Selected Quotes By Marcus Aurelius
"Humans have come into being for the sake of each other, so either teach them, or learn to bear them."
Marcus Aurelius, Life
"Whatever anyone does or says, I must be emerald and keep my colour."
Marcus Aurelius, Intelligence/Wisdom
"The things you think about determine the quality of your mind."
Marcus Aurelius, Intelligence/Wisdom
"Life is neither good or evil, but only a place for good and evil."
Marcus Aurelius, Life
"If any man despises me, that is his problem. My only concern is not doing or saying anything deserving of contempt."
Marcus Aurelius, Kindness
"How ridiculous and how strange to be surprised at anything which happens in life."
Marcus Aurelius, Life
"Just that you do the right thing. The rest doesn't matter. Cold or warm. Tired or well-rested. Despised or honored. Dying...or busy with other assignments. Because dying, too, is one of our assignments in life. There as well: "To do what needs doing." Look inward. Don't let the true nature of anything elude you. Before long, all existing things will be transformed, to rise like smoke (assuming all things become one), or be dispersed in fragments...to move from one unselfish act to another with God in mind. Only there, delight and stillness...when jarred, unavoidably, by circumstances, revert at once to yourself, and don't lose the rhythm more than you can help. You'll have a better grasp of the harmony if you keep going back to it."
Marcus Aurelius, Kindness
"Receive without conceit, release without struggle."
Marcus Aurelius, Kindness
"Casting aside other things, hold to the precious few; and besides bear in mind that every man lives only the present, which is an indivisible point, and that all the rest of his life is either past or is uncertain. Brief is man's life and small the nook of the earth where he lives; brief, too, is the longest posthumous fame, buoyed only by a succession of poor human beings who will very soon die and who know little of themselves, much less of someone who died long ago."
Marcus Aurelius, Time
"At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work — as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for — the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?”
So you were born to feel “nice”? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands?
You don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you."
Marcus Aurelius, Work
"Your days are numbered. Use them to throw open the windows of your soul to the sun. If you do not, the sun will soon set, and you with it."
Marcus Aurelius, Life
"Never esteem anything as of advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect."
Marcus Aurelius, Life
"Remember that very little is needed to make a happy life."
Marcus Aurelius, Happiness
"The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it."
Marcus Aurelius, Life
"The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way."
Marcus Aurelius, Problems
"For it is in your power to retire into yourself whenever you choose."
Marcus Aurelius, Life
"Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future too."
Marcus Aurelius, Government
"Perfection of character is this: to live each day as if it were your last, without frenzy, without apathy, without pretence."
Marcus Aurelius, Life
"Do not indulge in dreams of having what you have not, but reckon up the chief of the blessings you do possess, and then thankfully remember how you would crave for them if they were not yours."
Marcus Aurelius, Wealth
"Do every act of your life as though it were the very last act of your life."
Marcus Aurelius, Life
"What we do now echoes in eternity."
Marcus Aurelius, Life
"You always own the option of having no opinion. There is never any need to get worked up or to trouble your soul about things you can't control. These things are not asking to be judged by you. Leave them alone."
Marcus Aurelius, Intelligence/Wisdom
"You are a little soul carrying about a corpse, as Epictetus used to say."
Marcus Aurelius, Belief
"Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil."
Marcus Aurelius, Problems
"Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now, take what's left and live it properly. What doesn't transmit light creates its own darkness."
Marcus Aurelius, Life, Kindness
"How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbour says or does or thinks, but only at what he does himself, to make it just and holy."
Marcus Aurelius, Time, Kindness
"Look well into thyself; there is a source of strength which will always spring up if thou wilt always look."
Marcus Aurelius, Courage
"Here is a rule to remember in future, when anything tempts you to feel bitter: not "This is misfortune," but "To bear this worthily is good fortune."
Marcus Aurelius, Happiness
"Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is in your power, be good."
Marcus Aurelius, Kindness
"The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are."
Marcus Aurelius, Life
"How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it."
Marcus Aurelius, Anger and Fighting
"When another blames you or hates you, or people voice similar criticisms, go to their souls, penetrate inside and see what sort of people they are. You will realize that there is no need to be racked with anxiety that they should hold any particular opinion about you."
Marcus Aurelius, Criticism
"Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones."
Marcus Aurelius, Kindness
"Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears."
Marcus Aurelius, Criticism
"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 and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural."
Marcus Aurelius, Kindness
"Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself in your way of thinking."
Marcus Aurelius, Happiness
"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."
Marcus Aurelius, Intelligence/Wisdom
"If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it."
Marcus Aurelius, Kindness, Truth
"I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others."
Marcus Aurelius, Life
"Whenever you are about to find fault with someone, ask yourself the following question: What fault of mine most nearly resembles the one I am about to criticize?"
Marcus Aurelius, Criticism
"If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed. It is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance who is harmed."
Marcus Aurelius, Truth
"Our life is what our thoughts make it."
Marcus Aurelius, Life
"Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present."
Marcus Aurelius, Problems
"It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live."
Marcus Aurelius, Life
"Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together,but do so with all your heart."
Marcus Aurelius, Love
"The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts."
Marcus Aurelius, Kindness
"The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury."
Marcus Aurelius, Anger and Fighting
"When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love ..."
Marcus Aurelius, Happiness
"If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment."
Marcus Aurelius, Happiness
"Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one."
Marcus Aurelius, Kindness
"Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth."
Marcus Aurelius, Intelligence/Wisdom, Truth
"The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts."
Marcus Aurelius, Happiness
"Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them."
Marcus Aurelius, Happiness
"You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength."