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
Marcus Aurelius quotes about
pain giving opinion
If you are pained by any external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs you, but your own judgment about it. It is in your power to erase this judgment about it. If anything in your own nature gives you pain, you are who hinders you from correcting your opinion.
clothes house mind
God sees the inner spirit stripped of flesh, skin, and all debris. For his own mind only touches the spirit that he has allowed to flow from himself into our bodies. And if you can act the same way, you will rid yourself of all suffering. For surely if you are not preoccupied with the body that encloses you, you will not trouble yourself about clothes, houses, fame, and other showy trappings.
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.
father love-life life-is-short
All that is not eternal is eternally out of date. C. S. LEWIS, The Four Loves Life is short. Eternity is long. BENTLEY LITTLE, His Father's Son What we do now echoes in eternity.
happiness lying practice
I can at once become happy anywhere, for he is happy who has found himself a happy lot. In a word, happiness lies all in the functions of reason, in warrantable desires and virtuous practice.
nature benefits whole
Nature insists on whatever benefits the whole.
moving views purpose
Reason and the reasoning faculty need no foreign assistance, but are sufficient for their own purposes. They move within themselves, and make directly for the point in view. Wherefore, acts in accordance with them are called right acts, for they lead along the right road.
children men tyrants
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.
time past two
How very near us stand the two vast gulfs of time, the past and the future, in which all things disappear.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...