull you up? So what?

The prime principle then in man's constitution is the social. And the second is not to yield to the persuasions of the body,—for it is the peculiar office of the rational and intelligent motion to circumscribe itself, and never to be overpowered either by the motion of the senses or of the appetites, for both are animal: but the intelligent motion claims superiority, and does not permit itself to be overpowered by the others.

Call to mind the whole of Substance of which you have a very small portion, and the whole of time whereof a small hair's breadth has been determined for you, and of the chain of causation whereof you are how small a link.

Remember, however, that you are formed by nature to bear everything whose tolerability depends on your own opinion to make it so, by thinking that it is in your interest or duty to do so.

People out for posthumous fame forget that the Generations To Come will be the same annoying people they know now.

No longer talk at all about the kind of man that a good man ought to be, but be such.