Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aureliuswas Roman Emperor from 161 to 180. He ruled with Lucius Verus as co-emperor from 161 until Verus' death in 169. Marcus Aurelius was the last of the so-called Five Good Emperors. He was a practitioner of Stoicism, and his untitled writing, commonly known as the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, is the most significant source of our modern understanding of ancient Stoic philosophy...
NationalityRoman
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth26 April 121
CityRome, Italy
criticism opinion remember
Remember that all is opinion.
people fool
Because other people are fools, must you be so too?
death believe heaven
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.
kindness men deeds
Man is born for deeds of kindness.
taken complaining harm
Take away the complaint, 'I have been harmed,' and the harm is taken away.
add praise
Praise adds nothing to beauty--makes it neither better nor worse.
vanity fame everlasting
And what after all is everlasting fame? Altogether vanity.
smart two evil
Gluttony and drunkenness have two evils attendant on them; they make the carcass smart, as well as the pocket.
soul one-thing worth-living
The one thing worth living for is to keep one's soul pure.
littles found certainty
Even the stoics agree that certainty is very hard to come at; that our assent is worth little, for where is infallibility to be found?
relation all-time following
Be mindful at all times of the following: the nature of the whole universe, the nature of the part that is me, the relation of the one to the other, the one so vast, the other so small.
study bless interest
I bless the gods for not letting my education in rhetoric, poetry, and other literary studies come easily to me, and thereby sparing me from an absorbing interest in these subjects.
air legs path
I will march on in the path of nature till my legs sink under me, and then I shall be at rest, and expire into that air which has given me my daily breath.
horse men broken
The universal nature out of the universal substance, as if it were wax, now molds a horse, and when it has broken this up, it uses the material for a tree, then for a man, then for something else...