Marcus Aurelius: "The Wise"

“A man’s thoughts are the threads of which the fabric of his days are woven.” ~ Marcus Aurelius

Marcus Aurelius Augustus (“the Wise”; 121 A.D. to 180 A.D.) was Roman Emperor from 161 to his death in 180. He was also considered one of the most important Stoic Philosophers, and his Meditations are reknowned for their clear-mindedness and logic.

Some of my other favorite meditations include:

“If you’re pained by any external thing, it is not this that disturbs you, but thy own judgment about it. And it is in your power to wipe out this judgment now.”

“Take away your opinion, and there is taken away the complaint, [...] Take away the complaint, [...] and the hurt is gone.”

“Words that everyone once used are now obsolete, and so are the men whose names were once on everyone’s lips: Camillus, Caeso, Volesus, Dentatus, and to a lesser degree Scipio and Cato, and yes, even Augustus, Hadrian, and Antoninus are less spoken of now than they were in their own days. For all things fade away, become the stuff of legend, and are soon buried in oblivion. Mind you, this is true only for those who blazed once like bright stars in the firmament, but for the rest, as soon as a few clods of earth cover their corpses, they are ‘out of sight, out of mind.’ In the end, what would you gain from everlasting remembrance? Absolutely nothing. So what is left worth living for? This alone: justice in thought, goodness in action, speech that cannot deceive, and a disposition glad of whatever comes, welcoming it as necessary, as familiar, as flowing from the same source and fountain as yourself.”

“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own-not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine.”