Marcus Aurelius Quotes
Most popular Marcus Aurelius Quotes
The universe is change.
Our life is what our thoughts make it.
Your life is what your thoughts make it.
Very little is needed to make a happy life.
Fate finds for every man his share of misery.
A man's worth is no greater than his ambitions.
A man is a little soul carrying around a corpse.
Do not act as if you had a thousand years to live.
The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing.
What is not good for the swarm is not good for the bee.
A man must stand erect, and not be kept erect by others.
Execute every act of thy life as though it were thy last.
O world, I am in tune with every note of thy great harmony.
A man's worth is no greater than the worth of his ambitions.
Have I done an unselfish thing? well then, I have my reward.
It is a man's peculiar duty to love even those who wrong him.
Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.
Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.
The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.
All is temporary and ephemeral — fame and the famous, as well.
Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature's delight.
Check impulse; quench appetite; keep reason under its own control.
Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.
Whatever may befall thee, it was preordained for thee from eternity.
Nothing happens to any man which he is not fitted by nature to bear.
Nothing happens to any man which he is not formed by nature to bear.
How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.
Nothing can come out of nothing, any more than a thing can go back to nothing.
You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.
The man who sticks it out against his fate shows spirit, but the spirit of a fool.
Let thine occupations be few, said the sage, if thou wouldst lead a tranquil life.
Remember the sole life which one can lose is that which he is living at the moment.
A rational nature admits of nothing which is not serviceable to the rest of mankind.
Ask yourself daily, to how many ill-minded persons you have shown a kind disposition.
Do not be sick or despairing if you do not always succeed in acting from right principles.
You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.
Very little is needed to make a happy life. It is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.
Choose not to be harmed — and you won't feel harmed . Don't feel harmed — and you haven't been .
We are born for cooperation, as are the feet, the hands, the eyelids, and the upper and lower jaws.
Be satisfied with success in even the smallest matter, and think that even such a result is no trifle.
A man makes no noise over a good deed, but passes on to another as a vine to bear grapes again in season.
Every man's life lies within the present; for the past is spent and done with, and the future is uncertain.
Never esteem anything as of advantage to thee that shall make thee break thy word or lose thy self-respect.
The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts.
The present is all that they can give up, since that is all you have, and what you do not have, you cannot lose.
Every man values himself more than all other men, but he always values others' opinion of him more than his own.
Aptitude is found in the understanding and is often inherited. Genius coming from reason and imagination, rarely.
Opinion is the main thing which does good or harm in the world. It is our false opinions of things which ruin us.
Remember this—that there is a proper dignity and proportion to be observed in the performance of every act of life.
Such as are your habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of your mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts.
The characteristic of the good man is to delight in and to welcome what befalls and what is being spun for him by destiny.
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.
Everything is fruit to me that thy seasons bring, O Nature. All things come of thee, have their being in thee, and return to thee.
The art of living is more like that of wrestling than of dancing. The main thing is to stand firm and be ready for an unforeseen attack.
The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit; for all things must bow to Nature's law, and soon enough you must vanish into nothingness.
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.
Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life.
Stop allowing your mind to be a slave, to be jerked about by selfish impulses, to kick against fate and the present, and to mistrust the future.
How much time a man gains who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks, but only at what he does himself, to make it just and holy.
Here is the rule to remember in the future, When anything tempts you to be bitter: not, 'This is a misfortune' but 'To bear this worthily is good fortune.'
So remember this principle when something threatens to cause you pain: the thing itself was no misfortune at all; to endure it and prevail is great good fortune.
Forget everything else. Keep hold of this alone and remember it: Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see.
The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts, therefore guard accordingly; and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.
Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.
It is, in other words, not objects and events but the interpretations we place on them that are the problem. Our duty is therefore to exercise stringent control over the faculty of perception, with the aim of protecting our mind from error.
Thou hast existed as a part; thou shalt disappear into that which produced thee. This, too, nature wills. Pass then through this little space of time conformably to nature and end thy journey in content, just as the olive falls when it is ripe, thanking the tree on which it grew and blessing the nature that gave it birth.
Don't waste the rest of your time here worrying about other people—unless it affects the common good. It will keep you from doing anything useful. You'll be too preoccupied with what so-and-so is doing, and why, and what they're saying, and what they're thinking, and what they're up to, and all the other things that throw you off and keep you from focusing on your own mind.
Concentrate every minute like a Roman—like a man—on doing what's in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions. Yes, you can—if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable.
Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.
Choose not to be harmed—and you won't feel harmed. Don't feel harmed—and you haven't been.
The art of living is more like that of wrestling than of dancing. The main thing is to stand firm and be ready for an unforeseen attack.
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.
