MEDITATIONS: A NEW TRANSLATION by Marcus Aurelius, Gregory Hays

• Philosophy in the modern sense is largely the creation of one man, the fifth-century B.C. Athenian thinker Socrates.
• The discipline of perception requires that we maintain absolute objectivity of thought: that we see things dispassionately for what they are.
• Everywhere, at each moment, you have the option: to accept this event with humility [will]; to treat this person as he should be treated [action]; to approach this thought with care, so that nothing irrational creeps in [perception].
• When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own—not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me.
• Throw away your books; stop letting yourself be distracted.
• The angry man is more like a victim of wrongdoing, provoked by pain to anger.
• Remember two things:
• i. 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;
• ii. 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.
• Don’t waste the rest of your time here worrying about other people—unless it affects the common good.
• You need to avoid certain things in your train of thought: everything random, everything irrelevant. And certainly everything self-important or malicious. You need to get used to winnowing your thoughts, so that if someone says, “What are you thinking about?” you can respond at once (and truthfully) that you are thinking this or thinking that.
• No surplus words or unnecessary actions.
• In everything you do, even the smallest thing, remember the chain that links them.
• Stop drifting.
• Sprint for the finish.
• No random actions, none not based on underlying principles.
• Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been.
• It can ruin your life only if it ruins your character. Otherwise it cannot harm you—inside or out.
• Uncomplicate yourself.
• Life is short. That’s all there is to say. Get what you can from the present—thoughtfully, justly.
• Love the discipline you know, and let it support you. Entrust everything willingly to the gods, and then make your way through life—no one’s master and no one’s slave.
• A key point to bear in mind: The value of attentiveness varies in proportion to its object. You’re better off not giving the small things more time than they deserve.
• In short, know this: Human lives are brief and trivial. Yesterday a blob of semen; tomorrow embalming fluid, ash.
• 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
• It is crazy to want what is impossible. And impossible for the wicked not to do so.
• 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.
• You can lead an untroubled life provided you can grow, can think and act systematically.
• Two characteristics shared by gods and men (and every rational creature):
• i. Not to let others hold you back.
• ii. To locate goodness in thinking and doing the right thing, and to limit your desires to that.
• I was once a fortunate man but at some point fortune abandoned me. But true good fortune is what you make for yourself. Good fortune: good character, good intentions, and good actions.
• 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.
• What harms us is to persist in self-deceit and ignorance.
• Our lives are short. The only rewards of our existence here are an unstained character and unselfish acts.
• Nothing has meaning to my mind except its own actions. Which are within its own control. And it’s only the immediate ones that matter. Its past and future actions too are meaningless.
• 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 only thing that isn’t worthless: to live this life out truthfully and rightly. And be patient with those who don’t.
• Nothing is as encouraging as when virtues are visibly embodied in the people around us, when we’re practically showered with them.
• Things can’t shape our decisions by themselves.
• Practice really hearing what people say. Do your best to get inside their minds.
• our own worth is measured by what we devote our energy to.
• 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.
• Don’t be ashamed to need help. Like a soldier storming a wall, you have a mission to accomplish. And if you’ve been wounded and you need a comrade to pull you up? So what?
• Forget the future. When and if it comes, you’ll have the same resources to draw on—the same logos.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• It’s silly to try to escape other people’s faults. They are inescapable. Just try to escape your own.
• Remember that to change your mind and to accept correction are free acts too. The action is yours, based on your own will, your own decision—and your own mind.
• Nothing that can happen is unusual or unnatural, and there’s no sense in complaining. Nature does not make us endure the unendurable.
• 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?
• Don’t look down on death, but welcome it. It too is one of the things required by nature.
• So this is how a thoughtful person should await death: not with indifference, not with impatience, not with disdain, but simply viewing it as one of the things that happen to us. Now you anticipate the child’s emergence from its mother’s womb; that’s how you should await the hour when your soul will emerge from its compartment.
• Leave other people’s mistakes where they lie.
• The world’s cycles never change—up and down, from age to age.
• 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.
• Just remember: you can endure anything your mind can make endurable, by treating it as in your interest to do so.
• To stop talking about what the good man is like, and just be one.
• 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.
• Learn to ask of all actions, “Why are they doing that?” Starting with your own.
• 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?
• A straightforward, honest person should be like someone who stinks: when you’re in the same room with him, you know it. But false straightforwardness is like a knife in the back.
• False friendship is the worst. Avoid it at all costs. If you’re honest and straightforward and mean well, it should show in your eyes. It should be unmistakable.
• As you kiss your son good night, says Epictetus, whisper to yourself, “He may be dead in the morning.”
• Practice even what seems impossible.