Meditations Book Review
Very few rulers of humanity have written books. Meditations written by Marcus Aurelius, the emperor of Roman Empire (A.D. 161–180), is a must read for all readers keen on understanding Stoic Philosophy.
Marcus wrote these thoughts over many years as reminders to himself on how to deal with the stress and pressures of day to day life like adversity, ethics and rules for human behaviour.
The questions that the Meditations tries to answer are primarily metaphysical and ethical ones:
Why are we here?
How should we live our lives?
How can we ensure that we do what is right?
How can we protect ourselves against the stresses and pressures of daily life?
How should we deal with pain and misfortune?
How can we live with the knowledge that someday we will no longer exist?
…
What amazes me is that, despite being a powerful emperor, we find Marcus struggling with the same challenges and concerns that we believe affect only lesser mortals. What is also surprising that most of these challenges and situations are as relevant today as they were two thousand years ago.
The book is filled with insights, guidance, wisdom and practical advice. A must read book.
If you desire to master pain
Unroll this book and read with care,
And in it find abundantly
A knowledge of the things that are,
Those that have been, and those to come.
And know as well that joy and grief
Are nothing more than empty smoke.
Meditations Book Summary
Note: This summary is made up of my notes, thoughts and highlights of important passages while reading the book. I keep updating the summary when I revisit it, and occasionally may edit it to reduce summary length. Don’t be surprised if it has changed between visits. The author’s words are in normal font, while my interpretations are in italics.
BOOK 2 ON THE RIVER GRAN, AMONG THE QUADI
Remember how long you’ve been putting this off, how many extensions the gods gave you, and you didn’t use them.
At some point you have to recognize what world it is that you belong to; what power rules it and from what source you spring; that there is a limit to the time assigned you, and if you don’t use it to free yourself it will be gone and will never return.
Everyone gets one life.
People who labor all their lives but have no purpose to direct every thought and impulse toward are wasting their time—even when hard at work.
Don’t ever forget these things:
- The nature of the world.
- My nature.
- How I relate to the world.
- What proportion of it I make up.
- That you are part of nature, and no one can prevent you from speaking and acting in harmony with it, always.
The sin committed out of pleasure deserves a harsher rebuke than the one committed out of pain
Death and life, success and failure, pain and pleasure, wealth and poverty, all these happen to good and bad alike, and they are neither noble nor shameful—and hence neither good nor bad.
The speed with which all of them vanish—the objects in the world, and the memory of them in time.
What is divine deserves our respect because it is good; what is human deserves our affection because it is like us.
Everything has always been the same, and keeps recurring.
The longest-lived and those who will die soonest lose the same thing. The present is all that they can give up, since that is all you have, and what you do not have, you cannot lose.
“Everything is just an impression.” – Monimus the Cynic.
Remember two things:
- that everything has always been the same, and keeps recurring, and it makes no difference whether you see the same things recur in a hundred years or two hundred, or in an infinite period;
- that the longest-lived and those who will die soonest lose the same thing. The present is all that they can give up, since that is all you have, and what you do not have, you cannot lose.
BOOK 3 IN CARNUNTUM
We need to hurry. Not just because we move daily closer to death but also because our understanding—our grasp of the world—may be gone before we get there.
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.
Your ability to control your thoughts—treat it with respect. It’s all that protects your mind from false perceptions.
Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see.
The span we live is small—small as the corner of the earth in which we live it. Small as even the greatest renown, passed from mouth to mouth by short-lived stick figures, ignorant alike of themselves and those long dead.
People try to get away from it all—to the country, to the beach, to the mountains. You always wish that you could too. Which is idiotic: you can get away from it anytime you like. By going within. Nowhere you can go is more peaceful—more free of interruptions—than your own soul. Especially if you have other things to rely on. An instant’s recollection and there it is: complete tranquillity. And by tranquillity I mean a kind of harmony.
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.
BOOK 4
Nowhere you can go is more peaceful—more free of interruptions—than your own soul.
Doing what’s right sometimes requires patience.
Rational beings exist for one another.
No one does the wrong thing deliberately.
The world is nothing but change. Our life is only perception.
Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been.
People who are excited by posthumous fame forget that the people who remember them will soon die too.
Beautiful things of any kind are beautiful in themselves and sufficient to themselves.
Praise is extraneous. The object of praise remains what it was—no better and no worse.
Everything fades so quickly, turns into legend, and soon oblivion covers it.
Nothing that goes on in anyone else’s mind can harm you.
Time is a river, a violent current of events, glimpsed once and already carried past us, and another follows and is gone.
BOOK 5
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?
You don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you.
To shrug it all off and wipe it clean—every annoyance and distraction—and reach utter stillness. Child’s play.
If an action or utterance is appropriate, then it’s appropriate for you. Don’t be put off by other people’s comments and criticism.
If it’s right to say or do it, then it’s the right thing for you to do or say.
Follow your own nature, and follow Nature—along the road they share.
I walk through what is natural, until the time comes to sink down and rest.
No one could ever accuse you of being quick-witted. All right, but there are plenty of other things you can’t claim you “haven’t got in you.” Practice the virtues you can show: honesty, gravity, endurance, austerity, resignation, abstinence, patience, sincerity, moderation, seriousness, high-mindedness.
Don’t you see how much you have to offer—beyond excuses like “can’t”? And yet you still settle for less.
Some people, when they do someone a favor, are always looking for a chance to call it in. And some aren’t, but they’re still aware of it—still regard it as a debt. But others don’t even do that. They’re like a vine that produces grapes without looking for anything in return.
Prayer of the Athenians: “Zeus, rain down, rain down On the land and fields of Athens.” Either no prayers at all—or one as straightforward as that.
“Nature prescribed illness for him.” Or blindness. Or the loss of a limb. Or whatever. There “prescribed” means something like “ordered, so as to further his recovery.” And so too here. What happens to each of us is ordered. It furthers our destiny.
For there is a single harmony. Just as the world forms a single body comprising all bodies, so fate forms a single purpose, comprising all purposes.
So there are two reasons to embrace what happens.
- One is that it’s happening to you. It was prescribed for you, and it pertains to you. The thread was spun long ago, by the oldest cause of all.
- The other reason is that what happens to an individual is a cause of well-being in what directs the world—of its well-being, its fulfillment, of its very existence, even.
Not to feel exasperated, or defeated, or despondent because your days aren’t packed with wise and moral actions. But to get back up when you fail, to celebrate behaving like a human—however imperfectly—and fully embrace the pursuit that you’ve embarked on.
Remember: philosophy requires only what your nature already demands.
Things are wrapped in such a veil of mystery that many good philosophers have found it impossible to make sense of them. Even the Stoics have trouble. Any assessment we make is subject to alteration—just as we are ourselves.
Look closely at them—how impermanent they are, how meaningless.
Take refuge in these two things:
- Nothing can happen to me that isn’t natural.
- I can keep from doing anything that God and my own spirit don’t approve. No one can force me to.
What am I doing with my soul? Interrogate yourself, to find out what inhabits your so-called mind and what kind of soul you have now. A child’s soul, an adolescent’s, a woman’s? A tyrant’s soul? The soul of a predator—or its prey?
I am made up of substance and what animates it, and neither one can ever stop existing, any more than it began to. Every portion of me will be reassigned as another portion of the world, and that in turn transformed into another. Ad infinitum.
The logos and its employment are forces sufficient for themselves and for their works. They start from their own beginning, they proceed to the appointed end.
Nothing pertains to human beings except what defines us as human. No other things can be demanded of us.
The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts.
Anywhere you can lead your life, you can lead a good one.
What things gravitate toward is their goal.
It is crazy to want what is impossible. And impossible for the wicked not to do so.
Nothing happens to anyone that he can’t endure.
Things have no hold on the soul. They have no access to it, cannot move or direct it.
People are our proper occupation. Our job is to do them good and put up with them. But when they obstruct our proper tasks, they become irrelevant to us—like sun, wind, animals.
Our actions may be impeded by them, but there can be no impeding our intentions or our dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt.
The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting.
The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.
Honor that which is greatest in the world—that on whose business all things are employed and by whom they are governed.
If it does not harm the community, it does not harm its members.
When you think you’ve been injured, apply this rule: If the community isn’t injured by it, neither am I.
Keep in mind how fast things pass by and are gone—those that are now, and those to come.
Existence flows past us like a river: the “what” is in constant flux, the “why” has a thousand variations. Nothing is stable, not even what’s right here. The infinity of past and future gapes before us—a chasm whose depths we cannot see. So it would take an idiot to feel self-importance or distress. Or any indignation, either. As if the things that irritate us lasted.
Remember: Matter. How tiny your share of it. Time. How brief and fleeting your allotment of it. Fate. How small a role you play in it.
So other people hurt me? That’s their problem. Their character and actions are not mine.
What is done to me is ordained by nature, what I do by my own.
The mind is the ruler of the soul. It should remain unstirred by agitations of the flesh—gentle and violent ones alike.
“To live with the gods.” And to do that is to show them that your soul accepts what it is given and does what the spirit requires—the spirit God gave each of us to lead and guide us, a fragment of himself.
Don’t be irritated at people’s smell or bad breath. What’s the point? With that mouth, with those armpits, they’re going to produce that odor. —But they have a brain! Can’t they figure it out? Can’t they recognize the problem? So you have a brain as well. Good for you. Then use your logic to awaken his.
You can live here as you expect to live there. And if they won’t let you, you can depart life now and forfeit nothing. If the smoke makes me cough, I can leave. What’s so hard about that?
The world’s intelligence is not selfish. It created lower things for the sake of higher ones, and attuned the higher ones to one another.
How have you behaved to the gods, to your parents, to your siblings, to your wife, to your children, to your teachers, to your nurses, to your friends, to your relatives, to your slaves? Have they all had from you nothing “wrong and unworthy, either word or deed”?
Why do other souls—unskilled, untrained—disturb the soul with skill and understanding?
Soon you’ll be ashes, or bones. A mere name, at most—and even that is just a sound, an echo. The things we want in life are empty, stale, and trivial.
Honor and revere the gods, treat human beings as they deserve, be tolerant with others and strict with yourself.
Nothing belongs to you but your flesh and blood—and nothing else is under your control.
Two characteristics shared by gods and men (and every rational creature):
- Not to let others hold you back.
- To locate goodness in thinking and doing the right thing, and to limit your desires to that.
If: this evil is not of my doing, nor the result of it, and the community is not endangered, why should it bother me?
Not to be overwhelmed by what you imagine, but just do what you can and should.
Have you forgotten what’s what? —I know, but it was important to them. And so you have to be an idiot as well?
True good fortune is what you make for yourself. Good fortune: good character, good intentions, and good actions.
BOOK 6
Look inward. Don’t let the true nature or value of anything elude you.
The best revenge is not to be like that.
The mind is that which is roused and directed by itself.
Pride is a master of deception: when you think you’re occupied in the weightiest business, that’s when he has you in his spell.T
To do (and not do) what we were designed for. That’s the goal of all trades, all arts, and what each of them aims at: that the thing they create should do what it was designed to do.
I do what is mine to do; the rest doesn’t disturb me.
Disgraceful: for the soul to give up when the body is still going strong.
It’s normal to feel pain in your hands and feet, if you’re using your feet as feet and your hands as hands. And for a human being to feel stress is normal—if he’s living a normal human life.
The present: a split second in eternity. Minuscule, transitory, insignificant.
You take things you don’t control and define them as “good” or “bad.”
- And so of course when the “bad” things happen, or the “good” ones don’t, you blame the gods and feel hatred for the people responsible—or those you decide to make responsible.
- Much of our bad behavior stems from trying to apply those criteria. If we limited “good” and “bad” to our own actions, we’d have no call to challenge God, or to treat other people as enemies.
Nothing is as encouraging as when virtues are visibly embodied in the people around us, when we’re practically showered with them.
Ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say or do. Self-indulgence means tying it to the things that happen to you. Sanity means tying it to your own actions.
What injures the hive injures the bee.
Ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say or do. Self-indulgence means tying it to the things that happen to you. Sanity means tying it to your own actions.
BOOK 7
I can control my thoughts as necessary; then how can I be troubled? What is outside my mind means nothing to it. Absorb that lesson and your feet stand firm.
We need to practice acceptance. Without disdain. But remembering that our own worth is measured by what we devote our energy to.
Straight, not straightened.
Frightened of change?
- But what can exist without it?
- What’s closer to nature’s heart?
- Can you take a hot bath and leave the firewood as it was?
- Eat food without transforming it?
- Can any vital process take place without something being changed?
To feel affection for people even when they make mistakes is uniquely human.
- You can do it, if you simply recognize: that they’re human too, that they act out of ignorance, against their will, and that you’ll both be dead before long.
- And, above all, that they haven’t really hurt you. They haven’t diminished your ability to choose.
Before long, nature, which controls it all, will alter everything you see and use it as material for something else—over and over again. So that the world is continually renewed.
To harvest life like standing stalks of grain Grown and cut down in turn.
No escape from the rhythm of events.
- Which is why observing life for forty years is as good as a thousand.
- Would you really see anything new?
To labor cheerfully and so endure The wind that blows from heaven.
Everywhere, at each moment, you have the option: to accept this event with humility to treat this person as he should be treated to approach this thought with care, so that nothing irrational creeps in.
Perfection of character: to live your last day, every day, without frenzy, or sloth, or pretense.
It’s normal to feel pain in your hands and feet, if you’re using your feet as feet and your hands as hands. And for a human being to feel stress is normal—if he’s living a normal human life. And if it’s normal, how can it be bad?
BOOK 8
If it’s in your control, why do you do it? If it’s in someone else’s, then who are you blaming? Atoms? The gods? Stupid either way.
Blame no one. Set people straight, if you can. If not, just repair the damage. And suppose you can’t do that either. Then where does blaming people get you? No pointless actions.
What dies doesn’t vanish. It stays here in the world, transformed, dissolved, as parts of the world, and of you.
Stick to what’s in front of you—idea, action, utterance.
You could be good today. But instead you choose tomorrow.
Joy for humans lies in human actions. Human actions: kindness to others, contempt for the senses, the interrogation of appearances, observation of nature and of events in nature.
Three relationships:
- with the body you inhabit;
- with the divine, the cause of everything in all things;
- with the people around you.
You have to assemble your life yourself—action by action.
If you accept the obstacle and work with what you’re given, an alternative will present itself—another piece of what you’re trying to assemble. Action by action.
Give yourself a gift: the present moment.
External things are not the problem. It’s your assessment of them. Which you can erase right now.
The mind without passions is a fortress. No place is more secure. Once we take refuge there we are safe forever.
The cucumber is bitter? Then throw it out. There are brambles in the path? Then go around them. That’s all you need to know. Nothing more. Don’t demand to know “why such things exist.” Anyone who understands the world will laugh at you.
What doesn’t transmit light creates its own darkness.
Fear of death is fear of what we may experience. Nothing at all, or something quite new.
People exist for one another. You can instruct or endure them.
An arrow has one motion and the mind another. Even when pausing, even when weighing conclusions, the mind is moving forward, toward its goal.
To enter others’ minds and let them enter yours.
Stick to what’s in front of you—idea, action, utterance.
This is what you deserve. You could be good today. But instead you choose tomorrow.
BOOK 9
To pursue pleasure as good, and flee from pain as evil—that too is blasphemous.
To do harm is to do yourself harm. To do an injustice is to do yourself an injustice—it degrades you.
Objective judgment, now, at this very moment. Unselfish action, now, at this very moment. Willing acceptance—now, at this very moment—of all external events. That’s all you need.
Blot out your imagination. Turn your desire to stone. Quench your appetites. Keep your mind centered on itself.
All things are drawn toward what is like them, if such a thing exists.
Things wait outside us, hover at the door. They keep to themselves. Ask them who they are and they don’t know, they can give no account of themselves. What accounts for them? The mind does.
Leave other people’s mistakes where they lie.
Every transformation a kind of dying.
Do what nature demands. Get a move on—if you have it in you—and don’t worry whether anyone will give you credit for it.
Be satisfied with even the smallest progress, and treat the outcome of it all as unimportant.
Indifference to external events. And a commitment to justice in your own acts. Which means: thought and action resulting in the common good. What you were born to do.
You can discard most of the junk that clutters your mind—things that exist only there—and clear out space for yourself: … by comprehending the scale of the world … by contemplating infinite time … by thinking of the speed with which things change—each part of every thing.
All that you see will soon have vanished, and those who see it vanish will vanish themselves, and the ones who reached old age have no advantage over the untimely dead.
What their minds are like. What they work at. What evokes their love and admiration. Imagine their souls stripped bare. And their vanity. To suppose that their disdain could harm anyone—or their praise help them.
To decompose is to be recomposed. That’s what nature does.
Disgust at what things are made of: Liquid, dust, bones, filth. Or marble as hardened dirt, gold and silver as residues, clothes as hair, purple dye as shellfish blood. And all the rest. And the same with our living breath—transformed from one thing to another.
Enough of this wretched, whining monkey life. What’s the matter? Is any of this new? What is it you find surprising? The purpose? Look at it. The material? Look at that. That’s all there is.
If they’ve injured you, then they’re the ones who suffer for it.
Either all things spring from one intelligent source and form a single body (and the part should accept the actions of the whole) or there are only atoms, joining and splitting forever, and nothing else. So why feel anxiety?
Either the gods have power or they don’t. If they don’t, why pray? If they do, then why not pray for something else instead of for things to happen.
Pray not to feel fear. Or desire, or grief. If the gods can do anything, they can surely do that for us. —But those are things the gods left up to me.
Epicurus: “During my illness, my conversations were not about my physical state; I did not waste my visitors’ time with things of that sort, but went on discussing philosophy, and concentrated on one point in particular: how the mind can participate in the sensations of the body and yet maintain its serenity, and focus on its own well-being. Nor did I let my doctors strut about like grandees. I went on living my life the way it should be lived.”
Concentrate on what you’re doing, and what you’re doing it with.
Don’t ask the impossible. There have to be shameless people in the world. This is one of them. The same for someone vicious or untrustworthy, or with any other defect. Remembering that the whole class has to exist will make you more tolerant of its members.
BOOK 10
To my soul: Are you ever going to achieve goodness? Ever going to be simple, whole, and naked—as plain to see as the body that contains you? Know what an affectionate and loving disposition would feel like?
Focus on what nature demands, as if you were governed by that alone. Then do that, and accept it, unless your nature as a living being would be degraded by it. Then focus on what that nature demands, and accept that too—unless your nature as a rational being would be degraded by it.
Everything that happens is either endurable or not. If it’s endurable, then endure it. Stop complaining. If it’s unendurable … then stop complaining. Your destruction will mean its end as well.
You can endure anything your mind can make endurable, by treating it as in your interest to do so.
If they’ve made a mistake, correct them gently and show them where they went wrong. If you can’t do that, then the blame lies with you. Or no one.
Whatever happens to you has been waiting to happen since the beginning of time. The twining strands of fate wove both of them together: your own existence and the things that happen to you.
Whether it’s atoms or nature, the first thing to be said is this: I am a part of a world controlled by nature. Secondly: that I have a relationship with other, similar parts.
The whole is compounded by nature of individual parts, whose destruction is inevitable (“destruction” here meaning transformation).
Epithets for yourself: Upright. Modest. Straightforward. Sane. Cooperative. Disinterested. Try not to exchange them for others.
Keep in mind that “sanity” means understanding things—each individual thing—for what they are.
“Cooperation” means accepting what nature assigns you—accepting it willingly.
“Disinterest” means that the intelligence should rise above the movements of the flesh.
Operatics, combat and confusion. Sloth and servility. Every day they blot out those sacred principles of yours—which you daydream thoughtlessly about, or just let slide.
Your actions and perceptions need to aim: at accomplishing practical ends at the exercise of thought at maintaining a confidence founded on understanding. An unobtrusive confidence—hidden in plain sight.
How they all change into one another—acquire the ability to see that. Apply it constantly; use it to train yourself. Nothing is as conducive to spiritual growth.
He has stripped away his body and—realizing that at some point soon he will have to abandon mankind and leave all this behind—has dedicated himself to serving justice in all he does, and nature in all that happens.
Why all this guesswork? You can see what needs to be done. If you can see the road, follow it. Cheerfully, without turning back. If not, hold up and get the best advice you can.
To follow the logos in all things is to be relaxed and energetic, joyful and serious at once.
Does it make any difference to you if other people blame you for doing what’s right? It makes no difference.
Nature gives and nature takes away. Anyone with sense and humility will tell her, “Give and take as you please,” not out of defiance, but out of obedience and goodwill.
Only a short time left. Live as if you were alone—out in the wilderness. No difference between here and there: the city that you live in is the world.
To stop talking about what the good man is like, and just be one.
Continual awareness of all time and space, of the size and life span of the things around us. A grape seed in infinite space. A half twist of a corkscrew against eternity.
Bear in mind that everything that exists is already fraying at the edges, and in transition.
Each of us needs what nature gives us, when nature gives it.
“The earth knows longing for the rain, the sky/knows longing …” And the world longs to create what will come to be. I tell it “I share your longing.”
Possibilities:
- To keep on living (you should be used to it by now)
- To end it (it was your choice, after all)
- To die (having met your obligations)
Those are the only options. Reason for optimism.
Keep always before you that “this is no different from an empty field,” and the things in it are the same as on a mountaintop, on the seashore, wherever.
My mind. What is it? What am I making of it? What am I using it for? Is it empty of thought? Isolated and torn loose from those around it? Melted into flesh and blended with it, so that it shares its urges?
When a slave runs away from his master, we call him a fugitive slave. But the law of nature is a master too, and to break it is to become a fugitive.
He deposits his sperm and leaves. And then a force not his takes it and goes to work, and creates a child. This … from that?
To look at these things going on silently and see the force that drives them.
To bear in mind constantly that all of this has happened before.
Everything has to submit. But only rational beings can do so voluntarily.
Stop whatever you’re doing for a moment and ask yourself: Am I afraid of death because I won’t be able to do this anymore?
When faced with people’s bad behavior, turn around and ask when you have acted like that.
When you look at yourself, see any of the emperors. And the same with everyone else. Then let it hit you: Where are they now? Nowhere … or wherever. That way you’ll see human life for what it is. Smoke. Nothing. Especially when you recall that once things alter they cease to exist through all the endless years to come.
That no one can say truthfully that you are not a straightforward or honest person. That anyone who thinks that believes a falsehood. The responsibility is all yours; no one can stop you from being honest or straightforward.
Given the material we’re made of, what’s the sanest thing that we can do or say? Whatever it may be, you can do or say it. Don’t pretend that anything’s stopping you.
If you’ve immersed yourself in the principles of truth, the briefest, most random reminder is enough to dispel all fear and pain.
None of us have much time. And yet you act as if things were eternal—the way you fear and long for them.
A healthy pair of eyes should see everything that can be seen and not say, “No! Too bright!”
It doesn’t matter how good a life you’ve led. There’ll still be people standing around the bed who will welcome the sad event.
Learn to ask of all actions, “Why are they doing that?” Starting with your own.
Remember that what pulls the strings is within—hidden from us. Is speech, is life, is the person.
BOOK 11
Characteristics of the rational soul: Self-perception, self-examination, and the power to make of itself whatever it wants.
Look at the individual parts and move from analysis to indifference.
The resolute soul: Resolute in separation from the body. And then in dissolution or fragmentation—or continuity.
Have I done something for the common good? Then I share in the benefits. To stay centered on that. Not to give up.
“And your profession?” “Goodness.”
First, tragedies. To remind us of what can happen, and that it happens inevitably—and if something gives you pleasure on that stage, it shouldn’t cause you anger on this one.
It stares you in the face. No role is so well suited to philosophy as the one you happen to be in right now.
A branch cut away from the branch beside it is simultaneously cut away from the whole tree. So too a human being separated from another is cut loose from the whole community.
As you move forward in the logos, people will stand in your way. They can’t keep you from doing what’s healthy; don’t let them stop you from putting up with them either.
The natural can never be inferior to the artificial; art imitates nature, not the reverse. In which case, that most highly developed and comprehensive nature—Nature itself—cannot fall short of artifice in its craftsmanship.
It’s the pursuit of these things, and your attempts to avoid them, that leave you in such turmoil. And yet they aren’t seeking you out; you are the one seeking them.
The soul as a sphere in equilibrium: Not grasping at things beyond it or retreating inward. Not fragmenting outward, not sinking back on itself, but ablaze with light and looking at the truth, without and within.
Someone despises me. That’s their problem. Mine: not to do or say anything despicable. Someone hates me. Their problem. Mine: to be patient and cheerful with everyone, including them.
They flatter one another out of contempt, and their desire to rule one another makes them bow and scrape.
The despicable phoniness of people who say, “Listen, I’m going to level with you here.” What does that mean? It shouldn’t even need to be said. It should be obvious—written in block letters on your forehead. False straightforwardness is like a knife in the back.
To live a good life: We have the potential for it. If we can learn to be indifferent to what makes no difference.
This is how we learn: by looking at each thing, both the parts and the whole. Keeping in mind that none of them can dictate how we perceive it. They don’t impose themselves on us. They hover before us, unmoving.
It is we who generate the judgments—inscribing them on ourselves. And we don’t have to. We could leave the page blank—and if a mark slips through, erase it instantly.
Source and substance of each thing. What it changes into, and what it’s like transformed; that nothing can harm it.
Keep these nine points in mind, like gifts from the nine Muses, and start becoming a human being. Now and for the rest of your life.
- My relationship to them. That we came into the world for the sake of one another. Or from another point of view, I came into it to be their guardian—as the ram is of the flock, and the bull of the herd.
- What they’re like eating, in bed, etc. How driven they are by their beliefs. How proud they are of what they do.
- That if they’re right to do this, then you have no right to complain.
- That you’ve made enough mistakes yourself. You’re just like them.
- That you don’t know for sure it is a mistake. A lot of things are means to some other end.
- When you lose your temper, or even feel irritated: that human life is very short.
- That it’s not what they do that bothers us: that’s a problem for their minds, not ours. It’s our own misperceptions. Discard them.
- How much more damage anger and grief do than the things that cause them.
- That kindness is invincible, provided it’s sincere—not ironic or an act.
Four habits of thought to watch for, and erase from your mind when you catch them. Tell yourself:
- This thought is unnecessary.
- This one is destructive to the people around you.
- This wouldn’t be what you really think (to say what you don’t think—the definition of absurdity).
Your spirit and the fire contained within you are drawn by their nature upward. But they comply with the world’s designs and submit to being mingled here below. And the elements of earth and water in you are drawn by their nature downward. But are forced to rise, and take up a position not their own. So even the elements obey the world—when ordered and compelled—and man their stations until the signal to abandon them arrives.
If you don’t have a consistent goal in life, you can’t live it in a consistent way.
Socrates used to call popular beliefs “the monsters under the bed”—only useful for frightening children with.
At festivals the Spartans put their guests’ seats in the shade, but sat themselves down anywhere.
This advice from Epicurean writings: to think continually of one of the men of old who lived a virtuous life.
The Pythagoreans tell us to look at the stars at daybreak. To remind ourselves how they complete the tasks assigned them—always the same tasks, the same way. And their order, purity, nakedness. Stars wear no concealment.
Mastery of reading and writing requires a master. Still more so life.
Stupidity is expecting figs in winter, or children in old age.
As you kiss your son good night, says Epictetus, whisper to yourself, “He may be dead in the morning.” Don’t tempt fate, you say. By talking about a natural event? Is fate tempted when we speak of grain being reaped?
Grapes. Unripe … ripened … then raisins. Constant transitions. Not the “not” but the “not yet.”
We need to master the art of acquiescence. We need to pay attention to our impulses, making sure they don’t go unmoderated, that they benefit others, that they’re worthy of us.
Socrates: What do you want, rational minds or irrational ones? —Rational ones. Healthy or sick? —Healthy. Then work to obtain them. —We already have. Then why all this squabbling?
BOOK 12
Everything you’re trying to reach—by taking the long way round—you could have right now, this moment. If you’d only stop thwarting your own attempts. If you’d only let go of the past, entrust the future to Providence, and guide the present toward reverence and justice.
Reverence: so you’ll accept what you’re allotted.
Justice: so that you’ll speak the truth, frankly and without evasions, and act as you should—and as other people deserve.
God sees all our souls freed from their fleshly containers, stripped clean of their bark, cleansed of their grime. He grasps with his intelligence alone what was poured and channeled from himself into them. If you learn to do the same, you can avoid a great deal of distress.
Your three components: body, breath, mind. Two are yours in trust; to the third alone you have clear title.
It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own.
How is it that the gods arranged everything with such skill, such care for our well-being, and somehow overlooked one thing: that certain people—in fact, the best of them, the gods’ own partners, the ones whose piety and good works brought them closest to the divine—that these people, when they die, should cease to exist forever? Utterly vanished.
Practice even what seems impossible.
The condition of soul and body when death comes for us. Shortness of life. Vastness of time before and after. Fragility of matter.
To see the causes of things stripped bare. The aim of actions. Pain. Pleasure. Death. Fame. Who is responsible for our own restlessness. That no one obstructs us. That it’s all in how you perceive it.
The student as boxer, not fencer.
- The fencer’s weapon is picked up and put down again.
- The boxer’s is part of him. All he has to do is clench his fist.
To see things as they are. Substance, cause and purpose.
The freedom to do only what God wants, and accept whatever God sends us.
What it’s made of.
The gods are not to blame. They do nothing wrong, on purpose or by accident. Nor men either; they don’t do it on purpose. No one is to blame.
The foolishness of people who are surprised by anything that happens. Like travelers amazed at foreign customs.
Fatal necessity, and inescapable order. Or benevolent Providence. Or confusion—random and undirected. If it’s an inescapable necessity, why resist it?
The lamp shines until it is put out, without losing its gleam, and yet in you it all gutters out so early—truth, justice, self-control?
If it’s not right, don’t do it. If it’s not true, don’t say it.
At all times, look at the thing itself—the thing behind the appearance—and unpack it by analysis: cause substance purpose and the length of time it exists.
It’s time you realized that you have something in you more powerful and miraculous than the things that affect you and make you dance like a puppet.
To undertake nothing:
- at random or without a purpose;
- for any reason but the common good.
Everything’s destiny is to change, to be transformed, to perish. So that new things can be born.
It’s all in how you perceive it. You’re in control. You can dispense with misperception at will, like rounding the point.
A given action that stops when it’s supposed to is none the worse for stopping. Nor the person engaged in it either. So too with the succession of actions we call “life.” If it ends when it’s supposed to, it’s none the worse for that.
Three things, essential at all times:
- (a). your own actions: that they’re not arbitrary or different from what abstract justice would do. (b). external events: that they happen randomly or by design. You can’t complain about chance. You can’t argue with Providence.
- what all things are like, from the planting of the seed to the quickening of life, and from its quickening to its relinquishment. Where the parts came from and where they return to.
- that if you were suddenly lifted up and could see life and its variety from a vast height, and at the same time all the things around you, in the sky and beyond it, you’d see how pointless it is.
Throw out your misperceptions and you’ll be fine.
To be angry at something means you’ve forgotten: That everything that happens is natural. That the responsibility is theirs, not yours.
Whatever happens has always happened, and always will, and is happening at this very moment, everywhere.
Nothing belongs to anyone. Children, body, life itself—all of them come from that same source.
It’s all how you choose to see things.
The present is all we have to live in. Or to lose.
Constantly run down the list of those who felt intense anger at something: the most famous, the most unfortunate, the most hated, the most whatever. And ask: Where is all that now? Smoke, dust, legend … or not even a legend.
There’s nothing more insufferable than people who boast about their own humility.
Salvation: to see each thing for what it is—its nature and its purpose. To do only what is right, say only what is true, without holding back.
The fraction of infinity, of that vast abyss of time, allotted to each of us. Absorbed in an instant into eternity.
How the mind conducts itself. It all depends on that. All the rest is within its power, or beyond its control—corpses and smoke.
An incentive to treat death as unimportant: even people whose only morality is pain and pleasure can manage that much.
If you make ripeness alone your good … If a few actions more or less, governed by the right logos, are merely a few more or less.
This will be a drama in three acts, the length fixed by the power that directed your creation, and now directs your dissolution. Neither was yours to determine.
So make your exit with grace—the same grace shown to you.
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