MARCUS AURELIUS QUOTES
Roman Emperor (121-180)
Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
What we do now echoes in eternity.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
What use do I put my soul to? It is a serviceable question this, and should frequently be put to oneself. How does my ruling part stand affected? And whose soul have I now? That of a child, or a young man, or a feeble woman, or of a tyrant, of cattle or wild beasts.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
What doesn't transmit light creates its own darkness.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
You are a little soul carrying about a corpse.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
Nothing happens to anybody which he is not fitted by nature to bear.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
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
Meditations
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
Meditations
What is not good for the swarm is not good for the bee.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
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
Meditations
Death smiles at us all, all a man can do is smile back.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
If souls survive death for all eternity, how can the heavens hold them all? Or for that matter, how can the earth hold all the bodies that have been buried in it? The answers are the same. Just as on earth, with the passage of time, decaying and transmogrified corpses make way for the newly dead, so souls released into the heavens, after a season of flight, begin to break up, burn, and be absorbed back into the womb of reason, leaving room for souls just beginning to fly. This is the answer for those who believe that souls survive death.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
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
Meditations
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
Meditations
Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
Remember that man lives only in the present, in this fleeting instant; all the rest of his life is either past and gone, or not yet revealed. Short, therefore, is man's life, and narrow is the corner of the earth wherein he dwells.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
Failing to understand the workings of one's own mind is bound to lead to unhappiness.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations
A man's worth is no greater than the worth of his ambitions.
MARCUS AURELIUS
Meditations