Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and Gregory Hays

Summary

Reminders of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius to himself on what the world is like, how to do his job well, how to live well and how to be a good person. Incredible insights into the mind of the world’s most powerful man at the time.

Key Takeaways

• Values to exhibit: abstinence, austerity, cooperative, courage, endurance, generosity, high-mindedness, honesty, humility, justice, moderation, patience, prudence, sanity, self-control, seriousness, sincerity, straightforwardness, resignation (acceptance of that which is outside your control)
  • Perfection of character: to live your last day, every day, without frenzy, or sloth, or pretence.
• Marcus Aurelius focuses on three disciplines
  • Perception – objectivity of thought
  • Action – we are social animals and must act for the collective good while treating others justly and fairly as individuals. Unselfish action.
  • Will – governs our attitude toward things not in our control. Willing acceptance of external events.
• Ancient rhetoric training
  • Debate both sides of the argument
  • Advise a prominent political figure (effectively an apprenticeship)
• Be the same in all circumstances. A man can show both strength and flexibility.
• Expect the worst of people, recognize that others have their own nature, but remember that you share the same body, mind and spirit.
• Don’t waste your time worrying about other people – unless it affects the common good. It will keep you from doing anything useful.
• How to have a happy life
  • Do your job in a principled way, with diligence, energy and patience
  • Keep yourself free of distractions
  • Keep the spirit inside you undamaged, as if you might have to give it back at any moment
  • Embrace this without fear or expectation
  • Find fulfillment in what you’re doing now, as Nature intended
  • Find fulfillment in superhuman truthfulness (every word, every utterance)
• Disturbance comes only from within.
• “If you seek tranquility, do less.”
• Overcoming (perceived) harm
  • Harm comes from your capacity to see it. Stop doing that and everything will be fine.
  • Quiet your judgment.
  • What happens to everyone is neither good nor bad.
  • What happens in every life is neither natural nor unnatural.
• When having trouble getting out of bed, ask yourself “Was I created for this [huddled under the blanket]? Or was I born for something more?”
• The things you think about determine the quality of your mind.
• You can lead an untroubled life provided you can grow, can think and can act systematically.
• Our efforts are subject to circumstances.
• 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.
• When people injure you, ask yourself what good or harm they thought would come of it. If you understand that, you’ll feel sympathy rather than outrage or anger.
• Self-contraction: the mind’s requirements are satisfied by doing what we should, and by the calm it brings us.
• For every action, ask: How does it affect me? Could I change my mind about it?
• Only these two questions:
  • Is what he’s doing now the right thing to be doing? 
  • Does he accept and welcome what he’s been assigned?
• Learn to ask of all actions, “Why are they doing that?” Starting with your own.
• Kindness is invincible, provided it’s sincere.
• “If you don’t have a consistent goal in life, you can’t live it in a consistent way.”
• We all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own.
• Live more happily by living with purpose. Undertake nothing:
  • at random or without purpose
  • for any reason but the common good
• Throw out your misperceptions and you’ll be fine.

What I got out of it

I had come across many of Meditations’ quotes over the years and Marcus Aurelius’ worldview had shaped my own years before I was finally able to read the source material. 
I must admit that Gregory Hays’ translation of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditation is excellent and read very pleasantly. 

Meditations serves as a powerful reminder that we – with our perception and judgment – are in control over everything that happens to and for us in life. A great read to revisit whenever life brings you down.

Reminders to self: 

• Focus on yourself and your actions and accept that over which you have no control.
• While unique, our lives are ultimately insignificant. Make the most of the time we have by living with purpose and working for the common good.
• Attain tranquility by doing less.

Summary notes

Introduction

Plato: “States will never be happy until rulers become philosophers or philosophers become rulers.”

Literature served only as a preparation for the real goal. This was rhetoric, the key to an active political career under the empire.
Training:

• Short exercises
• Progressing to full-scale practice declamations in which one would have been asked to defend one side or another in imaginary law cases
• Or advise a prominent historical figure at a turning point in his career

An emperor was all-powerful in theory, but his ability to control policy was more limited in reality. Much of his time was spent fielding problems that moved up the administrative ladder: 

• Receiving embassies from the large cities of the empire
• Trying appeals of criminal cases
• Answering queries from provincial governors
• Dealing with petitions from individuals

One of Marcus’ priorities was to preserve good relationships with the Senate. The goal was to disguise the absoluteness with which the emperor rules: to preserve a facade – and sometimes, no doubt, even to achieve the reality – of consensus and cooperation.

The Christians’ failure to acknowledge the gods worshipped by the community around them and the emperor’s divine status threatened the social order and the well-being of the state.

Failure to develop a workable policy for refugees eventually resulted in the collapse of the Western empire.

Philosophy and its “mortal questions”

• Problems involved in making ethical choices
• Constructing a just society
• Responding to suffering and loss
• Coming to terms with the prospect of death

Philosophy is a “design for living” – a set of rules to live by.

Logos operates both in individuals and in the universe as a whole. In individuals it is the faculty of reason. On a cosmic level it is the rational principle that governs the organization of the universe. In this sense it is synonymous with “nature,” “Providence,” or “God.”
All events are determined by the logos, and follow in an unbrakable chain of cause and effect. Stoicism is thus from the outset a deterministic system that appears to leave no room for human free will or moral responsibility.

With conquest came culture.
Horace: “Conquered Greece was the true conqueror.” – Similar to Scotland’s cultural dominance over England after their unity.

Chrysippus and his followers had divided knowledge into three areas: 

• logic – the nature of knowledge
• physics – the structure of the physical world
• ethics – the proper role of human beings in that world

The central philosophy of Meditations: three disciplines.

• Perception – maintain objectivity of thought: see things dispassionately for what they are. No value judgments. Aim: protecting our mind from error.
• Action – our relationship with other people. We are made not for ourselves but for others, and our nature is fundamentally unselfish. We must work for the collective good, while treating others justly and fairly as individuals. It doesn’t mean we must treat them as equals, but simply as they deserve.
• Will – governs our attitude to things that are not within our control, those that we have done to us (by others or by nature). Acts of wrongdoing by a human agent harm the agent, not the victim. Acts of nature only harm us if we choose so. If we do, we question the benevolence and providence of the logos, thereby degrading our own logos.

Socratic paradox: no one does wrong willingly, and that if men were able to recognize what is right, they would inevitably do it.

Brunt: “The world was good beyond improvement, and yet it constantly appeared to him evil beyond remedy.”

Marcus does not offer us a means of achieving happiness, but only a means of resisting pain.

Book 1

Lessons from Rusticus:

• Train and discipline your character
• Don’t be sidetracked by your interests
• Write straightforward letters
• Behave in a conciliatory way when people who have angered or annoyed you want to make up
• Read attentively, don’t be satisfied with “just getting the gist of it.”
• Don’t fall for every smooth talker

Lessons from Apollonius:

• Be the same in all circumstances. A man can show both strength and flexibility.

Lessons from Severus:

• Be steady and consistent in valuing philosophy
• Conceived a society of equal laws, governed by equality of status and of speech, and of rulers who respect the liberty of their subjects above all else.

Lesson from Maximus:

• Self-control and resistance to distractions
• Optimism in adversity – especially illness.
• A personality in balance: dignity and grace together.
• Doing your job without whining.
• Other people’s certainty that what he said was what he thought, and what he did was done without malice.
• Never taken aback or apprehensive. Neither rash nor hesitant – or bewildered, or at a loss. Not obsequious – but not aggressive or paranoid either.
• Generosity, charity, honesty.
• His willingness to take responsibility – and blame – for both.
• His willigness to yield the floor to experts and to support them energetically, so that each of them could fulfill his potential.

“You can behave almost like an ordinary person without seeming slovenly or careless as a ruler or when carrying out official obligations.”

Book 2

Expect the worst of people, recognize that others have their own nature, but remember that you share the same body, mind and spirit. Obstructing each other is unnatural, as is feeling anger at someone. 

2.5 Concentrate every minute like a Roman – like a man – on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice.

2.17 What can guide us?
Only philosophy.
The power within stays safe and free from assault, superior to pleasure and pain, doing nothing randomly or dishonestly and with imposture, not dependent on anyone else’s doing something or not doing it. And making sure that it accept what happens and what it is dealt as coming from the same place it came from. And above all, that it accepts death in a cheerful spirit, as nothing but the dissolution of the elements from which each living thing is composed. If it doesn’t hurt the individual elements to change continually into one another, why are people afraid of all of them changing and separating? It’s a natural thing. And nothing natural is evil.

Book 3

3.4 Don’t waste your time worrying about other people – unless it affects the common good. It will keep you from doing anything useful.
Avoid certain things in your train of thought: everything random, everything irrelevant, everything self-important or malicious. Get used to winnowing your thoughts.

No need to share others’ opinions. Only listen to those whose lives conform to nature. Bear in mind what sort of people they are – at all times – and who they spend their time with. 

Care not for the praise of people who can’t even meet their own standards.

3.6 If you ever come across anything better than justice, honesty, self-control, courage – than a mind satisfied that it has succeeded in enabling you to act rationally, and satisfied to accept what’s beyond its control – if you find anything better than that, embrace it without reservations.
But if you don’t, then don’t make room for anything but it – for anything that might lead you astray, tempt you off the road, and leave you unable to devote yourself completely to achieving the goodness that is uniquely yours. It would be wrong for anything to stand between you and attaining goodness – as a rational being and a citizen. Anything at all: the applause of the crowd, high office, wealth, or self-indulgence.

3.7 Never regard something as doing you good if it makes you betray a trust, or lose your sense of shame, or makes you show hatred, suspicion, ill will, or hypocracy, or a desire for things best done behind closed doors.

3.12 How to have a happy life:

• Do your job in a principled way, with diligence, energy and patience
• Keep yourself free of distractions
• Keep the spirit inside you undamaged, as if you might have to give it back at any moment
• Embrace this without fear or expectation
• Find fulfillment in what you’re doing now, as Nature intended
• Find fulfillment in superhuman truthfulness (every word, every utterance)

Book 4

4.2 No random actions, none not based on underlying principles.

4.3 Dealing with people’s misbehaviour, consider:

• Rational beings exist for one another
• Doing what’s right sometimes requires patience
• No one does the wrong thing deliberately
• The number of people who have feuded and envied and hated and fought and died and had been buried

…and keep your mouth shut. Consider the two options: Providence or atoms.

Is it your reputation that’s bothering you? But look at how soon we’re all forgotten.

In times of need, turn to:

• Things have no hold on the soul. They stand there unmoving, outside it. Disturbance comes only from within – from our own perceptions.
• Everything you see will soon later and cease to exist. Think of how many changes you’ve already seen. “The world is nothing but change. Our life is only perception.”

4.4 If-then. We are all the same.

• If thought is something we share, then so is reason – what makes us reasonable beings.
• If so, then the reason that tells us what to do and what not to do is also shared.
• And if so, we share a common law.
• And thus, are fellow citizens.
• And fellow citizens of something.
• And in that case, our state must be the world. What other entity could all of humanity belong to? And from it – from this state that we share – come thought and reason and law.

4.7 Choose not to be harmed – and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed – and you haven’t been.

4.8 It can ruin your life only if it ruins your character. Otherwise it cannot harm you – inside or out.

4.12 Two kinds of readiness are constantly needed

• To do only what the logos of authority and law directs, with the good of human beings in mind
• To reconsider your position, when someone can set you straight or convert you to his. But your conversion should always rest on a conviction that it’s right, or benefits others – nothing else. Not because it’s more appealing or more popular.

4.20 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.

4.24 “If you seek tranquility, do less.” Which brings a double satisfaction: to do less, better.
If you can eliminate it, you’ll have more time, and more tranquility.
Eliminate unnecessary assumptions as well. To eliminate the unnecessary actions that follow.

4.33 What should we work for?

• Proper understanding
• Unselfish action
• Truthful speech
• A resolve to accept whatever happens as necessary and familiar, flowing like water from that same source and spring.

4.36 Constant awareness that everything is born from change. The knowledge that there is nothing nature loves more than to alter what exists and make new things like it. All that exists is the seed of what will emerge from it. You think the only seeds are the ones that make plants or children? Go deeper.

4.38 Look into their minds, at what the wise do and what they don’t.

4.39 Overcoming (perceived) harm

• Harm comes from your capacity to see it. Stop doing that and everything will be fine.
• Quiet your judgment.
• What happens to everyone is neither good nor bad.
• What happens in every life is neither natural nor unnatural.

4.49a Does what’s happened keep you from acting with justice, generosity, self-control, sanity, prudence, honesty, humility, straightforwardness, and all the other qualities that allow a person’s nature to fulfill itself?

The thing itself was no misfortune at all; to endure it and prevail is a great good fortune.

4.51 Take the shortest route, the one that nature planned – to speak and act in the healthiest way. Do that, and be free of pain and stress, free of all calculation and pretension.

Book 5

5.1 When having trouble getting out of bed, ask yourself “Was I created for this [huddled under the blanket]? Or was I born for something more?”

Is helping others less valuable to you? Not worth your effort?

Overcoming procrastination.

• You don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you. People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it, they even forget to wash or eat. Do you have less respect for your own nature than the engraver does for engraving, the dancer for the dance, the miser for money or the social climber for status? When they’re really possessed by what they do, they’d rather stop eating and sleeping than give up practising their arts.

5.3 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.
The others obey their own lead, follow their own impulses. Don’t be distracted. Keep walking. Follow your own nature, and follow Nature – along the road they share.

5.5 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”?

5.8 No nature would do that – bring something about that wasn’t beneficial to what it governed. 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 fulfilment, of its very existence, even. Because the whole is damaged if you cut away anything – anything at all – from its continuity and its coherence. Not only its parts but its purposes. And that’s what you’re doing when you complain: hacking and destroying.

5.9 Fully embrace the pursuit that you’ve embarked on.

5.16 The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the colour of your thoughts.

• Anywhere you can lead your life, you can lead a good one.
• Things gravitate toward what they were intended for.

5.17 It is crazy to want what is impossible. And impossible for the wicked not to do so.

5.20 In a sense, 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 impediments to action advance action.
What stands in the way becomes the way.

5.24 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.

5.34 You can lead an untroubled life provided you can grow, can think and can act systematically. Two characteristics shared by gods and men (and every rational creature):

• Not to let others hold you back.
• To allocate goodness in thinking and doing the right thing, and to limit your desires to that.

Contrast the first sentence with “I can think, I can wait, I can fast” – Siddhartha by Herman Hesse

5.35 If:

• this evil is not of my doing,
• nor the result of it,
• and the community is not endangered, why should it bother me?

5.37 True good fortune is what you make for yourself. Good fortune: good character, good intentions, and good actions.

Book 6

6.6 The best revenge is not to be like that.

6.16 What’s left for us to prize?
I think it’s this: 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.

And if you can’t stop prizing a lot of things? Then you’ll never be free – free, independent, imperturbable. Because you’ll always be envious and jealous, afraid that people might come and take it all away from you.

6.21 If anyone can refute me – show me I’m making a mistake or looking at things from the wrong perspective – I’ll gladly change. It’s the truth I’m after, and the truth never harmed anyone. What harms us is to persist in self-deceit and ignorance.

6.27 How cruel – to forbid people to want what they think is good for them. And yet that’s just what you won’t let them do when you get angry at their misbehaviour. They’re drawn toward what they think is good for them.
– But it’s not good for them.
Then show them that. Prove it to them. Instead of losing your temper.

6.38 Keep reminding yourself of the way things are connected of their relatedness. All things are implicated in one another and in sympathy with each other. This event is the consequence of some other one. Things push and pull on each other, and breathe together, and are one.

6.42 Some of us work in one way, and some in others. And those who complain and try to obstruct and thwart things – they help as much as anyone. The world needs them as well.
So make up your mind who you’ll choose to work with. The force that directs all things will make good use of you regardless – will put you on its payroll and set you to work.

6.44 My city and state are Rome – as Antoninus. But as a human being? The world. So for me, “good” can only mean what’s good for both communities.

6.45 Whatever happens to you is for the good of the world. That would be enough right there. But if you look closely you’ll generally notice something else as well: whatever happens to a single person is for the good of others.

6.48 When you need encouragement, think of the qualities the people around you have: this one’s energy, that one’s modesty, another’s generosity, and so on. Nothing is as encouraging as when virtues are visibly embodied in the people around us, when we’re practically showered with them.

6.50 Do your best to convince them. But act on your own, if justice requires it. If met with force, then fall back on acceptance and peaceability. Use the setback to practice other virtues.
Remember that our efforts are subject to circumstances; you weren’t aiming to do the impossible.
– Aiming to do what, then?
To try. And you succeeded. What you set out to do is accomplished.

6.51 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.

6.52 You don’t have to turn this into something. It doesn’t have to upset you. Things can’t shape our decisions by themselves.

Book 7

7.4 Focus on what is said when you speak and on what results from each action. Know what the one aims at, and what the other means.

7.5 Is my intellect up to this? If so, then I’ll put it to work, like a tool provided by nature. And if it isn’t, then I’ll turn the job over to someone who can do better – unless I have no choice.
Or I do the best I can with it, and collaborate with whoever can make use of it, to do what the community needs done. Because whatever I do – alone or with others – can aim at one thing only: what squares with those requirements.

7.16 The mind in itself has no needs, except for those it creates itself. Is undisturbed, except for its own disturbances. Knows no obstructions, except those from within.

7.26 When people injure you, ask yourself what good or harm they thought would come of it. If you understand that, you’ll feel sympathy rather than outrage or anger. Your sense of good and evil may be the same as theirs, or near it, in which case you have to excuse them. Or your sense of good and evil may differ from theirs. In which case they’re misguided and deserve your compassion. Is that so hard?

7.27 Treat what you don’t have as nonexistent. Look at what you have, the things you value most, and think of how much you’d crave them if you didn’t have them. But be careful. Don’t feel such satisfaction that you start to overvalue them – that it would upset you to lose them.

7.28 Self-contraction: the mind’s requirements are satisfied by doing what we should, and by the calm it brings us.

7.49 Look at the past – empire succeeding empire – and from that, extrapolate the future: the same thing. 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?

7.52 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

7.56 Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly.

7.62 Look at who they really are, the people whose approval you long for, and what their minds are really like. Then you won’t blame the ones who make mistakes they can’t help, and you won’t feel a need for their approval. You will have seen the sources of both – their judgments and their actions.

7.69 Perfection of character: to live your last day, every day, without frenzy, or sloth, or pretence.

Book 8

8.1 Forget what they think of you. Be satisfied if you can live the rest of your life, however short, as your nature demands. Focus on that, and don’t let anything distract you. You’ve wandered all over and finally realized that you never found what you were after: how to live. Not in syllogisms, not in money, or fame, or self-indulgence. Nowhere.

– Then where is it to be found?
In doing what human nature requires.

– How?
Through first principles. Which should govern your intentions and your actions.

– What principles?
Those to do with good and evil. That nothing is good except what leads to fairness, and self-control, and courage, and free will. And nothing bad except what does the opposite.

8.2 For every action, ask: How does it affect me? Could I change my mind about it?

8.5 The first step: Don’t be anxious. Nature controls it all. And before long you’ll be no one, nowhere.
The second step: Concentrate on what you have to do. Fix your eyes on it. Remind yourself that your task is to be a good human being; remind yourself what nature demands of people. Then do it, without hesitation, and speak the truth as you see it. But with kindness. With humility. Without hypocrisy.

8.7 Nature of any kind thrives on forward progress. And progress for a rational mind means not accepting falsehood or uncertainty in its perceptions, making unselfish actions its only aim, seeking and shunning only the things it has control over, embracing what nature demands of it.

8.12 When you have trouble getting out of bed in the morning, remember that your defining characteristic – what defines a human being – is to work with others.

8.13 Apply them constantly, to everything that happens:

• Physics
• Ethics
• Logic

8.14 When you have to deal with someone, ask yourself: What does he mean by good and bad? If he thinks x or y about pleasure and pain (and what produces them), about fame and disgrace, about death and life, then it shouldn’t shock or surprise you when he does x or y.
In fact, I’ll remind myself that he has no real choice.

8.22a That is what you deserve. You should be good today. But instead you choose tomorrow.

8.27 Three relationships:

• with the body you inhabit;
• with the divine, the cause of everything in all things;
• with the people around you.

8.43 People find pleasure in different ways. I find it in keeping my mind clear. In not turning away from people or the things that happen to them. In accepting and welcoming everything I see. In treating each thing as it deserves.

8.47 External things are not the problem. It’s your assessment of them. Which you can erase right now.

If the problem is something in your own character, who’s stopping you from setting your mind straight?
And if it’s that you’re not doing something you think you should be, why not just do it?

– But there are insuperable obstacles.
Then it’s not a problem. The cause of your inaction lies outside you.

– But how can I go on living with that undone?
Then depart, with a good conscience, as if you’d done it, embracing the obstacles too.

8.49 Nothing but what you get from first impressions. That someone has insulted you, for instance. That – but not that it’s done you any harm. The fact that my son is sick – that I can see. But “that he might die of it,” no. Stick with first impressions. Don’t extrapolate. And nothing can happen to you.

Or extrapolate. From knowledge of all that can happen in the world.

Book 9

9.1 Some things nature is indifferent to; if it privileged one over the other it would hardly have created both. And if we want to follow nature, to be of one mind with it, we need to share its indifference. To privilege pleasure over pain – life over death, fame over anonymity – is clearly blasphemous. Nature certainly doesn’t.
And when I say that nature is indifferent to them, I mean that they happen indifferently, at different times.

9.4 To do harm is to do yourself harm. To do an injustice is to do yourself an injustice – it degrades you.

9.5 And you can also commit injustice by doing nothing.

9.6 All you need:

• 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.

9.11 Convince them not to. If you can.
And if not, remember: the capacity for patience was given to us for a reason. The gods are patient with them too, and even help them with concrete things: health, money, fame…Such is the gods’ goodness.
And yours, too, if you wanted. What’s stopping you.

9.13 Today I escaped from anxiety. Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions – not outside.

9.16 Not being done to, but doing – the source of good and bad for rational and political beings. Where their own goodness and badness are found – not in being done to, but in doing.

9.17 A rock thrown in the air. It loses nothing by coming down, gained nothing by going up.

9.20 Leave other people’s mistakes where they lie.

9.27 When you face someone’s insults, hatred, whatever…look at his soul. Get inside him. Look at what sort of person he is. You’ll find you don’t need to strain to impress him.
But you do have to wish him well. He’s your closest relative. The gods assist him just as they do you – by signs and dreams and every other way – to get the things he wants.

9.28 The world’s cycles never change – up and down, from age to age.
Either the world’s intelligence wills each thing (if so, accepts its will), or it exercised that will once – once and for all – and all else follows as a consequence (and if so, why worry?).
One way or another: atoms or unity. If it’s God, all is well. If it’s arbitrary, don’t imitate it.

9.31 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.

9.32 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; the narrow space between our birth and death; the infinite time before; the equally unbounded time that follows.

9.40 Isn’t it better to do what’s up to you – like a free man – than to be passively controlled by what isn’t, like a slave or beggar? And what makes you think the gods don’t care about what’s up to us?
Start praying like this and you’ll see.

• Not “some way to sleep with her” – but a way to stop wanting to.
• Not “some way to get rid of him” – but a way to stop trying.
• Not “some way to save my child” – but a way to lose your fear.

Redirect your prayers like that, and watch what happens.

9.42 You’ll find that none of the people you’re upset about has done anything that could do damage to your mind. But that’s all that “harm” or “injury” could mean.

The logos gave you the means to see it – that a given person would act a given way – but you paid no attention. And now you’re astonished that he’s gone and done it. So when you call someone “untrustworthy” or “ungrateful,” turn the reproach on yourself. It was you who did wrong. By assuming that someone with those traits deserved your trust. Or by doing them a favour and expecting something in return, instead of looking to the action itself for your reward. What else did you expect from helping someone out? Isn’t it enough that you’ve done what your nature demands? You want a salary for it too?

As if your eyes expected a reward for seeing, or your feet for walking. That’s what they were made for. By doing what they were designed to do, they’re performing their function. Whereas humans were made to help others. And when we do help others – or help them to do something – we’re doing what we were designed for. We perform our function.

Book 10

10.4 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.

10.8 Epithets for yourself: Upright. Modest. Straightforward. Sane. Cooperative. Disinterested.
Try not to exchange them for others. And if you should forfeit them, set about getting them back.

Keep in mind that “sanity” means understanding things – each individual thing – for what they are. And not losing the thread.
And “cooperation” means accepting what nature assigns you – accept it willingly.
And “disinterest” means that the intelligence should rise above the movements of the flesh – the rough and the smooth alike. Should rise above fame, above death, and everything like them.

If you maintain your claim to these epithets – without caring if others apply them to you or not – you’ll become a new person, living a new life.

10.9 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.

10.11 Only these two questions: 

• Is what he’s doing now the right thing to be doing? 
• Does he accept and welcome what he’s been assigned?

10.12 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. If anything gets in the way, forge on ahead, making good use of what you have on hand, sticking to what seems right.

10.16 To stop talking about what the good man is like, and just be one.

10.27 To bear in mind constantly that all of this has happened before. And will happen again – the same plot from beginning to end, the identical staging. Produce them in your mind, as you know them from experiencing or from history: the court of Hadrian, of Antoninus. The courts of Philip, Alexander, Croesus. All just the same. Only the people different.

10.37 Learn to ask of all actions, “Why are they doing that?”
Starting with your own.

Book 11

11.1 Characteristics of the rational soul:

• Self-perception
• Self-examination
• The power to make of itself whatever it wants

It reaches its intended goal, no matter where the limit of its life is set.

Also characteristic of the rational soul:

• Affection for its neighbours
• Truthfulness
• Humility

Not to place anything above itself – which is the characteristic of law as well. No difference here between the logos of rationality and that of justice.

11.2 Look at the individual parts and move from analysis to indifference.
Apply this to life as a whole.

11.4 Have I done something for the common good? Then I share in the benefits. To stay centered on that. Not to give up.

11.13 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. Ready to show them their mistake. Not spitefully, or to show off my own self-control, but in an honest, upright way.

As long as you do what’s proper to your nature, and accept what the world’s nature has in store – as long as you work for others’ good, by any and all means – what is there that can harm you?

11.16 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.

11.18 That you don’t know for sure it is a mistake. A lot of things are means to some other end. You have to know an awful lot before you can judge other people’s actions with real understanding.

When you lose your temper, or even feel irritated: that human life is very short. Before long all of us will be laid out side by side.

How much more damage anger and grief do than the things that cause them.

Kindness is invincible, provided it’s sincere – not ironic or an act. What can even the most vicious person do if you keep treating him with kindness and gently set him straight – if you get the chance – correcting him cheerfully at the exact moment that he’s trying to do you harm.

Keep these points in mind, like gifts from the nine Muses, and start becoming a human being. Now and for the rest of your life.

11.19 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).
• The more divine part of you has been beaten and subdued by the degraded mortal part – the body and its stupid self-indulgences.

11.21 “If you don’t have a consistent goal in life, you can’t live it in a consistent way.”
Unhelpful, unless you specify a goal.

There is no common benchmark for all the things that people think are good – except for a few, the ones that affect us all.

So the goal should be a common one – a civic one. If you direct all your energies toward that, your actions will be consistent. And so will you.

Book 12

12.1 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. Nature intended it for you, and you for it.
• Justice: so that you’ll speak the truth, frankly and without evasions, and act as you should – and as other people deserve.

Don’t let anything deter you: other people’s misbehaviour, your own misperceptions, What People Will Say, or the feelings of the body that covers you (let the affected part take care of those).

12.4 It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own.

12.6 Practice even what seems impossible.

12.10 To see things as they are. Substance, cause and purpose.

12.18 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.

12.20 To undertake nothing:

• at random or without purpose
• for any reason but the common good

12.24 Three things, essential at all times:

1. Your own actions: that they’re not arbitrary or different from what abstract justice would do.
2. External events: that they happen randomly or by design. You can’t complain about chance. You can’t argue with Providence.

12.25 Throw out your misperceptions and you’ll be fine.

12.29 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.
What else could it be but to live life fully – to pay out goodness like the rings of a chain, without the slightest gap.

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