Marcus Aurelius

Within is the fountain of good, and it will ever bubble up, if thou wilt ever dig.

In everything which happens keep before thy eyes those to whom the same things happened, and how they were vexed, and treated them as strange things, and found fault with them: and now where are they?

Love that only which happens to thee and is spun with the thread of thy destiny.

Consider thyself to be dead, and to have completed thy life up to the present time; and live according to nature the remainder which is allowed thee.

The prime principle then in man's constitution is the social.

But every being ought to do that which is according to its constitution; and all other things have been constituted for the sake of rational beings, just as among irrational things the inferior for the sake of the superior, but the…

Do not look around thee to discover other men's ruling principles, but look straight to this, to what nature leads thee, both the universal nature through the things which happen to thee, and thy own nature through the acts which must be…

Everywhere and at all times it is in thy power piously to acquiesce in thy present condition, and to behave, justly to those who are about thee, and to exert thy skill upon thy present thoughts, that nothing shall steal into them without…

Where any work can be done conformably to the reason which is common to gods and men, there we have nothing to fear; for where we are able to get profit by means of the activity which is successful and proceeds according to our…

Another may be more expert in casting his opponent; but he is not more social, nor more modest, nor better disciplined to meet all that happens, nor more considerate with respect to the faults of his neighbors.

For they will certainly be of like form, and it is not possible that they should deviate from the order of the things which take place now; accordingly to have contemplated human life for forty years is the same as to have contemplated it…

Consider the past,--such great changes of political supremacies; thou mayest foresee also the things which will be.

Look round at the courses of the stars, as if thou wert going along with them; and constantly consider the changes of the elements into one another, for such thoughts purge away the filth of the terrene life.

No joining others in their wailing, no violent emotion.

It is a base thing for the countenance to be obedient and to regulate and compose itself as the mind commands, and for the mind not to be regulated and composed by itself.

And consider that as the heaps of sand piled on one another hide the former sands; so in life the events which go before are soon covered by those which come after.

About pain: the pain which is intolerable carries us off; but that which lasts a long time is tolerable; and the mind maintains its own tranquillity by retiring into itself, and the ruling faculty is not made worse.

About death: whether it is a dispersion, or a resolution into atoms, or annihilation, it is either extinction or change.

Adorn thyself with simplicity and modesty, and with indifference towards the things which lie between virtue and vice.

Let thy understanding enter into the things that are doing and the things which do them (vii. 4).

Let the wrong which is done by a man stay there where the wrong was done (viii. 29).

The rational principle which rules has this nature, that it is content with itself when it does what is just, and so secures tranquillity.

Think not so much of what thou hast not as of what thou hast: but of the things which thou hast select the best, and then reflect how eagerly they would have been sought, if thou hadst them not.

When a man has done thee any wrong, immediately consider with what opinion about good or evil he has done wrong.

Nature which governs the whole will soon change all things thou seest, and out of their substance will make other things, and again other things from the substance of them, in order that the world may be ever new (xii. 23).