Marcus Aurelius: Meditations
The Plainspoken Classics - Scriptorium Press (First Edition, 2026)
An original AI translation made directly from the source language.
https://openscriptorium.com


======== Book 1 ========

1. From my grandfather Verus: good character and an even temper.
2. From the reputation and memory of my father: modesty and a manly bearing.
3. From my mother: reverence for the gods, and generosity, and refraining not only from doing wrong but even from entertaining the thought of it; also plainness of living, far removed from the ways of the rich.
4. From my great-grandfather: not to have attended the public schools, but to have had good teachers at home, and to have learned that on such things one ought to spend without stinting.
5. From my tutor: not to become a partisan of the Greens or the Blues at the races, nor a backer of the Light-Shield or the Heavy-Shield fighters at the games; to be able to endure labor and want little; to work with my own hands and mind my own business; and to be deaf to slander.
6. From Diognetus: not to waste my energy on trifles; to disbelieve what wonder-workers and charlatans say about spells, the driving-away of spirits, and things of that sort; not to keep fighting-quail, nor to be worked up over such pursuits; to put up with plain speaking; to grow at home in philosophy, and to have heard first Bacchius, then Tandasis and Marcianus; to have written dialogues as a boy; and to have set my heart on a hard pallet and an animal skin to sleep on, and whatever else belongs to the Greek way of training.
7. From Rusticus: to grasp the sense that my character needed correcting and training; not to be led aside into rivalry with sophists, nor to write treatises on abstract questions, or deliver little uplifting speeches, or make a showy display of the ascetic or the tirelessly active man; to keep away from rhetoric, poetry, and clever phrase-making; not to go about the house in formal dress, nor do such things; to write letters plainly, the way he himself wrote from Sinuessa to my mother; toward those who had lost their temper with me or done me wrong, to be quick to soften and easily reconciled as soon as they themselves wanted to make it up; to read carefully and not be content with a rough overview, nor to agree too quickly with people who talk a great deal; and to have come to know the discourses of Epictetus, which he supplied me from his own collection.
8. From Apollonius: freedom of will, and unwavering steadiness, looking to nothing else, not even for a moment, except reason; always being the same — in sharp pains, in the loss of a child, in long illnesses; seeing clearly, in a living example, that the same man can be most intense and yet relaxed; patience in explaining things; watching a man who plainly counted his experience and his skill at teaching doctrines as the least of his good qualities; and learning how one ought to accept apparent favors from friends, without being made lesser by them or letting them pass unacknowledged.
9. From Sextus: kindliness; the example of a household run as a father runs it; the idea of living according to nature; dignity without affectation; watchful care for friends' interests; patience with the untrained and with those who form opinions without thinking them through; being agreeable to everyone, so that his company was pleasanter than any flattery, and yet he was most deeply respected by those very people at that very moment; the ability to find and set in order, with sound grasp and method, the doctrines necessary for life; never showing the least sign of anger or any other passion, but being at once entirely free of passion and full of warm affection; giving praise without fanfare, and carrying wide learning without display.
10. From Alexander the grammarian: not to find fault, and not to correct with reproach those who let slip a barbarism, a solecism, or some ungainly phrase, but to bring up, skillfully and by itself, just the expression that should have been used — in the form of an answer, or a supporting remark, or a joint look at the matter itself rather than the wording — or by some other such tactful, indirect reminder.
11. From Fronto: to take note of what envy, cunning, and pretense a tyrant is capable of, and that, as a rule, those among us called well-born are somehow rather lacking in natural affection.
12. From Alexander the Platonist: not to say to someone often, or without real need, or to write in a letter, that 'I am too busy,' nor in this way to keep excusing myself from the duties owed to the people I live with, on the pretext of pressing business.
13. From Catulus: not to make light of a friend's complaint, even when it happens to be unreasonable, but to try to restore things to their usual footing; to speak of one's teachers warmly and gratefully, as is remembered of Domitius and Athenodotus; and genuine love for one's children.
14. From my brother Severus: devotion to kin, a passion for truth, and a commitment to justice; through him coming to know Thrasea, Helvidius, Cato, Dion, and Brutus, and forming a picture of a state based on equal law, governed by equality and equal freedom of speech, and of a monarchy that prizes above everything the freedom of the governed; and from him too, steadiness and unwavering constancy in the honor paid to friendship; readiness to do good and to give generously without stinting; good hope, and trust in being loved by one's friends; openness toward those he had reason to find fault with; and that his friends never had to guess what he wanted or did not want, since it was always plain.
15. From Maximus: to master oneself and be swayed by nothing; to keep good spirits in all circumstances, including in sickness; the well-tempered character, gentle and dignified; to work through what lies in front of you without complaint; that everyone trusted him — when he said what he thought, that he thought it that way, and when he did what he did, that he did it without ill intent. Never astonished, never panicked, never in a hurry or hesitant or at a loss, never sullen or falsely smiling, never again angry or suspicious. Ready to do good, ready to forgive, incapable of lying; giving the impression of a man who cannot be bent rather than one who must be straightened out. No one could ever have thought himself looked down on by him, nor could anyone have borne to think himself better than him. And he had a gift for graciousness.
16. From my father: gentleness, and an unshakable adherence to decisions reached after careful examination; no vanity over what passes for honors; love of work and persistence; readiness to listen to anyone who had something to contribute to the common good; an unwavering commitment to giving each person what he deserved; practical knowledge of where effort was needed and where relaxation; an end to the love affairs with boys; his sense of community, and the way he released his friends from any obligation to dine with him always or to travel with him — those left behind by some necessity always found him unchanged toward them; his exacting and persistent way of examining questions in council, never breaking off the inquiry early and settling for the first impressions at hand; his constancy in keeping friends, never growing tired of them nor infatuated with them; his self-sufficiency in everything, and his cheerfulness; his foresight reaching far ahead, and his quiet management of even the smallest matters, without theatrics; how in his reign acclamations and every kind of flattery were suppressed; his constant watchfulness over what the empire needed, his careful stewardship of its resources, and his patience under the blame this sometimes brought.
And this too: no superstition toward the gods, and toward men no crowd-pleasing, no currying favor, no playing to the mob — instead sobriety in everything, and steadiness, and never any vulgarity or love of novelty. As for the things that make life comfortable, of which fortune gave him abundance, he used them without arrogance and without apology — enjoying them naturally when they were present, and feeling no need for them when they were absent. No one could ever call him a sophist, or a house-slave-made-good, or a pedant — but a man mature, complete, immune to flattery, capable of governing both his own affairs and those of others. Beyond this, his respect for genuine philosophers, without reproaching the rest, and without being easily led by them either; and further, his ease in company, his charm that never cloyed; his moderate care for his own body, neither like a man in love with life nor for the sake of appearance, nor yet careless of it — so that through his own attentiveness he needed medical treatment or drugs and dressings only rarely. And above all, his readiness to yield without envy to those who possessed some particular ability, such as skill in speaking or expert knowledge of laws or customs or other such matters, and his eagerness to join in supporting them, so that each might win recognition according to his own strengths.
He did everything according to ancestral custom, yet without making a show even of this — of guarding ancestral custom. He was not one to shift about or dart from place to place, but stayed put, dwelling on the same places and the same matters. After his bouts of headache he would turn at once, fresh and vigorous, to his usual work. He had very few secrets, and those very rare, and only ever concerning public affairs. He showed good sense and moderation in staging public shows, in building projects, in distributions of money, and such things — the conduct of a man who looks to what needs doing, not to the reputation that comes from having done it. He did not bathe at odd hours, he had no passion for building, he gave no special thought to his food, or to the weave and color of his clothes, or to the beauty of his slaves. His country dress came up from his villa below; his tunic at Lanuvium was plain for the most part; the way he once declined the cloak at Tusculum, apologizing for it, and every such trait of his. There was nothing harsh in him, nothing shameless, nothing violent, nothing that would ever make anyone say "this goes too far" — everything was measured out and reasoned through as if there were all the time in the world, calmly, in order, with strength, in harmony with itself.
What is remembered of Socrates would fit him well — that he was able both to abstain from and to enjoy those things which most people are too weak to abstain from and too indulgent in enjoying. To be strong, and to endure, and to stay sober in either case, is the mark of a man with a soul that is whole and unconquerable — such as he showed in the illness of Maximus.
17. From the gods: fine grandparents, worthy parents, a devoted sister, capable teachers, a good household, kinsmen, and friends — nearly all of them; and that toward none of them did I fall into any offense, although I had a disposition of such a kind that, given the chance, I might well have done something of the sort; but it was the gods' kindness that no combination of circumstances arose that was going to expose me. And that I was not raised too long with my grandfather's mistress, and that I kept my youth intact, and that I did not become a man before my time, but even put it off a while longer. That I was placed under a ruler and father who was going to strip me of all vanity and bring me to recognize that a life within a palace can be lived without needing bodyguards, or conspicuous robes, or torches and statues of that kind and similar show — but that one can draw oneself in nearly to the level of a private citizen, and not for that reason be more base or more slack toward what needs to be done, in ruler's fashion, for the common good. That I got such a brother — one able through his character to rouse me to care for myself, while at the same time gladdening me with honor and affection. That my children were not born deficient in nature nor deformed in body.
That I did not advance further in rhetoric and poetry and the other pursuits, in which I might perhaps have been caught and held, had I felt myself progressing smoothly in them. That I was quick to set my foster-parents in the rank they seemed to me to want, and did not put it off on the hope that, since they were still young, I would do it later. That I came to know Apollonius, Rusticus, Maximus. That I formed a vivid and repeated picture of what the life according to nature is, of what sort it is — so that, as far as depends on the gods and the gifts, aid, and inspirations that come from them, nothing any longer keeps me from already living according to nature, though I still fall short of it through my own fault, through not holding fast to the gods' reminders — one might almost call them lessons. That my body has held out so long in such a life. That I never laid a hand on Benedicta or Theodotus, and even later, when I fell into erotic passions, was cured of it. That though I was often harsh with Rusticus, I never did anything further that I would have come to regret. That my mother, though fated to die young, still lived with me through her last years. That as often as I wished to help someone poor, or in need of something else, I never once had to hear that I had no money to do it from — and that I myself never fell into a like need, such that I had to take from someone else.
That my wife is what she is — so compliant, so affectionate, so unassuming. That I had good foster-parents in abundance for my children. That through dreams remedies were given me — among other things, one against spitting blood and against dizziness — and this at Caieta, as an oracle answered. That when I came to desire philosophy, I did not fall in with some sophist, nor sit down to writing treatises, or working out syllogisms, or busying myself with matters of the sky. For all of this needs the gods' help, and fortune. Written among the Quadi, on the Granua.

======== Book 2 ========

1. Say to yourself at the start of the day: I shall meet with the meddling, the ungrateful, the violent, the treacherous, the envious, the unsociable. All this has come upon them through their ignorance of good and bad. But I, who have grasped what goodness is in its essence — that it is fine — and what badness is in its essence — that it is shameful — and grasped, too, the essence of the very one who does wrong, that he is akin to me — not sharing the same blood or seed, but a partner in mind and in a portion of the divine — I can be harmed by none of them, for no one will wrap me in shame; nor can I be angry at my kinsman, or turn against him. Cooperation is why we exist at all, just like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of upper and lower teeth. To work against one another, then, is against nature; and resentment and turning away are a form of working against.
2. Whatever this is that I am, it is a bit of flesh, a bit of breath, and the ruling faculty. Put the books down; stop being pulled at. That is not granted you. Instead, as if already dying, hold the bits of flesh in contempt: gore and little bones, a woven net of nerves, veins, and arteries. Look too at what the breath is: wind, and not even the same wind always, but breathed out and sucked back in again every hour. The ruling faculty, then, is the third thing. Think of it this way: you are an old man; no longer let this be enslaved, no longer let it be jerked about like a puppet by unsociable impulse, no longer let it chafe against what is fated in the present, or be suspicious of what is to come.
3. The works of the gods are full of providence. The works of fortune are not apart from nature, or from the spinning together and interweaving of what is governed by providence. All things flow from there; and there is joined to them what is necessary, and what is of benefit to the whole universe, of which you are a part. Now to every part of nature that is good which the nature of the whole brings, and which preserves it. And it is the changes, both of the elements and of the compound things, that keep the universe whole. Let this be enough for you, and let it stand as your settled belief. But throw away the thirst for books, so that you do not die grumbling, but truly at peace, and thankful from the heart to the gods.
4. Remember how long you have been putting this off, and how many times you have been given a deadline by the gods and not used it. You need, at some point, finally to perceive what universe you are a part of, and whose governance of the universe you are an outflow of, and that there is a limit set to your time, which if you do not use to clear the skies within you, it will be gone, and you along with it, and the chance will never come again.
5. In every hour take care to do, with sturdy and unaffected dignity, with warmth, with freedom, and with justice, whatever task is at hand as firmly as a Roman and a man, and to give yourself relief from every other impression. And you will secure this relief if you carry out each action as though it were the last of your life, freed from all randomness, from the passionate turning away from reason, from playacting, from self-love, and from resentment at what has been allotted to you. You see how few the things are that a person needs to master in order to live a life that flows smoothly and in reverence to the gods; for the gods too will require nothing more from the one who keeps to these.
6. Wrong yourself, wrong yourself, O soul; but you will no longer have the chance to honor yourself, for each person's life is one, and yours is nearly finished, and still you have not respected yourself, but have made your own well-being depend on the souls of others.
7. Do the things happening from outside distract you? Then give yourself the leisure to learn some further good, and stop drifting about. But you must also guard against the other kind of wandering. For those too are fools who have grown weary of life through their actions, and have no goal to which they direct every impulse and, in a word, every impression.
8. Because of not paying attention to what is going on in someone else's soul, a person is rarely seen to be unhappy; but those who do not attend to the movements of their own soul are bound to be unhappy.
9. These things must always be kept in mind: what the nature of the whole is, and what mine is, and how the one relates to the other, and what sort of fragment of what sort of totality it is; and that no one can stop you from always doing and saying what follows from the nature of which you are a part.
10. Theophrastus, speaking as a philosopher when comparing wrongdoings — comparing them, that is, in the ordinary way one compares such things — says that offenses committed out of desire are graver than those committed out of anger. For the man who is angry seems to turn away from reason with a certain pain and hidden contraction; but the man who errs out of desire, overpowered by pleasure, appears somehow more unrestrained and more effeminate in his wrongdoing. Rightly, then, and in a manner worthy of philosophy, he said that the offense committed with pleasure deserves greater blame than the one committed with pain; and in general the angry man is more like someone who has first been wronged and is driven to anger through pain, while the other has set out toward wrongdoing on his own impulse, carried toward doing something to satisfy desire.
11. Act, speak, and think in every case as one for whom it is already possible to depart from life. But to leave the company of men is nothing terrible, if gods exist; for they would not involve you in anything bad. And if they do not exist, or if they take no care for human affairs, what is it to me to live in a universe empty of gods or empty of providence? But in truth gods do exist, and they do care for human affairs, and they have granted each person, as fully as anything could be granted, the means to avoid sliding into what is genuinely bad. And had there been anything else bad among the rest of things, they would have arranged likewise, so that avoiding it too would rest in everyone's hands. Yet how could something that fails to make a man worse make his life worse in turn? The nature of the whole would not have overlooked such things, whether through ignorance, or through knowing but being unable to guard against or correct them; nor would it have erred so greatly, whether from weakness or from lack of skill, that good things and bad should fall out indiscriminately, mixed together, on the good and on the bad alike. But death and life, honor and dishonor, hardship and pleasure, wealth and poverty — all these fall out equally on good men and bad, being in themselves neither noble nor shameful. Therefore they are neither good nor bad.
12. How quickly all things vanish away — the bodies themselves into the universe, the memories of them into time. Such is the nature of all things perceived by the senses, especially those that lure with pleasure, or frighten with pain, or are trumpeted about by vanity — how cheap, how contemptible, how filthy, how perishable, how dead they are — this is what the power of understanding must fix on. What are these people whose opinions and voices confer reputation? What is it to die — and that if one looks at death alone, and by dividing the notion strips away the images attached to it, one will no longer suppose it to be anything but a plain operation of nature; and whoever is afraid of a plain operation of nature is a child. Yet this is not merely something nature does but something useful to her design. And how man makes contact with god, and by what part of himself, and in what condition that part of man must be when he does.
13. Nothing is more pitiable than the man who goes around and around everything, "searching out the things beneath the earth" as the saying goes, and prying by conjecture into the souls of those near him, without perceiving that it is enough to be alone with the guiding spirit within himself and to serve it genuinely. Service of it means keeping it pure of passion, of aimlessness, and of discontent at what comes from gods and from men. For what comes from the gods deserves reverence because of their excellence, and what comes from men is dear because of kinship, though at times it is even, in a way, pitiable because of their ignorance of good and bad; that blindness is no less a defect than the one that deprives a person of the power to distinguish white from black.
14. Even if you were going to live three thousand years, or ten times that many, still remember that no one loses any other life than the one he is living now, nor lives any other than the one he loses. So the longest life and the shortest come to the same thing. For the present moment is equal for all, and what is passing away is thus equal too, and so what is being lost turns out to be a mere instant. For no one could lose the past or the future — how could someone be deprived of what he does not have? So two things must be remembered: one, that all things from eternity are of the same form and cycle round again, and it makes no difference whether one watches the same things for a hundred years or two hundred or an infinite time; the other, that the one who lives longest and the one who is about to die soonest lose the same thing. For the present is the only thing one can be deprived of, since that is the only thing one has, and what one does not have, one cannot lose.
15. That everything is a matter of judgment — this is clear from what is said about Monimus the Cynic; and clear too is the usefulness of what he said, if one accepts its point as far as it holds true.
16. The human soul does violence to itself most of all when it becomes, as far as it is able, an abscess or a tumor on the universe; for to chafe against whatever occurs amounts to a revolt from nature, which holds within itself, as one of its parts, the natures of every other thing. Next, it does violence to itself when it turns away from a human being, or even moves against him meaning to harm him, the way angry people do. Third, it does violence to itself when it is overcome by pleasure or by pain. Fourth, when it play-acts and does or says something artificial and untrue. Fifth, when it lets any action or impulse of its own go without aim, and does whatever it does randomly and heedlessly, when even the smallest things ought to be done with reference to an end; and the end for rational creatures is to follow the reason and the law of that most venerable city and commonwealth.
17. Of human life, the time is a point, its substance flowing, its perception dim, the composition of the whole body prone to decay, the soul a whirl, fortune hard to divine, fame indiscriminate. In sum: everything of the body is a river, everything of the soul is dream and vapor, life is a war and a stay in a foreign land, and reputation after death is oblivion. What, then, can escort a person through? One thing, and one thing only: philosophy. And this consists in keeping the guiding spirit within unabused and unharmed, superior to pleasures and pains, doing nothing at random, nor falsely and with pretense, needing nothing that another do or not do; and further, in accepting what happens and is allotted to it as coming from that same source from which the person himself came; and above all, in waiting for death with a gracious mind, seeing it as nothing but a dissolution of the elements out of which every living being is composed. And if there is nothing terrible to the elements themselves in each one continually changing into another, why should anyone eye with distrust the transformation and breaking-apart of everything that is? Such is simply nature's way, and nothing that follows nature's way can be evil. Written at Carnuntum.

======== Book 3 ========

1. One must not reckon only this, that life is used up day by day and an ever smaller part of it is left; one must also reckon this, that even if a person should live longer, it is uncertain whether his mind will still be equal, as before, to the understanding of affairs and to the contemplation that reaches after insight into matters divine and human alike. Should he begin to grow senile, breathing, nourishment, imagination, impulse, and other such things will not fail him; but the ability to make use of himself, to reckon exactly the demands of duty, to analyze what appears before him, to judge whether it is already time to take himself out of life, and all such things that require a thoroughly trained reasoning power — these are extinguished beforehand. One must hurry, therefore, not only because we are each moment drawing nearer to death, but also because our comprehension of things and our capacity to attend to them fail us even before that.
2. You should also keep an eye on things like this: that even what comes as a by-product of what nature produces has a certain charm and appeal of its own. For instance, when bread is baked, some parts of it crack open; and these very cracks, which occur in a way contrary to the baker's intention, somehow look right and in their own way stir up an appetite for the food. Again, figs, when they are at their ripest, split open; and in overripe olives, the very nearness to decay adds a beauty of its own to the fruit. And ears of grain bending down, and the lion's furrowed brow, and the foam flowing from the mouths of boars, and many other things - looked at on their own, they are far from beautiful, yet because they follow upon what nature produces, they add to its adornment and delight the mind. So that if a person has feeling and a deeper understanding of what happens in the whole, hardly anything that comes about as a consequence of it will fail to seem to him somehow pleasingly put together. Such a person will find real animals baring their fangs just as delightful to watch as the copies that painters and sculptors make of them, and will be able to see in an old woman and an old man a certain ripeness and prime, and the erotic charm in children, with his own sober eyes. Many such things will not be convincing to everyone, but will strike only the one who is genuinely at home with nature and her works.
3. Hippocrates, after curing many diseases, himself fell sick and died. The Chaldeans foretold the deaths of many, and then fate caught up with them too. Alexander, Pompey, and Gaius Caesar, after utterly destroying whole cities so many times over, and cutting down in battle many tens of thousands of horsemen and foot soldiers, themselves also at some point departed from life. Heraclitus, after all his natural philosophizing about the conflagration of the universe, died filled inside with water, plastered over with dung. Lice killed Democritus; other lice killed Socrates. What does all this amount to? You boarded, you sailed, you have come to port; disembark. If into another life, nothing there is empty of gods either; if into insensibility, you will stop enduring pains and pleasures, and stop being a slave to a vessel as much inferior as the thing it serves is superior; for the one is mind and the guiding spirit within, the other is earth and gore.
4. Do not wear away what remains of your life in imaginings about other people, whenever it serves no reference to some benefit for the community - for then you are deprived of some other task. That is, picturing what so-and-so is doing, and why, and what he is saying, and what he has in mind, and what he is scheming, and all such things, makes you wander away from watching over your own ruling faculty. One must therefore guard against the random and pointless in the chain of one's thoughts, and above all the meddlesome and malicious; and one should train oneself to think only such things that, if someone should suddenly ask, 'What are you thinking about right now?' you could answer at once and frankly, this or that - so that from the answer itself it would be clear immediately that everything in you is simple and kindly, and befitting a social creature that has no concern for imaginings of pleasure or of enjoyment altogether, or for any rivalry, malice, or suspicion, or anything else you would blush to admit you had in mind.
For such a man, no longer putting off being counted among the best, is a kind of priest and servant of the gods, making use also of that which is set up within him, which keeps the person untainted by pleasures, unwounded by any pain, untouched by any insult, unfeeling toward any wickedness - an athlete in the greatest of contests, that of not being thrown down by any passion, dyed through to the depth with justice, welcoming with his whole soul all that happens to him and is allotted to him, and not often, nor without great and communal necessity, imagining what someone else is saying or doing or thinking. For he attends in action only to what is his own, and continually reflects on what is spun out for him by the whole; the former he makes noble, and the latter he is convinced is good. For the portion allotted to each is carried along with him and carries him along in turn. And he remembers that everything rational is akin to him, and that caring for all human beings belongs to human nature, but that one should not cling to the opinion of everyone, only of those who live in acknowledged agreement with nature. As for those who do not live so, he keeps constantly in mind what sort of people they are, at home and away from home, night and day, what sort of company they keep.
So he takes no account of the praise that comes from such people, since they are not even pleased with themselves.
5. Act neither unwillingly, nor without regard for others, nor without examination, nor under conflicting impulse. Do not let cleverness dress up your thinking; be neither a man of many words nor a busybody. Further, let the god within you be the guardian of a being that is male, mature, a citizen, a Roman, a ruler - one who has taken his post as though awaiting the signal to retreat from life, ready and needing neither oath nor any man as witness. Let there be cheerfulness in you, and no need of outside help, no need of the peace that others provide. One must stand upright, not be held upright.
6. If you find something better than justice, truth, self-control, courage — better, in short, than a mind content with itself, content in this: that it acts according to right reason, and content with what fate assigns you without your choosing — if, I say, you see something better than this, then turn to it with your whole soul and enjoy that greatest good you have found. But if nothing appears better than the guiding spirit seated within you — which has brought its own impulses under its own control, which examines its impressions, which has torn itself free, as Socrates used to say, from the promptings of the senses, which has subordinated itself to the gods and looks after the interests of mankind — if you find everything else smaller and cheaper next to this, then give ground to nothing else. Once you tilt and lean toward anything else, you will no longer be able to give undistracted preference to that good which is properly and truly your own. Nothing of a different kind — praise from the many, office, wealth, the enjoyment of pleasures — has any right to set itself up against the good that belongs to a rational, civic being. All these things, even if for a while they seem to fit, suddenly gain the mastery and carry you off. So choose, I say, simply and freely, what is better, and hold to it. "But the advantageous is what is better." If you mean advantageous to you as a rational being, hold to that; if as an animal, then say so plainly, and guard your judgment without arrogance — only make sure your examination is sound.
7. Never value as advantageous to yourself anything that will one day force you to break faith, abandon self-respect, hate someone, suspect them, curse them, play the hypocrite, or desire something that needs walls and curtains around it. For the man who has put his own mind, his guiding spirit, and the sacred rites of its excellence above all else does not act out a tragedy, does not groan, will need neither solitude nor a crowd. Above all, he will live neither chasing nor fleeing anything, and it will not matter to him in the least whether he makes use of his soul — housed in the body — for a longer stretch of time or a shorter one. For even if he must depart at once, he goes as easily as he would do any other thing that can be done with self-respect and good order, guarding against this one thing throughout his whole life: that his mind should ever turn into something foreign to a rational, civic creature.
8. In the mind of a man who has been disciplined and purified you will find nothing festering, nothing corrupt, nothing lying just beneath the surface waiting to break out. Nor does fate catch his life unfinished, as one might say of an actor who leaves before completing and playing out his part. And further, there is in him nothing servile, nothing affected, nothing over-attached or torn away, nothing answerable to another, nothing lurking in hiding.
9. Respect your capacity to form judgments. Everything depends on this: that no judgment should form in your ruling faculty at odds with nature or with how a rational creature is constituted. This capacity promises freedom from hasty conclusions, kinship with other people, and accord with the gods.
10. Throw away everything else, then, and hold on to just these few things. And remember too that each of us lives only this present moment, this mere instant; the rest is either already lived out or lies in uncertainty. Small, then, is the portion each of us lives; small the little corner of earth where we live it; small too even the longest fame after death, and even that carried on by a succession of little men who will very soon die themselves, and who do not even know themselves, let alone the man who died long ago.
11. To the aids already mentioned, let one more be added: always make a definition or a sketch of whatever presents itself to your mind, so as to see it as it truly is in its bare essence, whole, taken apart part by part, and to say to yourself both its own proper name and the names of the elements it is made of and into which it will dissolve. For nothing produces greatness of mind so much as being able to test methodically and truthfully everything that presents itself in life, and always to look at things in such a way that you take in at once what sort of use each thing serves in what sort of universe, what value it has in relation to the whole, and what value in relation to man — man as a citizen of the highest city, of which all other cities are like households. What is this thing that is now producing an impression on me, what is it made of, how long is it naturally suited to last, and what virtue is needed to meet it — gentleness, say, or courage, honesty, simplicity, self-sufficiency, or one of the others? So for each thing you must say: this comes from god; this comes by the interweaving and spun-together thread of fate, by such a coincidence and chance; and this from a fellow member of my kind, my kin, my partner — though he does not know what is in accordance with his own nature. But I do know it; and so I deal with him under the shared law that binds kindred beings, treating him kindly and justly, while at the same time aiming, in matters that are indifferent, at his true worth.
12. If you carry out whatever is in front of you now, following right reason, carefully, vigorously, and with good will, allowing nothing to distract you from it but keeping your own guiding spirit pure, as if you had to give it back right away; if you hold to this, expecting nothing and avoiding nothing, but content with your present activity in accordance with nature and with heroic truthfulness in everything you say and speak, you will live well. And there is no one who can stop you from doing this.
13. Just as doctors always keep their instruments and scalpels ready at hand for sudden calls to treatment, so you should keep your principles ready for understanding things divine and human, and for doing even the smallest thing with the connection between the two in mind. For you will not do well at anything human without referring it to the divine, nor the reverse.
14. Stop wandering off course. You are not going to read your own notebooks anymore, nor the histories of the ancient Romans and Greeks, nor the excerpts from writings that you were setting aside for your old age. Hurry, then, toward the end, give up your empty hopes, and come to your own aid, if you care at all for yourself, while it is still possible.
15. They do not know how much is meant by stealing, sowing, buying, keeping quiet, seeing what needs to be done — which is not a matter of the eyes but of a different kind of sight.
16. Body, soul, mind: to the body belong sensations, to the soul impulses, to the mind judgments. To be stamped by impressions belongs even to cattle; to be jerked about by impulse belongs even to wild beasts, to men who behave like women, to Phalaris, and to Nero; to have the mind as guide toward what appears to be one's duty belongs even to those who do not believe in the gods, to those who abandon their country, and to those who do whatever they please once they have shut the doors. If, then, everything else is shared with the people just mentioned, what remains as peculiar to the good man is this: to love and welcome whatever happens to him and is spun together with his fate, and not to defile the guiding spirit set up within his breast, nor to trouble it with a mob of impressions, but to keep it gracious, following god in good order, saying nothing contrary to truth and doing nothing contrary to justice. And even if all men refuse to believe that he lives simply, with due modesty, and cheerfully, he is not angered at any of them for this, nor turned aside from the road that leads to the end of his life, to which he must come pure, at peace, ready to be released, fitted to his own portion without being forced.

======== Book 4 ========

1. The ruling power within, when it is in accordance with nature, stands toward what happens in such a way that it always easily shifts to what is possible and given. For it is not devoted to any fixed material, but reaches for what it aims at with reservation, and makes whatever opposes it into material for itself, just as fire does when it gets the better of what is thrown onto it — the very things that would have put out a small lamp. But a blazing fire quickly makes its own whatever is heaped on it, consumes it, and rises higher from those very things.
2. Let no action be undertaken at random, or otherwise than in accordance with a principle that completes the art.
3. People look for retreats for themselves — country places, seashores, mountains — and you yourself are particularly used to longing for such things. But this is altogether the mark of an ordinary man, when it is possible for you, at whatever hour you wish, to withdraw into yourself. For nowhere does a man withdraw into more peace or freedom from trouble than into his own soul, especially if he has within himself the sort of thoughts that, by looking into them, at once bring him into complete ease. And by that ease I mean nothing beyond a well-ordered mind. Constantly, then, give yourself this retreat and renew yourself. Let the doctrines be brief and elementary, such as will suffice, as soon as you meet them, to wash away all your distress and send you back without resentment toward the things to which you return. For what will you resent? The wickedness of men? Reckoning up the judgment that rational creatures have come into being for one another's sake, that bearing with one another is part of justice, that men do wrong without meaning to, and how many already, having been enemies, suspicious, hateful, at each other's throats, now lie stretched out, turned to ashes — stop resenting, at some point. But will you resent the things allotted to you out of the whole? Renew for yourself that either-or: either providence or atoms, and all the arguments by which it has been shown that the universe is like a city. But will bodily things still lay hold of you?
Consider that the mind, once it has taken hold of itself and recognized its own power, does not mix itself in with the breath moving smoothly or roughly, and remember all you have heard and agreed to about pain and pleasure. But will petty reputation distract you? Look at how quickly all things are forgotten, at the chaos of the boundless age on either side of us, at the emptiness of applause, at the fickleness and lack of judgment in those who seem to praise, and at the narrowness of the place within which it is confined. For the whole earth is a mere point, and this dwelling of ours is what small corner of it? And here, how many are there, and of what sort, who will praise you? What remains, then, is to remember to withdraw into this little plot of ground that is yourself, and above all not to strain or stretch yourself out of shape, but to be free, and to view matters the way a man should, the way a human being should, the way a citizen should, the way a mortal creature should. Among the things most ready to hand for you to look into, let these two be present: one, that things do not touch the soul, but stand outside it, unmoving, and disturbances come only from the judgment within; the other, that all these things you see will change almost at once and will no longer exist — and keep constantly in mind how many changes you yourself have already witnessed. The universe is change; life is opinion.
4. If the intellect is common to us, and reason too, in virtue of which we are rational — if this is so, then reason that prescribes what is to be done or not is common; if this is so, law too is common; if this is so, we are citizens; if this is so, we share in some form of government; if this is so, then the cosmos itself amounts to a kind of city-state. For what other shared government could anyone claim embraces the whole human race? And it is from there, from this shared city, that our very intellect and reason and grasp of law are derived — from where else could they come? Just as the earthy portion in me was apportioned out of some quantity of earth, and the fluid portion out of a further element, and the breath-like portion out of its own wellspring, and the warm, fiery portion likewise drawn from a wellspring proper to it (since nothing arises out of nothing, just as nothing passes away into utter nonbeing), so too the intellect must come from somewhere.
5. Death is a thing like birth, a mystery of nature: a combination out of the same elements, a dissolution into the same. There is nothing here to feel disgraced by, since it runs counter neither to the order fitting a rational being nor to the logic of its own makeup.
6. These things are, by necessity, the nature of such causes to produce; and one who does not want this wants the fig tree to have no juice. In general, remember this: that in a very short time both you and he will be dead, and shortly after, not even your name will be left.
7. Take away the judgment, and 'I have been harmed' is taken away; take away 'I have been harmed,' and the harm is taken away.
8. Whatever does not make a man worse than himself, that also does not make his life worse, nor does it harm him, either from outside or from within.
9. The nature of what is advantageous has been compelled to do this.
10. 'Everything that happens, happens justly.' Watch carefully and you will find this so — I do not mean merely as following in sequence, but as in accordance with justice, as if apportioned by someone who assigns to each according to worth. So watch as you began, and whatever you do, do it together with this — together with being good, in the sense properly meant by 'good.' Keep this in every action.
11. Do not suppose things to be such as the one who insults you judges them, or as he wishes you to judge them, but see them as they truly are.
12. You must always have these two readinesses at hand: the one, to do only what the reason of kingship and lawgiving suggests for the benefit of mankind; the other, to change your course, if someone is present to correct and turn you from some opinion. Yet the change of course should always come from some persuasion that it is just or of common benefit, and what is set forth as such should be of that kind only — not because it seemed pleasant or brought reputation.
13. 'Do you have reason?' 'I have.' 'Why then do you not use it? For if this does its own work, what else do you want?'
14. You have subsisted as a part. You will vanish into that which begot you — or rather, you will be taken back up into its generative reason, by transformation.
15. Many grains of frankincense on the same altar: one falls first, another later, but it makes no difference.
16. Within ten days you will seem a god to those to whom you now seem a beast and an ape, if you turn back to your principles and the reverence of reason.
17. Do not act as though you were going to live ten thousand years. What is fated hangs over you. While you live, while it is still possible, become good.
18. How much leisure a man gains who does not look at what his neighbor has said or done or thought, but only at what he himself is doing, so that this very thing may be just and holy, or in accordance with the good — not looking around at a dark character, but running straight along the line, not scattered.
19. The one who is agitated about posthumous fame does not picture that each of those who remember him will himself also die very soon; and then in turn the one who succeeded him, until the whole memory is extinguished, passing on through people being kindled and being quenched in turn. But suppose that those who will remember are even immortal, and the memory immortal — what then is that to you? And I do not say it is nothing to the dead man, but as for the living, what good is praise — except perhaps for some practical purpose? For you are now setting aside, out of season, nature's own gift, clinging instead to some other line of reasoning.
20. Everything that is beautiful in any way is beautiful of itself and terminates in itself, not having praise as part of itself; at any rate, the thing praised becomes neither worse nor better. This I say also of things called beautiful in the more common sense, such as material objects and works of craft. For what real need has the truly beautiful? No more than law does, no more than truth, no more than goodwill or modesty. Which of these becomes beautiful because it is praised, or is corrupted because it is blamed? Does an emerald become worse than itself if it is not praised? What of gold, ivory, purple, a lyre, a small knife, a little flower, a little tree?
21. If souls persist, how does the air hold them from eternity? And how does the earth hold the bodies of those buried over so vast an age? Just as here, after some span of persisting, their change and dissolution makes room for other corpses, so too the souls that pass over into the air, after remaining for a time, change and are poured out and kindled, taken up into the generative reason of the whole, and in this way make room for those settling in alongside them. This is the answer one might give on the hypothesis that souls persist. But one should consider not only the multitude of bodies buried in this way, but also that of the animals eaten each day by us and by other animals. For consider the number consumed and in a sense buried this way, in the bodies of those they feed — and yet the world receives them, through their conversion into blood, through their alteration into the airy or the fiery. What is the true account of this matter? A division into the material and the causal.
22. Do not let yourself be swept off course, but at every impulse render what is just, and at every impression preserve the power of comprehension.
23. Everything suits me that is fitting for you, O universe. Nothing arrives ahead of schedule or overdue when it comes from you at its proper hour. Everything is fruit for me that your seasons bring, O nature. From you are all things, in you are all things, to you all things return. That man says, 'Dear city of Cecrops' — will you not say, 'Dear city of Zeus'?
24. 'Do little,' he says, 'if you mean to be cheerful.' Is it not better to do what is necessary, and whatever the reason of a creature naturally social chooses, and as it chooses? For this brings not only the cheerfulness that comes from acting well, but also that which comes from doing little. For if one cuts away most of what we say and do, since it is not necessary, one will be more at leisure and less troubled. Hence one must remind oneself at every turn: is this perhaps one of the unnecessary things? And one must cut away not only unnecessary actions but also unnecessary impressions; for then unneeded actions will not follow after them either.
25. Try how the life of the good man suits you too — one who is content with what is allotted from the whole, and satisfied with his own just action and benevolent disposition.
26. You have seen those things; look now at these too. Do not trouble yourself; make yourself simple. Someone does wrong? He does wrong to himself. Something has happened to you? Good — everything that happens was spun and fated for you from the beginning, out of the whole. In short, life is brief; one must profit from the present with good sense and justice. Be sober without straining.
27. Either an ordered universe or a jumbled confusion. But surely it is an ordered universe. Or could some order subsist in you while there is disorder in the whole? And that too when all things are so distinguished, yet interspersed, and in sympathy with one another.
28. A dark character, a womanish character, a stubborn character; bestial, brutish, childish, stupid, false, scurrilous, mercenary, tyrannical.
29. If he who does not recognize what exists in the universe is a stranger to the universe, no less a stranger is he who does not recognize what is happening in it. A fugitive is he who flees the reason that governs the community; blind is he who shuts the eye of the mind; a beggar is he who is in need of another and does not have from himself all that is useful for life; an abscess on the universe is he who withdraws and separates himself from the reason of common nature by being displeased with what happens — for the same nature that bore you bears this too; a severed limb from the city is he who cuts his own soul off from that of rational beings, which is one.
30. One philosophizes without a tunic, another without a book. Here's another, half-naked: 'I have no bread,' he says, 'yet I hold to reason.' — And I have no nourishment from my studies, yet I hold on.
31. Love the little craft you have learned, and rest content in it; and pass through the rest of life as one who has entrusted all that is his own to the gods with his whole soul, making himself neither tyrant nor slave to any man.
32. Call to mind, for instance, the times of Vespasian: you will see all the same things — people marrying, raising children, falling ill, dying, making war, feasting, trading, farming, flattering, being stubborn, suspecting, plotting, praying for some to die, grumbling at their present state, falling in love, hoarding wealth, longing for the consulship, for kingship — well, that life of theirs is now nowhere at all. Pass again to the times of Trajan: again all the same things; that life too has died. In the same way, review the other records of times and whole nations, and see how many, having strained themselves to the utmost, soon fell and were dissolved into their elements. Above all you must call to mind those you yourself have known, straining after empty things, having let go of doing what accorded with their own constitution and clinging to that and being satisfied with it. And here it is necessary to remember that one's attention to each action has its own worth and proportion; for in this way you will not lose heart, provided you do not spend more time than is fitting on lesser things.
33. Words once in common use are now obsolete; so too the names of men once greatly celebrated are now, in a way, obsolete words — Camillus, Caeso, Volesus, Dentatus, and before long Scipio and Cato too, then Augustus, then Hadrian and Antoninus. Everything fades and quickly turns into legend, and complete forgetfulness quickly buries it. And I say this of those who shone in some marvelous way; the rest, the moment they breathe their last, are "unseen, unheard of." And what, in any case, is being remembered forever? Utterly empty. So what is it that deserves our effort? This one thing: a just mind, actions for the common good, speech incapable of deceit, and a disposition that welcomes whatever happens as necessary, as familiar, as flowing from a source and origin of that same kind.
34. Give yourself over willingly to Clotho, letting her spin you into whatever affairs she pleases.
35. Everything is short-lived, both the one who remembers and the one remembered.
36. Watch continually how all things come to be through change, and accustom yourself to grasp that the nature of the whole loves nothing more than reshaping what currently exists into fresh forms that resemble it. Everything that exists is, in a sense, the seed of what will come from it — but you imagine seeds only as what is thrown into the earth or into a womb, which is far too simple-minded a view.
37. You will soon be dead, and still you are not simple, not untroubled, not free of suspicion that you might be harmed from outside, not gracious to everyone, not placing wisdom in doing what is right alone.
38. Look closely into their ruling faculties, even those of the wise, and see what they run from and what they pursue.
39. Your harm does not reside in another person's ruling faculty, nor indeed in any turn or alteration of what surrounds you. Where then? Where your own judgment about evils resides. So let that judgment not be made, and all is well. And even if the part nearest to it, this poor body, is cut, burned, festers, rots, still let the faculty that judges about these things keep quiet — that is, let it decide that nothing is evil or good which can happen equally to a bad man and a good one. For what happens equally to the one living against nature and the one living according to nature is itself neither according to nature nor against it.
40. Constantly conceive of the universe as one living creature, possessing one substance and one soul; and note how all things are referred back to its one perception, and how one urge drives its every action, and how each existing thing works together with the rest as a co-cause of whatever comes into being, and what a weaving and twining-together this all makes.
41. You are a little soul carrying a corpse, as Epictetus used to say.
42. There is no evil in things that come about through change, just as there is no good in things that arise from change.
43. Time is a river of things coming to be, and a violent stream; for as soon as each thing appears it has been swept away, and another is carried along, and it too will be carried off.
44. Every occurrence is as ordinary and expected as roses opening in springtime or fruit ripening come summer; so it is with sickness, dying, slander, betrayal, and anything else that delights or troubles the foolish.
45. What follows is always fitted intimately to what went before; for this is not some detached enumeration containing only what is forced together, but a reasoned connection — and just as the things that exist are arranged in harmonious order, so the things that come to be display not mere succession but a wondrous kinship.
46. Always remember the saying of Heraclitus: that the death of earth is to become water, and the death of water is to become air, and of air, fire, and back again. Remember too the man who forgets where the road leads; and that people are at odds with the very Reason that governs the universe, the thing they live with more constantly than anything else; and that the things they meet with every day seem strange to them; and that our waking deeds and words must not resemble a dream, since even while asleep we go on performing and uttering things; and that we must not behave toward our elders the way infants do, merely taking over whatever was handed down to us.
47. Just as, if one of the gods told you that you would die tomorrow, or certainly the day after, you would no longer think it a great matter whether it were the day after rather than tomorrow, unless you were utterly ignoble — for how much is the difference between them? — so too, count it no great matter whether it happens after many years rather than tomorrow.
48. Keep constantly in mind how many physicians have died, after knitting their brows so often over the sick; how many astrologers, after foretelling other people's deaths as if it were some great thing; how many philosophers, after countless arguments about death or immortality; how many great warriors, after killing so many; how many tyrants, after wielding power of life and death with terrible arrogance as though they were immortal; how many whole cities have died, so to speak — Helike, Pompeii, Herculaneum, and countless others. Go over as well all those you have known, one after another: one man buried another and was then laid out himself, and another buried him, and all of this in a short space of time. In short, always see human affairs as short-lived and worthless — yesterday a bit of mucus, tomorrow ashes or a mummy. So travel across this brief stretch of time following nature's way, and lay it down content, the way a ripened olive drops from the branch, speaking well of the ground that fed it and grateful to the tree that grew it.
49. Be like the headland against which the waves constantly break; it stands firm, and around it the raging waters are lulled to rest. "How unlucky I am, that this happened to me." Not at all—rather, how lucky I am, that although this has happened to me, I remain free of grief, neither crushed by what is present nor afraid of what is coming. For such a thing could have happened to anyone, but not everyone would have remained free of grief over it. Why then call that a misfortune rather than this a good fortune? Do you really call something a misfortune for a human being, when it is not a failure of human nature? And does something seem to you to be a failure of human nature, when it is not against that nature's own will? What then? You have learned its will. Does this thing that has happened prevent you at all from being just, great-minded, self-controlled, sensible, unhasty in judgment, unerring, honorable, free—and all the rest, in whose presence human nature keeps what is properly its own? Remember from now on, in everything that draws you toward grief, to apply this principle: not that this is a misfortune, but that bearing it nobly is good fortune.
50. A crude but still effective help toward contempt of death is the recollection of those who clung tenaciously to life. What more did they gain than those who died young? Somewhere, at any rate, they lie now — Caedicianus, Fabius, Julianus, Lepidus, or anyone like them, who carried out many others for burial and then were themselves carried out. The whole interval is small, and even that small span is spent amid how many troubles, in what company, and in what a wretched little body. So do not treat it as a great matter. Look behind you at the vast gulf of time, and ahead at another infinity. In the face of this, what difference is there between the man who lived three days and the man who lived three lifetimes, like old Nestor?
51. Always run the short way; the short way is the way in accordance with nature, so as to speak and act in the healthiest manner possible in everything. Such a purpose frees a person from toils, from straining, and from all contrivance and affectation.

======== Book 5 ========

1. At dawn, when you are reluctant to get up, let this thought be ready at hand: I am rising to do the work of a human being. Why then am I irritated, if I am setting out to do what I was born for and what I was brought into the world to do? Or was I made for this, to lie warm under the covers? "But this is more pleasant." So were you born for pleasure — altogether for being acted upon, and not for action? Do you not see the little plants, the little sparrows, the ants, the spiders, the bees doing their own work, each putting together its own share of the world's order? And then are you unwilling to do the work proper to a human being? Do you not run toward what accords with your own nature? "But one must also rest." I agree — yet nature has set a measure for that too, just as it has set a measure for eating and drinking; and yet you go beyond the measure, beyond what is enough, while in your actions you no longer do so, but stay within what is possible. For you do not love yourself — otherwise you would love your nature too, and its will. But those who love their own crafts wear themselves down over the works of those crafts, unwashed and unfed; you honor your own nature less than the engraver honors engraving, the dancer dancing, the miser his money, or the vain man his little glory. And these people, when they are absorbed in something, are unwilling to eat or sleep rather than build up the things they are devoted to; yet do the actions of fellowship seem to you cheaper and worth less effort?
2. How easy it is to push away and wipe out every disturbing or unfitting impression, and at once to be in complete calm.
3. Judge yourself worthy of every word and deed that accords with nature, and do not let the blame or talk that some may bring afterward distract you; rather, if what was done or said is good, do not judge it beneath you. Other people, after all, are governed by their own guiding minds and move by their own impulses; pay that no mind, but hold to your own path, in step with your own nature and with the nature shared by all — for these two have one and the same road.
4. I journey through what is in accordance with nature, until I fall and come to rest, breathing my last into that from which I draw breath each day, and collapsing onto the very ground that supplied my father with the seed, my mother with the blood, and my nurse with the milk that made me — the same ground that, day upon day across all these years, has fed me and given me drink, that holds me up as I walk on it and put it to countless uses.
5. They cannot admire your sharpness of mind — very well; but there are many other things of which you cannot say, "I was not born for that." Offer, then, those qualities which are entirely within your power: integrity, dignity, endurance of hardship, distaste for pleasure, contentment with your lot, needing little, kindliness, freedom, simplicity, freedom from idle talk, greatness of spirit. Do you not perceive how many qualities you are already able to offer, for which there is no excuse of natural incapacity or unfitness, and yet you still willingly remain below the mark? Or are you forced, by having been made without natural gifts, to grumble, to be stingy, to flatter, to blame your poor little body, to curry favor, to boast, and to be tossed about so much in your soul? No, by the gods — you could have been rid of all this long ago; only, if it must be so, you might be found somewhat slow and hard to follow in understanding — yet even this must be trained against, not neglected, and not indulged as if you took pleasure in your own sluggishness.
6. One person, when he has done something good for someone, is quick to also reckon up the favor owed him for it. Another is not quick to do that, yet still, within himself, thinks of the other as a debtor and knows what he has done. But another, in a way, does not even know what he has done, but is like a vine that has borne its cluster of grapes and looks for nothing further once it has once borne its own fruit. A horse that has run, a dog that has tracked, a bee that has made honey, and a man who has done a good deed does not shout about it, but moves on to another act, just as the vine moves on to bear its cluster again in season. So one must be among those who, in a way, do this without dwelling on it.— Yes, but that very thing must be attended to, someone says: for it is proper to the social being to perceive that it acts socially, and, by Zeus, to want the fellow member of society to perceive it too.— What you say is true, but you misunderstand what is now being said; because of this you will become one of those I mentioned before, for they too are led astray by a certain plausible line of reasoning. But if you are willing to grasp what is actually meant, do not fear that on this account you will leave some act of social usefulness undone.
7. The prayer of the Athenians: "Rain, rain, dear Zeus, upon the plowed land of the Athenians and upon the plains." Either one should not pray at all, or one should pray like this — simply and freely.
8. What is meant when it is said that Asclepius prescribed for this man horseback riding, or cold bathing, or going barefoot, is the same sort of thing as saying that the nature of the whole has prescribed for this man disease, or disability, or loss, or something else of that kind. For there too, "prescribed" signifies something like this: he ordered this for him as fitting toward health; and here too, what happens to each person has been ordered for him in some way as fitting toward his destiny. For this is how we say things happen to us as well — just as craftsmen say that the squared stones in walls or in pyramids "fit together," joining with one another by a certain fitting arrangement. For altogether there is one single harmony, and just as the universe is completed as such a body out of all bodies, so destiny is completed as such a cause out of all causes. Even the thoroughly unlearned understand what I mean, for they say, "this brought it upon him." So then, this was brought upon this man, and this was ordered for this man. So we ought to receive these things in the way we receive what Asclepius orders. Many of his orders are indeed harsh, yet we accept them looking forward to being well.
Let the accomplishment and completion of what seems good to the common nature seem to you to be something of this same sort — as your own health is; and so welcome everything that happens, even if it seems rather harsh, because it leads you there, toward the health of the universe and the good passage and good fortune of Zeus. For he would not have brought this upon anyone if it were not of benefit to the whole; nor does even an ordinary nature bring anything that is not fitting for that which it governs. So then, for two reasons you must be content with what happens to you: for one, because it came to be for you, and was prescribed for you, and stood in some relation to you, spun together from the oldest causes from above; and for the other, because for him who governs the whole, what comes to each individual is a cause of his good passage and completion, and, by Zeus, of his very cohesion. For the whole is maimed if you sever any part whatsoever of the connection and continuity — of the causes, just as of the parts; and you sever it, so far as it depends on you, whenever you are discontented, and in a way you destroy it.
9. Do not be disgusted, nor give up, nor grow impatient, if it does not happen densely enough for you to act on right principles in every case; but even when knocked back, return to it again, and be glad if most of what you do is more worthy of a human being, and love this, that to which you return, and do not return to it as a pupil returns to a strict tutor, but as those with sore eyes turn to the sponge and the egg, as another turns to a poultice, as to a soothing compress. For in this way you will show that obeying reason is no burden, but that you find rest in it. Remember that philosophy wants only what your own nature wants; but you were wanting something else, not in accordance with nature. For what could be more agreeable than this? Is it not for this very reason that pleasure deceives? But look and consider whether greatness of soul is not more agreeable, and freedom, and simplicity, and considerateness, and holiness. For what is more agreeable than practical wisdom itself, when you consider the unstumbling and smooth-flowing character, in every matter, of the faculty of understanding and knowledge?
10. Things are, in a way, wrapped in such a veil that to not a few philosophers, and not the run-of-the-mill ones either, they have seemed altogether incomprehensible; indeed even to the Stoics themselves they seem hard to comprehend — and all our assent is subject to change, for where is the man who never changes? Go, then, to the very objects themselves, seeing them as short-lived and worthless, capable of being in the possession of a pervert, or a prostitute, or a bandit. After that, go on to the characters of those who live alongside you, among whom it is hard to put up with even the most agreeable, not to mention that a man scarcely puts up with even himself. In such murk and filth, then, and in so great a flux of substance and time and motion and things moved, I cannot conceive what there could be worth prizing or being seriously concerned with at all. On the contrary, one must comfort oneself and wait for the natural dissolution, and not be vexed at the delay, but find rest in only these two things: one, that nothing will befall me that fails to fit the workings of the whole cosmos; the other, that no external force can make me act against my own indwelling god and guardian spirit — since no one has power to compel it into wrongdoing.
11. To what use, then, am I now putting my own soul? Ask yourself this at every turn and examine it: what do I have right now in this part of me they call the ruling faculty, and whose soul do I actually have at this moment? A child's? A young man's? A little woman's? A tyrant's? A beast's? A wild animal's?
12. What sort of things the many take to be good — you could learn even from this. If someone were to conceive of things that are truly good — prudence, self-control, justice, courage — having conceived these first, he could not then take in the phrase 'amid such an abundance of goods,' for it would not fit. But if someone first conceives what the many regard as goods, he will take in that line and readily accept it as aptly applied — the line spoken by the comic poet. That is how much the many themselves sense the difference: otherwise that phrase would not have jarred and been rejected in one case, while in the case of wealth and the good fortunes that lead to luxury or reputation we accept it as fittingly and cleverly said. Go on, then, and ask whether such things are to be honored and supposed goods — things such that, once conceived, it would fittingly follow that the man who possesses them, from sheer abundance, 'has nowhere to relieve himself.'
13. I am composed of a causal part and a material part. Neither of these will perish into non-being, just as neither arose out of non-being. So every part of me will be arranged, by change, into some part of the universe, and that in turn will change into another part of the universe, and so on into infinity. It was by this kind of change that I too came to be, and those who begot me, and so on back into another infinity. For nothing prevents saying this even if the universe is administered according to fixed cycles.
14. Reason and the art of reasoning are powers sufficient to themselves and to their own workings. They set out from their own proper starting point and travel toward the end set before them — which is why such actions are called 'right actions,' signifying the rightness of the path.
15. None of these things should be called a man's, which do not belong to man as man. They are not requirements of man, nor does man's nature promise them, nor are they completions of man's nature. So the end is not located in them for man, nor is the good, which is the fulfillment of the end. For if any of these did belong to man, then despising them and rising above them would not belong to him, nor would the man who makes himself free of need of them be praiseworthy, nor would the man who deprives himself of any of them be good — if these things were in fact goods. Yet in reality, the further a person strips away from himself things of this kind, or patiently accepts losing some of them, the better a person he becomes.
16. Whatever you keep picturing to yourself, such will your mind become — for the soul is dyed by its impressions. Dye it, then, by constant repetition of impressions like these: that wherever a life can be lived at all, a good life can be lived there too; and a life can be lived inside a palace, so a good life can be lived inside a palace as well. And again: that whatever a thing has been constructed for, toward that it is carried; and that toward which it is carried, in that lies its end; and where the end is, there too is each thing's advantage and good. Therefore the good of the rational creature is community. For that we were born for community has long since been shown. Or was it not obvious that the lesser exist for the sake of the greater, and the greater for one another's sake? And among things, the ensouled are greater than the unensouled, and among the ensouled, the rational are greater still.
17. To chase after impossibilities is madness; and it is impossible for the base not to do the sort of things they do.
18. No one meets anything his own nature lacks the strength to endure. The same things befall another, and whether unaware they have even occurred, or putting on a show of a lofty spirit, he stands unmoved and takes no hurt. It is a shameful thing, truly, that mere ignorance and empty pride should turn out mightier than genuine understanding.
19. Things themselves do not touch the soul in the slightest, nor have any way in to the soul, nor can they turn or move the soul; it alone turns and moves itself, and whatever judgments it deems itself worthy of, such it makes for itself the circumstances that stand before it.
20. In one sense man is closest of all to us, insofar as we must do him good and put up with him; but insofar as some men stand in the way of my proper actions, man becomes for me one of the things indifferent, no less than sun or wind or a wild animal. By these, some activity of mine might be hindered, but no hindrance comes to my impulse and disposition, because of the reservation and the turning of obstacles to use. For the mind turns and converts every hindrance to activity into a furtherance of that same activity: what checked this task becomes a furtherance to the task, and what blocked this path becomes a help to the journey.
21. Honor the most powerful thing in the universe: that which uses all things and directs all things. Likewise honor the most powerful thing in you: this is that thing's kin. For in you too it is this that uses everything else, and your life is governed by it.
22. What is not harmful to the city does not harm the citizen either. Whenever you have the impression of being harmed, apply this rule: if the city is not harmed by this, neither am I harmed. And if the city is harmed, you must not grow angry, but show the one harming the city what he is overlooking.
23. Consider often the speed with which things that exist and things that come to be are swept past and carried away. For substance is like a river in ceaseless flow, its activities in constant change, its causes in countless turnings, and hardly anything stands still — even what is right beside us. And the infinite gulf of past and future, in which all things vanish. How then is he not a fool who, amid these things, puffs himself up, or is racked with strain, or complains, as though he were troubled for any length of time worth mentioning?
24. Remember the whole of substance, of which you have the smallest share, and the whole of time, of which a brief and momentary span has been marked off for you, and destiny — what fraction of it are you?
25. Someone wrongs me? Let him see to that; he has his own disposition, his own action. I now have what the common nature wills me to have, and I do what my own nature wills me to do now.
26. Let the ruling and governing part of your soul be unmoved by the smooth or rough motion in the flesh, and let it not mix itself with it, but wall itself off, keeping such reactions penned within their own province. But when they are transmitted into the understanding, as is natural in a body united into one, through that other sympathy, then you must not try to resist the sensation, since it is natural — but let the ruling faculty not add to it, of its own accord, the judgment that it is good or bad.
27. 'Live together with the gods.' And he lives together with the gods who continually shows them his soul satisfied with what has been allotted to it, and doing whatever the guiding spirit within wills — that spirit which Zeus has given to each person as overseer and guide, a fragment of himself. And this is each person's own mind and reason.
28. Are you angry at the man who reeks, angry at the man with foul breath? What good will that do you? That is simply the mouth he has, the armpits he has — such things cannot help but give off such a smell. "But," you say, "the man has reason, and can, by paying attention, work out where he is going wrong." Good for you — well then, you too have reason: rouse a rational disposition by a rational disposition, show him, remind him. For if he listens, you will have cured him, and there will be no need of anger. No need to play the tragic actor, and no need to play the whore.
29. As you intend to live once you have departed, so it is possible to live here. But if they will not allow it, then depart from life itself as well — yet in such a way as to suffer no evil. "The smoke bothers me, and I am leaving." Why do you think this is some great matter? So long as nothing of that sort drives me out, I remain free, and no one will prevent me from doing what I want — and what I want is whatever fits the makeup of a reasoning creature meant for life among others.
30. The mind of the whole is social. At any rate it has made the lesser things for the sake of the better, and fitted the better things to one another. You see how it has subordinated, coordinated, and assigned to each what it deserves, and brought the things of highest excellence into concord with one another.
31. How have you behaved, up to now, toward the gods, your parents, your brothers, your wife, your children, your teachers, your tutors, your friends, your household, your servants? Is it true of you, toward all of them up to now, that you have neither done nor said anything outrageous? Recall, too, what sort of things you have come through, and what sort of things you have had the strength to endure, and that the story of your life is now complete, and your service finished, and how many fine things you have seen, and how many pleasures and pains you have looked past, and how many honors you have passed over, and toward how many ungracious people you have been gracious.
32. Why do untrained and ignorant souls throw into confusion a soul that is trained and knowing? What soul, then, is trained and knowing? One that knows beginning and end, and the reason that runs through the whole of substance and administers the universe throughout the whole of time according to fixed cycles.
33. How soon you will be ash, or a skeleton, and either a name, or not even a name — and the name is just a sound and an echo. And the things prized so highly in life are empty and rotten and small: little dogs snapping at one another, quarrelsome children, laughing and then immediately crying. But Trust and Modesty and Justice and Truth have withdrawn to Olympus, far from this broad-pathed earth. What, then, still holds you here, if the things perceived by the senses are easily changed and never stand still, and the organs of sense are dim and easily deceived, and the poor little soul itself is a vapor rising from blood, and gaining a good reputation among such people is empty? What then? Wait calmly for either extinction or transformation. And until the moment for that arrives, what is enough? What else but to revere the gods and speak well of them, and to do good to human beings and to bear with them and hold back from them — and as for everything within the bounds of this little flesh and breath, to remember that these are neither yours nor within your power.
34. You can always flow well, if you can also proceed well, if you can grasp things and act as the way requires. Two things are common to the soul of god and to the soul of man and of every rational creature: not to be hindered by another, and to place the good in a just disposition and action, and to let desire stop there.
35. If this is neither a vice of mine nor an activity in accordance with a vice of mine, and the common good is not harmed, why do I trouble myself over it, and what harm is done to the common good?
36. Do not let yourself be swept away wholesale by impression, but help others as far as your power and your standing allow, even if what they lose is only among the indifferent things — yet do not go imagining that loss a harm; that is a bad habit. Rather do as the old man did, who on leaving asked back his foster-child's spinning top, all the while remembering it was only a top. So too here. So when you find yourself declaiming from the speaker's platform — man, have you forgotten what these things really were? "Yes, but people take them very seriously." Is that any reason for you to turn fool as well? I was once, wherever I happened to be caught, a man of good fortune. And having good fortune means you have assigned to yourself a fine share in life — and a fine share consists of well-turned dispositions of the soul, well-turned impulses, well-turned actions.

======== Book 6 ========

1. The substance of the whole is compliant and workable, and the reason governing it has within itself no cause to do evil; for it holds no vice, does nothing evilly, and nothing is harmed by it. All things come to be and are brought to completion according to it.
2. Do not concern yourself with whether you are doing what is fitting while shivering or while warm, whether drowsy or fully rested with sleep, whether spoken of badly or well, whether dying or doing something else instead; for even the act of dying belongs among the things a living body does, and here too it suffices to put the present moment to good use.
3. Look within. Do not let any thing's own quality, or its worth, slip past you unnoticed.
4. All underlying things will very soon change, and will either be turned to vapor, if indeed substance is one, or be scattered abroad.
5. The governing reason knows in what state it is disposed, and what it is doing, and on what matter it is working.
6. The best way of defending yourself is not to become like them.
7. Take delight in one thing and rest in it: moving from one act of service to the community to another act of service to the community, with the god in mind.
8. The ruling faculty is what rouses itself, turns itself, and makes itself into whatever it wants to be, and makes everything that happens to it appear to itself as it wants it to appear.
9. Each and every thing is brought to completion according to the nature of the whole; for it is not according to some other nature, whether one enclosing it from outside, or one enclosed within it, or one hanging apart outside it.
10. Either a jumble, an interweaving, and a scattering, or else union, order, and providence. If then it is the former, why do I even wish to go on lingering in so random a mixture and confusion? What do I care about anything else except how, at some point, to "become earth"? And why am I troubled at all? For the scattering will come upon me whatever I do. But if it is the latter, I revere it, I stand firm, and I take courage in the one who governs.
11. When you are forced by circumstances closing in around you to be somewhat disturbed, return quickly into yourself and do not go on out of rhythm any longer than necessity demands; for you will have a firmer grip on harmony by returning to it continually.
12. If you had both a stepmother and a mother at the same time, you would attend to the stepmother, and yet your return to your mother would still happen continually. That is what the court and philosophy are to you now. Return here often, and rest in her, through whom the things over there come to seem bearable to you, and you yourself bearable among them.
13. Take, for instance, forming this impression about side dishes and such foods: this is the corpse of a fish, that is the corpse of a bird or a pig; and again, that Falernian wine is a bit of grape juice, and the purple-bordered robe is sheep's wool dyed with a shellfish's blood; and in the case of sexual intercourse, it is the rubbing together of an internal membrane and, with a certain spasm, the discharge of some mucus. What powerful impressions these are, reaching the things themselves and passing straight through them, so that one sees what they really are! This is how one must act throughout one's whole life, and wherever things present themselves as too impressive and convincing, one must strip them bare, look upon their cheapness, and strip away the grand story with which they dress themselves up. For self-conceit is a clever deceiver, and precisely when you think you are most engaged with serious things, that is when it bewitches you most. Consider, then, what Crates says about Xenocrates himself.
14. Most of the things the crowd admires reduce to the most general class, things held together by mere cohesion or by nature — stones, timber, fig trees, vines, olive trees. Things admired by the somewhat more moderate reduce to what is held together by soul, such as flocks and herds. Things admired by those still more refined reduce to what is held together by a rational soul — not, however, a universal rational soul, but only insofar as it is skilled in some craft or otherwise clever, or simply owns a great number of slaves. But the one who honors a rational soul that is universal and civic no longer turns his attention to any of these other things; above all else he keeps his own soul, holding it and moving it rationally and in fellowship with others, and works together with his kin toward this same end.
15. Some things hurry to come into being, others hurry to have come and gone, and already something of what is coming into being has been extinguished. Flowings and changes renew the universe continually, just as the unbroken passage of time makes the boundless age ever new. In this river, then, in which one cannot stand still, what among the things rushing past could a person value? It is as if someone began to love one of the little sparrows flying by, and it has already vanished from sight. Such a thing, indeed, is life itself for each of us — like the exhalation from blood and the drawing of breath from air. For just as it is nothing more than drawing in the air once and giving it back, which we do each moment, so it is with giving back, to the place from which you first drew it, the whole power of breathing which you acquired at birth only yesterday or the day before.
16. Neither respiring like the plants is valuable, nor breathing like the cattle and wild beasts, nor being stamped with impressions through imagination, nor being jerked about by impulse like a puppet, nor herding together, nor being fed — for that is like excreting the waste of one's food. What then is valuable? Being applauded? No. Then neither is being applauded by tongues; for the praises of the many are just the clapping of tongues. So you have let go even of that little glory too — what is left that is valuable? I think it is this: moving and being restrained according to one's own constitution, the very thing toward which both attentive care and the arts lead. For every art aims at this, that the thing constructed should be well-suited for the work for which it was constructed; and the vinedresser tending the vine, and the horse-trainer, and the one who cares for the dog, all seek this. And what do the training of children and the teaching of them strive toward? There, then, lies what is valuable, and if this is well, you will not need to secure for yourself any of the other things. Will you not stop valuing many other things too? Then you will be neither free nor self-sufficient nor free from passion; for you will inevitably envy, be jealous, suspect those who can take those things away, and plot against those who hold what you value. In short, whoever is in need of any of those things must inevitably be in turmoil, and moreover must often find fault with the gods as well. But reverence and honor for your own mind will make you pleasing to yourself, well-fitted to your community, and attuned to the divine — approving, that is, whatever the gods allot and have ordained.
17. Up, down, in a circle — these are the movements of the elements; but the movement of virtue is in none of these, rather it goes forward on a more divine path, one hard to conceive, and fares well.
18. What a strange thing it is that they do. They are unwilling to speak well of the people living in their own time and alongside them, yet they set great store by being spoken well of by those born later, whom they have never seen and never will see. And this is not far from being distressed that those born before you did not speak well of you either.
19. Do not, just because something is hard for you to master, suppose it impossible for a human being; but whatever is possible for a human being and proper to him, consider that reachable by you too.
20. In the wrestling schools someone scratches us with his nails and, butting with his head, gives us a blow, yet we do not mark it out as an offense, nor take it amiss, nor afterward regard him with suspicion as one who plots against us; though we do stay on guard against him, not however as against an enemy nor with suspicion, but simply with good-natured avoidance. Let something like this happen in the other parts of life too; let us overlook many things done by those who are, as it were, our sparring partners. For it is possible, as I said, to avoid them without suspecting or hating them.
21. If someone can prove and show me that I do not think or act rightly, I will gladly change; for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever harmed. It is the one who persists in his own deception and ignorance who is harmed.
22. I do my own duty; nothing outside it pulls my attention away. All else is either lifeless matter, or a creature lacking reason, or a mind that has lost its bearings and cannot find the path.
23. Toward the irrational animals and, in general, toward things and objects, deal with them, since you have reason and they do not, with a great and free spirit; but toward human beings, since they have reason, deal with them as befits a community. And in all things call upon the gods. And do not fret over how long a time you will do these things; even three hours of such conduct are enough.
24. Alexander of Macedon and his mule-driver, once dead, came to the same state; for either they were taken up into the same generative principles of the universe, or they were alike scattered into atoms.
25. Consider how many things, bodily and psychic together, occur at the very same instant in each one of us. And so you will not be amazed if far more things — indeed all the things coming to be at once — subsist together in that one and all-encompassing thing which we call the universe.
26. If someone asks you how the name Antoninus is spelled, will you snap out each of its letters at him with force? So too if they grow angry, will you grow angry back? Won't you calmly go on and count out each letter in turn? Well then, remember here too that every duty is made up of a certain number of parts. These you must keep to, and without being thrown into confusion, and without answering the irritable with irritation, get on with the task before you, in due order.
27. How harsh it is not to allow people to reach for what appears to them to be their own and to their advantage. And yet in a way you don't allow them to do this, when you are indignant that they go wrong; for they are drawn, in every case, toward what seems to them their own and their advantage. —But it isn't so.— Then teach them, and show them, without being indignant.
28. Death is a rest from the pushback of the senses, from the pulling of impulse's strings, from the wandering of thought, and from service to the flesh.
29. It is shameful, in the life in which your body does not give out, for your soul to give out first.
30. Watch that you don't become thoroughly Caesar-ized, that you don't get dyed with that purple — for it does happen. So keep yourself simple, good, unmixed, dignified, unadorned, a friend of justice, reverent toward the gods, kindly, affectionate, strong for the tasks that are fitting. Fight to remain the man philosophy wished to make you. Revere the gods, save mankind. Life is short; the one fruit of earthly existence is a holy disposition and actions for the common good. Do everything as a disciple of Antoninus: his vigor in acting according to reason, his evenness everywhere, his holiness, the serenity of his face, his gentleness, his freedom from vanity, his eagerness to grasp matters accurately; and how he would never let anything go until he had first looked at it thoroughly and understood it clearly; and how he bore those who blamed him unjustly without blaming them back; how he was never in a hurry about anything; how he did not accept slander; how he was a precise examiner of characters and actions, not given to reproach, not timid, not suspicious, not a sophist; how he was satisfied with little — housing, bedding, clothing, food, service; how he was hard-working and patient; and how, because of his simple diet, he was able to remain at the same task until evening, not even needing to relieve himself outside his usual hour; and the steadiness and constancy of his friendships; and his tolerance of those who spoke frankly against his opinions, and his joy when someone showed him something better; and how he was reverent toward the gods without superstition — so that your last hour may find you with as clear a conscience as his.
31. Sober up, call yourself back, and having shaken off sleep once more and realized that what disturbed you were only dreams, look now, wide awake, at these things here, just as you looked at those.
32. I am made up of a little body and a soul. For the little body, all things are indifferent, for it cannot make distinctions. For the mind, everything is indifferent that is not its own activity; but whatever is its own activity, all of that lies within its power. And of these, moreover, it concerns itself only with the present; for its future and past activities are themselves, even now, indifferent.
33. Toil is not against nature for the hand or the foot, so long as the foot does the work of a foot and the hand the work of a hand. So too toil is not against nature for a human being as a human being, so long as he does what belongs to a human being. And if it is not against his nature, then it is not an evil for him either.
34. What great pleasures robbers, deviants, parricides, and tyrants have enjoyed.
35. Don't you see how ordinary craftsmen will accommodate themselves to laymen up to a point, yet none the less hold fast to the principle of their craft and cannot bear to depart from it? Isn't it strange, then, if the architect and the doctor will show more respect for the principle of their own craft than a human being does for his own — a principle he shares in common with the gods?
36. Asia, Europe — corners of the universe; every sea a drop in the universe; Athos a little clod of the universe; every present moment of time a point in eternity. All things are small, quick to change, vanishing away. Everything comes from there, setting out from that one common ruling source, either directly or as a consequence. And so the gaping jaws of the lion, and poison, and every harmful thing — like a thorn, like mud — are all after-growths of those solemn and beautiful things. So do not imagine them as foreign to that which you revere, but reckon up the source of all things together.
37. Whoever has seen the present has seen everything — both all that has come to be from eternity, and all that will be into infinity; since everything shares a single kind and a single shape.
38. Consider often the interweaving of all things in the universe and their relation to one another. For in a way all things are intertwined with one another, and in this respect are friendly to one another; for one thing follows on another because of the tension of motion, and the common breath, and the unity of substance.
39. Fit yourself to the circumstances allotted to you, and the people who share your lot, love them — but truly.
40. Any instrument, tool, or vessel is in good order if it does what it was made for — even though the one who made it is nowhere near. But in the things held together by nature, the power that made them is present within and remains; all the more reason to revere it, and to trust that if you keep and conduct yourself according to its will, everything is going for you according to mind. So too, for the whole, its own affairs go according to mind.
41. Whatever of the things not in our power you set down for yourself as good or bad, it is inevitable that when such a bad thing befalls you, or such a good thing eludes you, you will blame the gods, and hate the men who are or are suspected of being the causes of the loss or the mishap; and indeed we do much wrong because of the value we place on these things. But if we judge as good and bad only what is up to us, no cause is left either to accuse a god or to take up a hostile stand against a man.
42. All of us work together toward one outcome, some knowingly and with understanding, others without awareness — just as, I think, Heraclitus says that even sleepers are workers and fellow-laborers in what happens in the universe. One person contributes in one way, another in another, and even the one who finds fault and tries to resist and undo what is happening contributes in abundance — for the universe had need of that sort too. So then, understand which group you are ranking yourself among; for the one who administers the whole will in any case make good use of you and receive you as some part of his fellow-workers and collaborators. But you — do not become the kind of part that is the cheap and ridiculous line in the play, the one Chrysippus mentions.
43. Does the sun claim to do the work of the rain? Does Asclepius claim the work of Demeter, the giver of harvests? Consider likewise each star — are they not different, yet working together toward the same end?
44. If the gods took counsel about me and about what ought to befall me, they took counsel well; for it is not easy even to conceive of a god without counsel. As for what reason would they have set out to do me harm? What advantage would come to them, or to the common good which they care for above all, from that? But if they took no counsel privately about me in particular, they certainly took counsel about things in common, and whatever follows as a consequence of these I am bound to welcome and embrace. But if in fact they take counsel about nothing at all — which it is impious to believe, or else let us stop sacrificing, praying, swearing oaths, and doing the other things we do on each occasion as though the gods were present and living alongside us — but if in fact they take counsel about none of the things that concern us, then the deliberating falls to me alone, and working out my own benefit is my job. And what benefits each creature is whatever fits its particular makeup and design — mine being a rational, civic one. As Antoninus, my city and fatherland is Rome; as a human being, it is the universe. What benefits these cities, then, is alone what is good for me.
45. Whatever happens to each thing is advantageous for the whole — that would be enough to say. But if you watch closely you will see this too, as a general rule: what is advantageous to one person is also advantageous to other people. But let "advantageous" now be taken in the more common sense, as applied to things indifferent.
46. Just as the shows in the amphitheater and places like it grow tiresome to you because it is always the same things being seen, and the sameness of kind makes the spectacle sickening — so too you should feel about the whole of life; for everything, top to bottom, is the same things and from the same things. How long, then?
47. Constantly keep in mind all sorts of people, of all sorts of pursuits and every sort of nation, now dead — so that you come down as far as Philistion and Phoebus and Origanion. Now pass on to the other tribes; there we must move on to where so many powerful orators are, so many venerable philosophers — Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Socrates — so many heroes of earlier times, so many generals and tyrants of later times; and besides these, Eudoxus, Hipparchus, Archimedes, other sharp and great-minded natures, hard-working, cunning, self-willed, mockers even of human life itself, precarious and short-lived as it is — men like Menippus and all like him. About all of these, keep in mind that they have long since been laid low. What is so terrible in that for them? And what of those not even named at all? One thing here is worth much: to live out one's life with truth and justice, kindly disposed even toward liars and wrongdoers.
48. When you want to cheer yourself up, think of the good qualities of those who live alongside you — the energy of one, say, the modesty of another, the generosity of another, and something else in another. For nothing so delights as the likenesses of the virtues appearing in the temperaments of the people beside us, all bunched together as many as possible at once. So keep them ready to hand.
49. Why be upset that you weigh only so many pounds and not three hundred? Just so with the fact that you must live only so many years and not more: just as you accept the portion of substance allotted to you, so accept it with time as well.
50. Try to persuade them, but act even against their will, whenever the reasoning of justice leads that way. If someone resists using force, though, turn instead to what is agreeable and free of pain, and use the obstruction as material for a different virtue; and remember that you set out with a reservation, and that you were not reaching for the impossible. For what, then, were you reaching? For an impulse of a certain kind. And that you attain: whatever we were driven toward, that comes to be.
51. The lover of glory supposes another's activity to be his own good; the lover of pleasure supposes his own sensation to be it; but the man of understanding supposes his own action to be it.
52. It is possible to form no judgment about a thing and not be troubled in soul; for the things themselves have no natural power to produce our judgments.
53. Train yourself to attend without distraction to what someone else is saying, and as far as possible to get inside the speaker's mind.
54. What does not benefit the hive does not benefit the bee either.
55. If sailors spoke ill of the helmsman, or the sick of the doctor, would they be listening to anyone else — or would the helmsman himself do anything other than work out the safety of those sailing with him, or the doctor the health of those under his care?
56. How many of those with whom I entered the world have already departed from it.
57. To the jaundiced, honey tastes bitter; to those bitten by a mad dog, water is terrifying; and to children, a little ball is a fine thing. Why then am I angry? Do you think falsehood has less power than bile has over the jaundiced man, or venom over the man bitten by a mad dog?
58. No one will prevent you from living according to the reasoning of your own nature; and nothing will happen to you contrary to the reasoning of universal nature.
59. Consider what sort of people they are whom they wish to please, and by what gains and through what actions. How quickly the age will cover everything over — and how much it has already covered.

======== Book 7 ========

1. What is vice? It is this — something you have seen many times. And at everything that happens, keep this ready to hand: that it is this, something you have seen many times. All up and down you will find the same things, of which the old histories are full, and the middle ones, and the recent ones; of which the cities and households are full even now. Nothing is new; everything is both familiar and short-lived.
2. How else can your principles be put to death, unless the impressions that correspond to them are extinguished — and it is up to you to keep rekindling those continually. I am able to hold about this the judgment I ought; and if I am able, why am I disturbed? The things outside my own understanding are nothing at all to my understanding. Grasp this, and you stand upright. It is possible for you to begin life again. See things once more as you used to see them; for in this lies the beginning of life again.
3. The empty fuss of a procession, dramas on a stage, flocks, herds, sham fights with spears, a bone tossed to little dogs, a scrap of bread thrown into fish-ponds, the toiling and burden-bearing of ants, the scurrying about of frightened little flies, puppets jerked on strings. Amid all this, then, one must stand with good will and without disdain, yet keep in mind that each person is worth exactly as much as the things he has been earnest about are worth.
4. One must attend word by word to what is said, and impulse by impulse to what is done — in the one case seeing at once toward what end the reference is made, in the other watching carefully for what is signified.
5. Is my understanding sufficient for this task, or is it not? If it is sufficient, I use it for the work as an instrument given to me by the nature of the whole. But if it is not sufficient, either I hand the work over to whoever is able to accomplish it better — if this is not otherwise incumbent on me — or I do it as best I can, taking on someone able, with the aid of my own ruling faculty, to do what is now timely and useful for the common good. For whatever I do, whether by myself or with another, must be aimed at this alone: what is useful and fitting for the community.
6. How many who were once celebrated in song have already been handed over to oblivion — and how many who sang their praises are, long since, gone.
7. Do not be ashamed of being helped; for it is set before you to carry out your task, like a soldier in an assault on a wall. What then, if you are lame and cannot mount the battlement alone, but it is possible with another's help?
8. Do not let what is to come trouble you; for you will arrive at it, if you must, bearing the same reason you now use for what is present.
9. All things are woven together with one another, and the bond is sacred, and almost nothing is alien to anything else; for they have been arranged together and together adorn the same universe. For there is one universe out of all things, and one god through all things, and a single substance, and a single governing law, a shared reason running through every rational creature, and a single truth — since, at least, there is likewise a single completeness proper to beings of one kind who partake of that same reason.
10. Everything material is very quickly absorbed into the substance of the whole, and every cause is very quickly taken up into the reason of the whole, and the memory of everything is very quickly buried in eternity.
11. For the rational animal, the same act is according to nature and according to reason.
12. Upright, not straightened by another.
13. What the limbs of the body are to one another when united in one body, that same relation holds among rational beings even though they are separated, since they are constructed for one single work of cooperation. This thought will strike home to you more if you often say to yourself: I am a limb of the system made up of rational beings. But if, using the letter rho, you say instead that you are merely a part, you do not yet love mankind from the heart; doing good does not yet, by itself, bring you complete joy; you are still doing it merely as something fitting, not yet as doing good to yourself.
14. Whatever it wants, let it come from outside upon those things capable of being affected by such a coming. For those things, if they choose, will complain about what has befallen them; but I, unless I suppose that what has happened is bad, am not yet harmed — and the choice to withhold that judgment rests entirely with me.
15. Whatever anyone does or says, I must be good — just as if gold, or an emerald, or purple cloth, always said: 'Whatever anyone does or says, this emerald must stay true to its own hue.'
16. The ruling faculty does not trouble itself — I mean, it does not frighten itself into desire. But if someone else is able to frighten it or grieve it, let him try; for it will not, by its own judgment, turn itself into such states. Let the poor body see to it itself, if it can, that nothing happens to it, and let it speak up if something does happen to it; but the poor soul that fears, that grieves, that forms any judgment at all about such things — that will suffer nothing, for you will not bring it to such a verdict. As far as it depends on itself, the ruling faculty lacks nothing, unless it creates a need for itself; and likewise it is untroubled and unhindered, unless it troubles and hinders itself.
17. Happiness is a good guiding spirit within, or a good ruling faculty. What then are you doing here, imagination? Go away, by the gods, the way you came — I have no need of you. You have come by old habit. I am not angry at you; only go away.
18. Is someone afraid of change? What can even come to be without change? What is dearer or more proper to the nature of the whole? Can you yourself take a bath, unless the wood changes? Can you be fed, unless the food changes? Can anything else useful be accomplished without change? Do you not see, then, that your own changing is just the same kind of thing, and just as necessary, to the nature of the whole?
19. Through the substance of the whole, as through a torrent, all bodies pass, of one growth with the whole and working together with it, as our own limbs work together with one another. How many Chrysippuses has eternity already swallowed down, how many Socrateses, how many Epictetuses! Let this same thought occur to you concerning any person or thing whatsoever.
20. One thing alone distracts me: that I myself might do something which the constitution of man does not want, or in a way it does not want, or which it does not want right now.
21. Near is your forgetting of all things, and near is the forgetting of you by all things.
22. It is proper to man to love even those who stumble. This happens if the thought strikes you at the same moment that they are your kin, that they do wrong through ignorance and against their will, that soon both of you will be dead, and above all, that he has not harmed you — for he has not made your ruling faculty any worse than it was before.
23. Universal nature, working the whole substance like a lump of wax, shaped a little horse just now; then, melting that down, used the same stuff for a little tree; then for a little man; then for something else. Each of these held together for the briefest moment. It is no terrible thing for the box to be taken apart, just as it was no good thing for it to be put together.
24. A resentful look on the face is very much against nature; when it happens often, decency dies out in a person, until at last it is put out so completely that it cannot be kindled again at all. Try to grasp this very point: that it is against reason. For if even the awareness of doing wrong is gone, what reason is left for living?
25. Everything you see, the nature that governs the whole will very soon change, and out of their substance will make other things, and again out of the substance of those, still others — so that the world may always be fresh.
26. Whenever someone wrongs you, at once consider what good or bad he supposed in doing wrong. For once you see this, you will pity him, and neither be astonished nor angry. For either you yourself still suppose the same thing to be good that he does, or something else of the same kind — in which case you must forgive him; or if you no longer suppose such things to be good or bad, you will find it easier to be kind to one who has lost his way.
27. Don't picture absent things as if they were already present, but pick out from what's present the most fortunate features, and for their sake remind yourself how much they'd be missed if they weren't there. At the same time, be careful: don't let this enjoyment of them turn into a habit of over-valuing them, so that if they're ever absent, you're thrown into turmoil.
28. Roll yourself up into yourself. The rational ruling faculty, by nature, is content with itself when it acts justly, and through that very fact possesses calm.
29. Wipe out the impression. Stop the puppet-strings from jerking you. Confine yourself to the present moment of time. Recognize what is happening, to yourself or to another. Divide and separate the object before you into its cause and its matter. Think of your last hour. Leave the other person's wrongdoing right where the wrongdoing occurred.
30. Let your understanding stretch out alongside what is being said. Let your mind sink into events and into the people producing them.
31. Make yourself radiant with simplicity, self-respect, and indifference to what lies between virtue and vice. Love the human race. Follow god. He says that "all things are by convention, only the elements by reality" — it's enough to remember that all things are by convention; already that leaves very few things of any weight.
32. On death: either dispersal, if atoms; or, if it is a unity, either extinction or a change of state.
33. On pain: what is unbearable carries us off; what drags on is bearable. And the mind preserves its own calm by withdrawing into itself, and the ruling faculty is no worse for it. As for the parts hurt by the pain, let them declare their own case, if they can.
34. On reputation: look at the minds of those who seek it — what sort they are, and what sort of things they avoid, and what sort of things they pursue. And consider how, just as one heap of sand piled on another buries the ones before it, so too in this life, whatever came before gets swiftly buried under whatever follows.
35. "To a mind possessed of grandeur and a view over all time and all being, do you suppose human life looks like anything great?" "Impossible," he said. "Then won't such a person also consider death nothing terrible?" "Not in the least."
36. "It is a king's part to do good and be spoken of ill."
37. It is shameful that the face should be obedient, shaped and arranged as the mind directs, while the mind itself is not shaped and arranged by itself.
38. "For one ought not to rage at things — they care nothing about it."
39. "Grant joy to the immortal gods and to us."
40. "To harvest life like a ripe ear of corn — one stalk still standing, another not."
41. "But if I was neglected by the gods, and my child too, even this has its reason."
42. "For the good and the just are on my side."
43. Don't join in the wailing, don't get worked up.
44. "But I would answer him with good reason: 'You do not speak well, my friend, if you think a man of even the slightest worth ought to weigh the risk of living or dying, rather than looking only to this, whenever he acts — whether he acts justly or unjustly, and does the deeds of a good man or a bad one.'"
45. "For this is truly how it is, men of Athens: wherever a man takes up his post because he judges it best, or is placed there by the one commanding him, there, it seems to me, he must stay and meet the danger, giving no thought to death or to anything else except what is shameful."
46. "But, my good friend, consider whether nobility and goodness are not something other than saving one's life and being saved. For perhaps a true man ought to let go of the question of living so long or so short a time, and not cling to life, but leave that to god, and trust the women's saying that no one can escape his fate, and instead consider how he may best live out whatever time he has left to live."
47. Survey the courses of the stars as though running along with them, and keep constantly in mind the transformations of the elements into one another; for thinking on these things washes away the filth of life down here.
48. Plato put it well: when discussing human beings, one should also survey earthly things as though looking down from somewhere above — herds, armies, farms, weddings, divorces, births, deaths, the uproar of law courts, deserted lands, the varied nations of barbarians, festivals, funerals, marketplaces, the whole mixture and the order composed out of opposites.
49. Review the things that have happened before — all those changes of empires. It is also possible to foresee what is to come; for it will surely be of the same kind, and it is not possible for it to step outside the rhythm of what happens now. Hence to have observed human life for forty years comes to the same thing as observing it for ten thousand — for what more will you see?
50. "And what grew from the earth returns to the earth, but what sprouted from heavenly seed comes back again to the heavenly pole." Or else this is simply the dissolution of the interlockings among the atoms, and a similar scattering of the unfeeling elements.
51. "With foods and drinks and spells, they divert the channel so as not to die. . . . . . . . . . . . . . But when the wind blows from the gods, one must endure it, toiling without complaint."
52. More skilled at wrestling, perhaps, but not more sociable, nor more modest, nor better ordered in the face of events, nor kinder toward the failings of those near him.
53. Wherever a work can be carried out according to the reason shared by gods and men, there is nothing to fear; for wherever it is possible to gain benefit through activity that proceeds smoothly and according to one's constitution, there no harm need be suspected.
54. Everywhere and continually it is in your power to be reverently content with your present circumstance, to deal justly with the people present to you, and to apply your full skill to the present impression, so that nothing ungrasped may slip in unnoticed.
55. Do not look around at the ruling faculties of others, but look straight ahead to where nature is leading you — the nature of the whole, through the things that happen to you, and your own nature, through the things you must do. Each thing must do what follows from its own constitution; and everything else was framed to serve creatures that reason, just as elsewhere, in every instance, lesser things exist to serve the greater, while beings that reason exist for each other's sake. So then the foremost thing in man's constitution is the social instinct; second is unyielding resistance to the affections of the body — for it is proper to rational and intelligent motion to mark out its own boundaries and never be overcome by the motion of sense or of impulse, since both of these are animal-like, while the intelligent motion wishes to hold the first place and never submit to their control. And that is only just, since by nature it is fit to make use of all the rest. Third in the rational constitution is freedom from rash judgment and from deception. Let the ruling faculty, then, hold fast to these things and keep a straight course, and it has what belongs to it.
56. As one already dead, and having lived only up to now, live the rest of your life, drawn from what remains, according to nature.
57. Love only what happens to you and is spun together with your fate. For what could fit you better?
58. At every event, keep before your eyes those to whom the same things happened, and who then were vexed, astonished, complained. Where are they now? Nowhere. Well then, do you too wish to be like that? Rather than leave the shifting fortunes of others to those who shift and are shifted, why not become wholly concerned with how you yourself will use them? For you will use them well, and they will become material for you. Only pay attention, and be willing to be good to yourself in everything you do, and remember both things: that what you do matters, and also the material on which the action is done.
59. Dig within. Within is the spring of the good, and it is always able to well up, if you always keep digging.
60. The body too must be kept firm, and not thrown about in either movement or posture. For what the mind provides for the face, keeping it composed and dignified, the same discipline should apply to the entire frame. Yet all of it must be maintained without any air of contrivance.
61. The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing, in that it must stand ready and unshaken against what falls upon it, even unforeseen.
62. Constantly consider who these people are whose approval you want, and what ruling faculties they have. For then you will not blame those who stumble unwillingly, nor will you need their approval, once you look into the sources of their judgment and impulse.
63. "Every soul," it is said, "is deprived of truth against its will." So too with justice and self-control and kindness and everything of that sort. It is most necessary to keep this constantly in mind, for it will make you gentler toward everyone.
64. In the case of every pain, let this be ready at hand: that it is not shameful, and does not make the governing mind worse — for it does not corrupt it either as a rational being or as a social one. Indeed, for most pains, let even Epicurus's saying help you: that pain is neither unbearable nor unending, if you remember its limits and do not add to it in your imagination. And remember this too: that many things which are painful pass unnoticed under another name, being the very same thing — such as drowsiness, and being overheated, and having no appetite. So whenever you are displeased at any of these, tell yourself that you are giving in to pain.
65. Take care never to feel toward inhuman people what inhuman people feel toward human beings.
66. How do we know whether Telauges was not superior in character to Socrates? For it is not enough that Socrates died more gloriously, and argued more cleverly with the sophists, and endured the frost more hardily through the night, and when ordered to arrest the man from Salamis judged it nobler to refuse, and "strutted along in the streets" — a claim one might well doubt, if it were even true. Rather, one must consider what sort of soul Socrates had: whether he was able to be content with being just toward men and pious toward the gods, neither vainly indignant at wickedness nor enslaved to anyone's ignorance, neither receiving as something foreign whatever was allotted to him out of the whole, nor enduring it as unbearable, nor allowing his mind to share in the sufferings of his poor flesh.
67. Nature did not mix things together in the compound so tightly that it is not permitted to bound yourself off and make what is your own subject to yourself; for it is entirely possible for a man to become godlike and yet be recognized by no one. Remember this always, and this too: that living happily lies in very few things, and that just because you have despaired of becoming a logician and a natural philosopher, you should not for that reason give up being free, self-respecting, sociable, and obedient to god.
68. Live your life through without being forced, in the greatest good cheer, even if everyone shouts whatever they please, even if wild beasts tear apart the little limbs of this flesh that has grown up around you. For what, in the midst of all this, prevents the mind from keeping itself in calm, and in a true judgment about the things that surround it, and in a ready use of what is presented to it, so that judgment says to what befalls it: this is what you are in your essence, even though in appearance you seem otherwise; and use says to what falls under it: I was looking for you. For to me the present is always material for rational and social virtue, and in general for the skill of man or of god; for everything that happens is made familiar to god or to man, and is neither new nor hard to handle, but known and easy to work with.
69. This is what perfection of character means: to pass every day as if it were the last, neither throbbing with excitement nor going numb nor play-acting.
70. The gods, being immortal, are not annoyed that through so vast an age they must always, without fail, put up with people of this kind and so many of them who are worthless; and beyond that they also care for them in every way. But you, who are all but at the point of stopping, do you give up — and that though you are yourself one of the worthless ones?
71. It is ridiculous not to flee one's own vice, which is in fact possible, and instead to try to flee the vice of others, which is impossible.
72. Whatever the rational and social faculty finds to be neither intelligent nor sociable, it reasonably judges to be beneath itself.
73. When you have done someone good and another has been benefited by it, why do you go looking for a third thing beyond these, the way fools do — namely, to be thought to have done good, or to get something in return?
74. No one grows tired of being benefited, and benefit is action in accordance with nature. So do not grow tired of benefiting others, in the very act by which you benefit yourself.
75. The nature of the whole set out to make the world; and now either everything that comes to be comes about by way of consequence, or even the most sovereign things toward which the ruling faculty of the universe directs its own impulse are without reason. Remembering this will make you calmer about many things.

======== Book 8 ========

1. This too helps toward freedom from vanity: that you can no longer claim to have lived your whole life, or at least your life from youth on, as a philosopher. No, it has become plain to many others, and to yourself as well, that you are far from philosophy. So you are muddied, and it is no longer easy for you to acquire the reputation of a philosopher; your own position in life fights against it too. So then, if you have truly seen where the matter lies, let go of what you will be thought to be, and be satisfied if you live out whatever remains of your life, however much that is, as your own nature wants. Consider then what it wants, and let nothing else distract you; for you have had enough experience of how, wandering through many things, you nowhere found living well — not in syllogisms, not in wealth, not in reputation, not in enjoyment, nowhere. Where then is it? In doing what the nature of man seeks. How then will you do this? If you hold convictions from which your impulses and actions flow. What convictions? Convictions about good and bad things: that there is nothing good for a man which does not make him just, temperate, brave, and free, and nothing bad which does not produce in him the opposites of these.
2. At each action ask yourself: how does this stand with me? Will I regret it? A little while and I am dead, and everything is wiped away. What more do I seek, if the work now at hand is that of a creature with intelligence, sociable, and living under the same law as god?
3. Alexander and Gaius and Pompey — what are they compared to Diogenes and Heraclitus and Socrates? These latter men saw things, and their causes, and their matter, and their ruling faculties were the same as the things themselves; but as for the former, how much they had to foresee, and how many things they were slaves to!
4. They will do the same things none the less, even if you burst yourself with anger.
5. First of all, do not be disturbed; for everything that occurs unfolds by the working order of the whole universe, and in a little while you will be no one and nowhere, just as neither Hadrian nor Augustus are. Next, fixing your gaze on the matter, look at it as it is, and remembering that your task is to act as a decent human being, and to fulfill whatever your nature as a person requires, do that without turning aside, and say what appears most just to you — only do it kindly, with self-respect, and without pretense.
6. The nature of the whole has this as its work: to shift what is here to there, to change it, to lift it up from one place and carry it to another. All things are transformations, not such that one should fear something new; all things are familiar — but the allotments too are equal.
7. Any nature is satisfied within itself so long as it fares well along its own path, and a rational nature fares well when it lends assent to no impression that is false or hazy, when it aims its impulses solely at deeds that benefit the community, and when it limits what it desires and avoids to matters lying strictly within its own control, welcoming whatever share the shared nature allots it. For a human is a portion of that shared nature, much as a leaf's growth is a portion of a plant's growth — save that in the leaf's case, its growth belongs to something unfeeling, unreasoning, subject to hindrance, whereas in a person's case, one's portion belongs to something that cannot be hindered, that thinks and judges rightly, allotting each thing its measure of duration, substance, cause, action, and event, matching the two impartially and by desert. Do not search for whether one item corresponds exactly to another taken by itself, but rather whether the whole cluster of factors on one side corresponds, gathered together, to the whole on the other.
8. Reading is not possible for you now. But restraining insolence is possible; but rising above pleasures and pains is possible; but being above petty reputation is possible; but not being angered at the unfeeling and the ungrateful — and even caring for them — is possible.
9. Let no one, from now on, hear you finding fault with the life at court — nor even you yourself.
10. Regret is a kind of self-reproach for having let slip something useful; but what is useful must be something good, and a good and noble man ought to care about it; yet no good and noble man would ever regret having let slip some pleasure. Therefore pleasure is neither useful nor good.
11. What is this thing, in itself, by its own particular constitution — what is its substance and matter, what is its causal element, what does it do in the universe, and for how long a time does it exist?
12. When you rise from sleep with difficulty, remind yourself that it is in accordance with your constitution, and with human nature, to perform actions that serve the community, while sleeping is common even to irrational animals. And what is according to each thing's own nature is more its own, more suited to it, and indeed more pleasant to it.
13. Continually, and on every impression if possible, apply physics, apply the study of the affections, apply logical analysis.
14. Whomever you meet, say to yourself at once: what beliefs does this man hold about good and evil? For if he holds such-and-such beliefs about pleasure and pain and what produces each, and about reputation and disrepute, death and life, then it will not seem strange to me, and I will not think it odd, if he does such-and-such things — and I will remember that he is compelled to act that way.
15. Remember that just as it is absurd to be surprised that a fig tree bears figs, so it is absurd to be surprised that the universe bears whatever it bears, of which it is the bearer; and for a doctor and a pilot too it is absurd to be surprised if a patient has a fever, or if a contrary wind has arisen.
16. Remember that changing your course and following one who corrects you is equally an act of a free man; for it is your own activity, carried out according to your own impulse and judgment, and indeed according to your own mind.
17. If it is up to you, why do you do it? But if it is up to another, whom do you blame — atoms, or the gods? Either is madness. No one is to be blamed. For if you can, set the matter right; if you cannot do even that, at least set right the thing itself; and if you cannot even do that, what further use is it to you to find fault? Nothing should be done at random.
18. What has died does not fall outside the universe. If it remains here and is transformed here and breaks apart into the parts that compose it — the same elements shared by the cosmos and by you — even those components undergo change in turn, and none of them complains about it.
19. Each thing has come to be for some purpose — a horse, a vine. Why be surprised at this? Even the Sun will say, I have come to be for some task, and so will the rest of the gods. You, then — for what have you come to be? For pleasure? See whether the very thought can be tolerated.
20. Nature has aimed at the end of each thing no less than at its beginning and its whole course through, just like one who tosses a ball up. What good is it, then, to the little ball to be carried upward, or what harm to be carried down and even to have fallen? What good is it to the bubble to hold together, or what harm to be dissolved? The same is true of a lamp's flame.
21. Flip it over and look closely at its true nature — what it turns into once it has grown old, or fallen ill, or been sold into prostitution. Short-lived alike are the one who praises and the one who is praised, the one who remembers and the one who is remembered. And all this, moreover, in a mere corner of this region of the world — and not even here do all agree, nor does any single person agree even with himself; and the whole earth, too, is a mere point.
22. Attend to the underlying substance, or to the principle, or to the activity, or to the meaning. You suffer these things justly; or rather, you would prefer to become good tomorrow than to be good today.
23. Am I doing something? I do it referring it to the good of humankind. Does something happen to me? I accept it, tracing it back to the divine and to that wellspring of everything, out of which the whole fabric of existence is woven.
24. What does bathing look like to you? Oil, sweat, filth, greasy water, all of it disgusting. Such is every part of life, and everything it touches.
25. Lucilla buried Verus, then Lucilla died; Secunda buried Maximus, then Secunda died; Epitynchanus buried Diotimus, then Epitynchanus died; Antoninus buried Faustina, then Antoninus died. It's all the same story. Celer buried Hadrian, then Celer died. And where are those sharp minds now, the prophetic ones, the puffed-up ones? Sharp minds like Charax, and Demetrius the Platonist, and Eudaemon, and anyone like them. All of it short-lived, all long since dead. Some are not remembered even for a little while, some have turned into legends, and some have already faded out of the legends too. So keep this in mind: this little bundle of yours must either be scattered, or your small spark of breath put out, or you must be moved on and stationed somewhere else.
26. A man's joy is to do what is proper to a man. What is proper to a man is goodwill toward his own kind, disdain for the stirrings of the senses, discernment among plausible impressions, and contemplation of the nature of the whole and of what happens according to it.
27. Three relations: one to the body that encases you, one to the divine cause from which everything comes to everyone, and one to those who live alongside you.
28. Pain is either an evil for the body — let the body say so, then — or for the soul. But the soul can keep its own clear sky and calm and simply refuse to judge it an evil. For every judgment, every impulse, every desire and aversion, lies within, and nothing evil climbs up that far.
29. Rub out your impressions again and again, telling yourself: right now it is in my power that no wickedness live in this soul, no desire, no disturbance at all — but seeing everything for what it is, I use each thing according to its worth. Remember this power is yours by nature.
30. Speak — whether in the senate or to anyone at all — in an orderly way, not over-emphatically. Use sound sense.
31. The court of Augustus: wife, daughter, descendants, ancestors, sister, Agrippa, relatives, household, friends, Areius, Maecenas, physicians, sacrificing priests — the whole court, dead. Then move on to the others, taking not just the death of a single man, say a Pompey, but that phrase carved on tombs: 'last of his own line.' Work out how much anxious effort those before them spent trying to leave behind an heir — and then, necessarily, someone had to be the last one after all. Here again, the death of an entire line.
32. You must build your life action by action, and be satisfied if each one, as far as possible, delivers what is proper to it. No one can stop it from delivering what is proper to it. — But something external will get in the way. — Nothing can get in the way of acting justly, moderately, and sensibly. But some other, more active undertaking may well be blocked. Yet by welcoming the very obstacle, and by shifting gracefully to what is given instead, another action is at once substituted, one that fits into the composition we are speaking of.
33. Take it without vanity, let it go without a struggle.
34. If you have ever seen a severed hand, or foot, or a head cut off, lying somewhere apart from the rest of the body — that is what a man makes of himself, as far as it's in his power, when he refuses what happens and cuts himself off from it, or when he does something unsociable. You have flung yourself away, somehow, from the unity that nature intends — you were born a part of it, and now you have hacked yourself off. Yet here is the fine thing about it: you are able to unite yourself again. God has allowed no other part, once separated and cut away, to come back together again — but consider the kindness by which he has honored man: he arranged it so that a man need never be torn from the whole to begin with, and, if he is torn away, so that he can return, grow back together, and take up again his place as a part.
35. Just as nature has given each rational being its other faculties, more or less in proportion to what the nature of rational beings possesses, so too we have received this one faculty from her. For in the way that she turns everything that stands against her and resists her back into her own service, ranks it within destiny, and makes it a part of herself, so too the rational animal can turn every obstacle into its own material and make use of it for whatever it had already set out to do.
36. Don't let the picture of your whole life overwhelm you. Don't dwell on all the hardships that might plausibly happen to you, taken all together — instead, for each thing that presents itself now, ask yourself: what exactly about this task is unbearable, past enduring? You'll be ashamed to admit an answer. Then remind yourself that it is not the future or the past that weighs on you, but always the present — and the present shrinks down small once you mark it off by itself alone and put your mind to the test, whether it really cannot hold up against that alone.
37. Is Panthea or Pergamus still sitting beside the coffin of Verus? Or Chabrias or Diotimus beside that of Hadrian? Ridiculous. And even if they were still sitting there, would the dead notice? And if they noticed, would they be pleased? And if they were pleased, would that make the mourners themselves immortal? Weren't they too destined to age into old women and old men, and afterward die? And once these had died, what would those others have done next? All of it is rot and refuse stuffed in a sack.
38. If you can see sharply, look and judge, as the wisest, they say, do.
39. I see no virtue in the constitution of the rational animal that stands opposed to justice, but I do see one opposed to pleasure: self-control.
40. If you take away your own opinion about the thing that seems to be paining you, you yourself stand on the safest ground.—Who is 'yourself'?—Reason.—But I am not reason.—Granted. Then let reason itself not pain itself; but if something else in you is faring badly, let that part hold whatever view of its own condition it likes.
41. A hindrance to sensation is an evil for a living nature. A hindrance to impulse is likewise an evil for a living nature. And there is something else too that in the same way hinders and harms the constitution of plants. So too a hindrance to the mind is an evil for a rational nature. Now carry all of this over to yourself. Does pain or pleasure touch you? Sensation will attend to that. Has an obstacle come up against your impulse? If you rushed at it without qualification, then it is already an evil for you as a rational being; but if you allow for the common case, you have not yet been harmed nor hindered. As for what belongs properly to the mind, no one else is in the habit of hindering it; for neither fire nor iron nor a tyrant nor slander nor anything whatsoever touches it, once it has become 'a sphere, rounded, at rest in its own circling.'
42. I am not worthy to pain myself, for I have never willingly pained anyone else either.
43. Different things gladden different people; but what gladdens me is this: keeping the ruling faculty healthy, turning away from no human being and from nothing that happens to human beings, but looking on everything, receiving it, and using each thing, with kindly eyes, according to its worth.
44. Grant yourself this present time as a gift. Those who chase after posthumous fame do not reckon that the people to come will be just the same as these people they now find hard to bear — and those people too will be mortal. What is it to you, in any case, if those to come echo such-and-such sounds about you, or hold such-and-such an opinion of you?
45. Pick me up and throw me wherever you like. For even there I will keep the guiding spirit within me gracious — that is, content, so long as it can hold and act in accordance with its own constitution. Is this worth it, that on its account my soul should fare badly and become worse than itself — brought low, straining after things, clinging to things, cringing? And what will you find that is worth that?
46. Nothing can happen to any human being that is not a human accident, nor to an ox what is not an ox's, nor to a vine what is not a vine's, nor to a stone what is not proper to a stone. If, then, what happens to each thing is what is usual and natural for it, why should you be resentful? The common nature has not brought you anything unbearable.
47. If you are pained because of something external, it is not that thing that troubles you but your own judgment about it — and that you have the power to erase right now. But if it is something in your own disposition that pains you, who is stopping you from correcting the belief? Likewise, if you are pained because you are not doing something you believe to be sound, why not do it instead of being pained?—But something stronger stands in the way.—Then do not be pained, for the cause of its not being done does not lie with you.—But it is not worth living if this cannot be done.—Then leave life in good will, just as a man who is still acting well would when he dies, gracious even toward what stood in his way.
48. Remember that the ruling faculty becomes unconquerable when it gathers itself inward and is content with itself, doing nothing it does not wish, even when it takes its stand without reason. How much more, then, when it judges something with reason and after careful consideration! For this reason the mind free of the passions is a citadel — a human being has nothing stronger to flee to, and once he has taken refuge there he is thereafter unassailable. The one who has not seen this is ignorant; the one who has seen it and does not take refuge there is unfortunate.
49. Tell yourself nothing more than what the first impressions report. It has been reported that so-and-so speaks ill of you. This has been reported; but that you have been harmed — that has not been reported. I see that the child is sick. I see it; but that he is in danger, I do not see. So then, always stay with the first impressions and add nothing yourself from within, and nothing happens to you — or rather, add to it only as one who understands each of the things that happen in the world.
50. The cucumber is bitter? Set it aside. There are brambles on the path? Step around them. That is enough — do not add, 'And why do such things even exist in the world?' Since a natural philosopher would laugh at you for that, just as a carpenter or a cobbler would laugh at you for criticizing them because you see in their workshop shavings and off-cuts from what they are making. And yet they at least have somewhere to throw those away, while the nature of the whole has nothing outside itself — but the marvel of this craft is that, having bounded itself, it turns back into itself everything within it that seems to decay, grow old, and become useless, and out of these very things makes other, fresh things again, so that it needs no material from outside and has no need of anywhere to cast off what has gone rotten. It is content, then, with its own space, its own matter, and its own craft.
51. Don't be dragged along in your actions, don't be muddled in your conversations, don't wander aimlessly in your impressions, don't let your soul be wholly pulled inward or driven outward, and don't be so busy in life that you have no room to breathe. They kill, they hack bodies to pieces, they hound you with curses. What has any of that to do with keeping your mind clear, sound, self-controlled, just? It's like a man standing beside a clear, sweet spring and cursing it — it never stops bubbling up drinkable water. Even if he throws mud or dung into it, it will quickly scatter it, wash it away, and take no stain at all. So how do you become an ever-flowing spring rather than a well? By guarding yourself, every hour, toward freedom, along with good will, simplicity, and self-respect.
52. A man who doesn't know what the universe is doesn't know where he is. A man who doesn't know what he was born for doesn't know who he is, nor what the universe is. And a man who fails at either of these could not even say what he himself was born for. So what do you make of a man who chases or flees the applause of people clapping, when they don't know where they are or who they are?
53. Do you want to be praised by a man who curses himself three times an hour? Do you want to please a man who doesn't please himself? Does a man please himself who regrets nearly everything he does?
54. No longer merely breathe in unison with the air around you, but now think in unison with the intelligence that surrounds all things. For the power of intelligence is spread everywhere and pervades everything, for the one able to draw it in, no less than the air is for the one able to breathe it.
55. Vice in general does no harm to the universe, and a particular vice does no harm to anyone else — it is harmful only to the one to whom it has been granted also to be rid of it, as soon as he chooses to be.
56. To my own power of choice, my neighbor's power of choice is just as indifferent as his little breath and his little scrap of flesh. For even if we exist above all for one another's sake, still each of our ruling faculties has authority over itself alone. Otherwise my neighbor's wickedness would have to be my own harm — and god did not see fit to allow that, so that my misfortune should not depend on someone else.
57. The sun seems to be poured out, and indeed it is poured out everywhere, yet it is not drained away. For this pouring is a kind of stretching — that's why its rays are called aktines, from the verb 'to stretch out.' You can see what a ray is like if you watch sunlight entering a shadowed room through some narrow opening: it stretches out in a straight line and, as it were, presses against whatever solid thing it meets that blocks the air beyond, and there it stops — it doesn't slide off or fall down. That is the kind of pouring-forth and spreading the mind should have — never a spilling out, but a stretching — and when it meets obstacles it should not press against them violently or headlong, nor collapse, but should stand firm and illuminate whatever receives it. For it is the surface that fails to pass the light along that deprives itself of the light.
58. The man who fears death fears either the loss of all sensation, or a different kind of sensation. But if you will have no sensation at all, then you won't feel anything bad either; and if you gain a different kind of sensation, you will be a different kind of living being, and you will not have stopped living.
59. People exist for one another's sake. So either teach them, or put up with them.
60. An arrow moves one way, the mind another. Even when the mind is being cautious, even when it is turning something over in careful thought, it is still moving in a straight line, no less, toward the thing set before it.
61. Go into each person's ruling faculty, and let every other person, too, go into your own.

======== Book 9 ========

1. The man who does wrong acts impiously. For since the nature of the whole has made rational creatures for one another's sake, so that they should help one another according to merit and never harm one another, whoever transgresses her will is plainly impious toward the eldest of the gods. And the man who lies is likewise impious toward that same divine power; for the universal nature is the nature of things that are, and things that are stand in kinship with all things that exist. Moreover this nature bears the further name of truth, and stands as the original source of everything true. So the man who lies willingly is impious, insofar as by deceiving he does wrong; and the man who lies unwillingly is impious too, insofar as he falls out of harmony with the nature governing everything, and insofar as he disturbs the order by fighting against the nature of the world — for whoever is carried toward things opposed to the truth fights against himself, since he had already received the resources for it from nature, and by neglecting them he is no longer able now to distinguish the false from the true. And further, the man who pursues pleasures as goods and flees hardships as evils is impious; for such a man must inevitably, again and again, find fault with the common nature, as though it dealt out things unfairly to the worthless and to the good — since the worthless are often found among pleasures and possess the means to them, while the good fall into hardship and the things that produce it.
What's more, the man who fears hardships will sometimes come to fear things that are bound to happen in the world too, and that already is impious; and the man who chases after pleasures will not hold back from doing wrong, and that is plainly impious. But toward the things the common nature treats alike — for it would not do both unless it were disposed alike toward both — toward these, those who wish to follow nature must also be disposed alike, being of one mind with her. So whoever is not disposed alike toward hardship and pleasure, or death and life, or reputation and disrepute, all of which the nature of the whole employs alike, is clearly impious. And by the common nature's 'employing these alike' I mean that they befall alike, in due sequence, all things that come to be and come after, by a kind of ancient impulse of providence — the impulse by which, starting from some beginning, it set out toward this present ordering of the world, having conceived certain principles of things to come and marked out generative powers for such comings-into-being, changes, and successions.
2. It would belong to a more refined man to depart from among men having tasted no falsehood, no hypocrisy, no luxury, no arrogance. But to breathe your last after having had your fill of these is the second-best voyage. Or have you chosen to sit down beside vice, and does not even experience yet persuade you to flee the plague? For a plague is corruption of the mind, far more than any such distemper and shift of this surrounding air. That is a plague of animals, insofar as they are animals; this is a plague of human beings, insofar as they are human beings.
3. Do not despise death, but be well pleased with it, since this too is one of the things nature wills. For as it is to be young and to grow old, to increase and to reach one's prime, to cut new teeth, to sprout a beard, to turn gray, to father children and carry a child and bring it forth, and all the other natural workings that the seasons of life bring, such too is being dissolved. This, then, is the reasoning proper to a thoughtful man: not to hold himself toward death recklessly, nor violently, nor with contempt, but to wait for it as one of the natural operations — and just as you now wait for the hour when the infant will come out of your wife's womb, so await the hour in which your little soul will fall out of this husk. But if you want an ordinary rule that touches the heart directly, nothing will make you readier for death than attention to the very things from which you are about to be parted, and to the thought that you will no longer be entangled with their characters. You must not be offended at them at all — rather you must care for them and bear with them gently — remembering, however, that your release will not be from men who share your convictions. For this alone, if anything, would have pulled you back and held you fast in life: if it were granted to live together with those who held the same beliefs. But as it is, you see how great the weariness is in the discord of living together, so that you might say: 'Come quickly, death, lest I too forget myself.'
4. The one who does wrong, wrongs himself; the one who acts unjustly acts unjustly toward himself, making himself, himself, into a bad man.
5. Often the one who does not do something acts unjustly, not only the one who does.
6. It is enough that the present judgment be one of true grasp, the present action be for the common good, and the present disposition be one of contentment with everything that happens from an outside cause.
7. Erase the impression. Halt the impulse. Quench the desire. Keep the ruling faculty in your own control.
8. Among irrational animals a single soul has been divided out; among rational beings a single intelligent soul has been portioned out — just as there is one earth for all earthy things, and we all see by one light and breathe one air, all of us that have sight and life.
9. All things that share in something common press toward what is akin to them in kind. Everything earthy inclines toward earth; everything liquid flows together; everything airy does likewise, so much so that barriers and force are needed to keep them apart. Fire tends upward because of the elemental fire above, and every fire here below is so ready to kindle together with fire that any material a little drier than usual catches easily, because it has less in it to resist ignition. So too, everything that shares in the common intelligent nature presses toward its kin just as much, or even more; for the more superior a thing is compared to the rest, the readier it is to blend and merge with what is its own. So, right away, among irrational creatures we find swarms, herds, the rearing of young, and something like love; for souls were already present there, and the drawing-together force was found intensified in the superior kind, in a way that did not exist among plants or stones or wood. Among rational beings there are states, friendships, households, assemblies, and, even in wars, treaties and truces. And among beings still higher, a kind of unity arose even among things set apart from one another, as with the stars: so the ascent to a higher order was able to produce sympathy even among things standing apart. See, then, what happens now: only rational beings have now forgotten their eagerness for one another and their leaning together, and here alone the flowing-together is nowhere to be seen. And yet, even fleeing, they are overtaken all the same, for nature prevails. Watch closely and you will see what I mean: one could sooner find some earthy thing touching nothing earthy than find a man cut off from man.
10. Man bears fruit, and god, and the universe; each bears fruit in its own proper season. If common usage has narrowed the word strictly to the vine and things like it, that means nothing. Reason bears both a common fruit and a fruit of its own, and from it come other things of the same kind, of just the sort that reason itself is.
11. If you can, teach him better; if not, remember that goodwill was given to you for this very purpose. The gods too are well-disposed toward such people, and for some things they even work together with them, toward health, toward wealth, toward reputation. That is how good they are. And it is possible for you as well - or tell me, who is stopping you?
12. Do not labor as one wretched, nor wanting to be pitied or admired, but want only one thing: to move and to hold back, as the reason of the community requires.
13. Today I got out of every difficult circumstance - or rather, I threw out every difficult circumstance. For it was not outside, but within, in my judgments.
14. All these things are familiar from experience, short-lived in time, squalid in their material - all just as they are now among those we have already buried.
15. Things stand outside the door, each by itself, knowing nothing about itself and declaring nothing. What then declares about them? The ruling faculty.
16. The rational, social being's harm and benefit are found not in what is done to it but in what it does — and the same holds for its excellence and its failing: they too show up in action, not in what is merely suffered.
17. For the stone thrown upward, it is no evil to come back down, nor good to have gone up.
18. Go deep, deep within into their ruling faculties, and you will see what judges you fear - and what sort of judges they themselves are, even about themselves.
19. All things are in change - and you yourself are in constant alteration, and in some respect decay, and so is the whole universe.
20. Another's fault must be left where it lies.
21. Cessation of activity, a stopping of impulse and judgment, a kind of death - none of this is an evil. Go now to your ages of life: childhood, boyhood, youth, old age. Every change among these too is a death - is that anything terrible? Go now to the life under your grandfather, then the one under your mother, then the one under your father, and finding many other corruptions and changes and cessations, ask yourself: is that anything terrible? So too, then, is the ending and stopping and change of your whole life.
22. Run to your own ruling faculty, and to that of the whole, and to that of this man. To your own, so that you may make it a just mind; to that of the whole, so that you may remember what part of it you are; to that of this man, so that you may determine whether it is ignorance or judgment acting in him, and at the same time reckon that he is kin to you.
23. Just as you yourself are a piece that completes a political system, so too let every action of yours complete a political life. Whatever action of yours, then, has no reference - whether directly or at a distance - to the common end, that action tears your life apart and does not let it be one, and is seditious, like a man in a community who splits his own part away from such harmony.
24. Children's tantrums and games, and 'little spirits carrying corpses' - so that the scene from the Nekyia strikes more vividly.
25. Go to the quality of the cause, and having stripped it of its material, look at it; then also limit the time - how long, at most, this particular quality is by nature able to persist.
26. You have endured countless things because you were not content with your ruling faculty doing what it does, constituted as it is. But enough.
27. Whenever someone else blames you or hates you, or people cry out such things, go to their little souls, go inside, and see what sort of people they are. You will see that you need not strain yourself over whatever they happen to think about you. Still, you must be well-disposed toward them - for by nature they are friends, and the gods too help them in all sorts of ways, through dreams, through divinations, toward the very things they are at odds about.
28. The same are the cyclical revolutions of the universe, up and down, from age to age. Either the intelligence of the whole sets out anew toward each thing - and if that is so, accept what it sets in motion - or it set out once, and everything else follows in sequence, so why do you strain over it? For in a way things are atoms, or indivisible units. And the whole, if it is a god, is well disposed; if it is random chance, then do not you be random too. Soon earth will cover all of us; then it too will change, and those things will change into infinity, and again those into infinity. Whoever dwells on the successive waves of changes and alterations, and the speed of it all, will come to despise everything mortal.
29. A torrent is the substance of all things - it carries everything along. How trivial are these political affairs, and these little men who think themselves practicing philosophy - full of mucus! Man, what then? Do what nature now demands; set out, if it is given to you; and do not look around to see whether anyone will know. Do not hope for Plato's Republic, but be content if even the smallest thing goes forward, and consider the outcome of even this as no small matter. For who will change their opinions? And without a change of opinions, what else is there but slavery among people groaning and pretending to be persuaded? Go on now and tell me about Alexander and Philip and Demetrius of Phalerum. They will see, if they truly saw, what the common nature wanted, and trained themselves accordingly; but if they played the tragic hero, no one has sentenced me to imitate them. The work of philosophy is simple and modest - do not drag me off into solemn pretension.
30. Survey from above the countless herds, the countless rites, every kind of voyage through storms and calms, the differences among those being born, coming together, and passing away. Consider too the life once lived by others long ago, the life that will be lived after you, and the life now being lived among barbarian peoples; and how many do not even know your name, how many will forget it very soon, how many who now perhaps praise you will very soon blame you; and that being remembered, being renowned, or anything else of that sort, is worth nothing at all.
31. Freedom from disturbance regarding what happens from outside causes, and justice in the actions done from causes within yourself; that is, an impulse and an action that terminates in acting for the common good, since this is in accordance with your nature.
32. You can remove many of the superfluous things that trouble you, since they lie entirely in your own judgment, and you will thereby win for yourself a great deal of open space, by embracing the whole universe in your mind, by contemplating unending time, and by considering the swift change of each individual thing part by part — how brief is the interval from birth to dissolution, how vast the void before birth, and equally infinite the void after dissolution.
33. Everything you see will very soon perish, and those who watch it perishing will themselves very soon perish too, and the one who dies at the furthest old age will end up in the same state as the one who died before his time.
34. What are the ruling faculties of these people, what things they are earnest about, and for what reasons they love and honor — think of their little souls as laid bare naked before you. When they suppose they harm you by blaming, or benefit you by praising, what conceit that is!
35. Loss is nothing other than change. And in this the nature of the whole rejoices, in accordance with which everything happens well, and has been happening in the same way from eternity, and will go on happening in that same way without end. So why do you say that everything has always happened badly and always will happen badly, and that among so many gods no power was ever found to set these things right, but the universe has been condemned to be gripped in unceasing evils?
36. The rottenness of the matter that underlies each thing: water, dust, little bones, stench — or again: marbles are just calluses of the earth, gold and silver are sediment, clothing is hair, purple dye is blood, and all the rest is just the same. And the little breath of life is likewise another such thing, changing from one form into another.
37. Enough of this wretched life, this grumbling, this ape-like mimicry. Why are you disturbed? What in this is new? What is it that unsettles you? The cause? Look at it. Or is it the matter? Look at that. Beyond these two there is nothing else — so, toward the gods too, become at last simpler and better. It is the same thing to have examined these matters for a hundred years as for three.
38. If he did wrong, the harm is his own. But perhaps he did not do wrong.
39. Either all things flow from one intelligent source, converging as upon a single body, and the part ought not to complain about what happens for the sake of the whole; or else there are only atoms, and nothing but a jumble and a scattering. Why then are you disturbed? Say to your ruling faculty: you are dead, you are decayed, you have turned into a wild beast, you are play-acting, you herd with the flock, you graze like cattle.
40. Either the gods hold no power at all, or some power belongs to them. If they hold none, why bother praying? Yet suppose power truly is theirs — could you not instead beg for freedom from dread of these things, freedom from craving these things, freedom from grief over these things, rather than begging that some particular thing stay away or turn up? Surely, if the gods can act on our behalf at all, they can act on our behalf here too. Perhaps you will object: the gods left this matter for me to control myself. Then is it not better to exercise, as a free man, what has been placed in your control, than to grovel after what lies outside it, cramped and servile? Besides, who informed you that the gods give no help even within the sphere that is ours to govern? Try it, at least — start praying along these lines and see what follows. One person prays: let me get this woman into bed. You instead: let me feel no urge to bed her. Another prays: let this man be out of my way. You instead: let me not need him gone. A third prays: don't let my small child die. You instead: let me face his death without terror. In every case, redirect the prayer this way, and observe what comes of it.
41. Epicurus says: "In my illness my conversations were not about the sufferings of my poor body, nor," he says, "did I talk of any such things to those who came to visit me, but I went on discoursing about the fundamental facts of nature, and dwelt especially on this very point: how the mind, though sharing in such disturbances of the flesh, remains untroubled, guarding its own proper good. Nor did I give the doctors," he says, "any chance to strut about as if they were accomplishing something great, but my life went on well and rightly." Let the same, then, hold for you as for him — in illness, if you should be ill, and in any other circumstance whatever: for not to abandon philosophy amid whatever befalls, and not to babble along with the ignorant person untrained in nature, is common to every school of thought. Be intent only on what you are doing right now, and on the instrument by which you do it.
42. Whenever you are offended by someone's shamelessness, ask yourself at once: can there fail to be shameless people in the world? There cannot. So do not demand the impossible. This man is simply one of those shameless people who must exist in the world. Keep the same thought ready at hand for the rogue, the faithless man, and anyone who does wrong in any way at all — for the moment you remind yourself that this whole class of people cannot fail to exist, you will be gentler toward each of them individually. It is also useful to bring to mind at once what virtue nature has given man to counter this particular fault: for she has given, as an antidote, gentleness against the unreasonable man, and against another some other power — and in general it is possible for you to re-teach the one who has gone astray, for everyone who does wrong misses his true mark and has gone astray. And how have you really been harmed? You will find that none of these people, at whom you are provoked, has done anything that could actually make your mind worse — and it is there, and only there, that your harm and your evil have their whole existence. And what is strange or new about it, if the uneducated man does the things an uneducated man does? Look instead to whether it is not rather yourself you ought to blame, for not expecting that this man would commit this fault —
since you had the resources from reason to consider it likely that he would commit it, and yet you forgot, and now you are astonished that he has done wrong. But above all, when you blame someone as faithless or ungrateful, turn back upon yourself: for the fault is plainly your own, whether you trusted that a person of such a character would keep faith, or whether in granting the favor you did not give it unconditionally, nor in such a way as to have already reaped the whole fruit of it from the very act itself. What more do you want, after doing a man good? Is it not enough that you have done something in accordance with your own nature, but must you go seeking payment for it? As if the eye asked to be paid for its sight, or the feet claimed wages for their stride. For just as these limbs were fashioned toward a particular end, and in carrying out their own function according to their own makeup they gain what is rightfully theirs, so too man, being fashioned by nature to do good to others, whenever he does something beneficial or in some other way contributes to the common good, has done that for which he was constituted, and has what is properly his own.

======== Book 10 ========

1. Will you ever, O my soul, be good, and simple, and one, and bare, more visible than the body that surrounds you? Will you ever taste the disposition of loving and affection? Will you ever be full and without want, longing for nothing and desiring nothing, neither anything ensouled nor anything soulless, for the enjoyment of pleasures — not even more time in which to go on enjoying them, not a place or a country or a kindlier climate, not harmony with other people? But will you instead be content with your present condition, and pleased with all that is now present, and persuade yourself that everything is present to you from the gods, that all is well with you and will be well, whatever is dear to them and whatever they are going to give for the preservation of that perfect living being — the good and just and beautiful, which begets all things and holds them together and encompasses and embraces them as they dissolve into the generation of others like them? Will you ever be such as to share your citizenship with gods and men in such a way that you neither find fault with them at all nor are condemned by them?
2. Observe what your nature seeks, insofar as you are governed only by nature; then do it and accept it, unless your nature as a living being is going to be worse off for it. Next you must observe what your nature as a living being seeks, and take up all of that, unless your nature as a rational living being is going to be worse off for it — and the rational is, immediately, also the political. Using these rules, do not trouble yourself further about anything.
3. Everything that happens, happens either in such a way that you are by nature fitted to bear it, or in such a way that you are not by nature fitted to bear it. If then it happens to you as something you are fitted to bear, do not be vexed, but bear it as you are fitted to. But if it happens as something you are not fitted to bear, do not be vexed either — for it will destroy you and then itself pass away. Remember, though, that you are fitted by nature to bear anything which it lies within your own judgment to make bearable and tolerable, by regarding it as either in your interest or your duty to do so.
4. If he is mistaken, teach him kindly and show him what he has overlooked. But if you are unable to, blame yourself — or not even yourself.
5. Whatever happens to you was prepared for you from eternity, and the interweaving of causes has spun together, from everlasting, both your own existence and this event's coincidence with it.
6. Whether it is atoms or nature, set this down as the starting point: I belong to a whole governed by nature, and beyond that, I am akin to the other pieces that share my kind. Holding these two things in mind, since I am one piece among many, I will not chafe at whatever share falls to me out of that whole — since nothing good for the whole can wound the piece within it. What the whole contains works only toward its own good, and this holds true of every nature there is; but the nature governing the universe carries a further trait — no outside force can compel it to breed anything harmful to itself. Keeping in view, then, my membership in a whole of this sort, I will meet everything that comes to pass with good cheer; and since I am akin to the other pieces sharing my kind, I will do nothing that sets me against my fellows — I will instead reach for what suits our common bond, steer every impulse toward the shared good, and turn it away from whatever opposes that good. Once this pattern is followed through, an untroubled life must surely result — picture the untroubled life of a citizen who moves from one deed useful to his neighbors to the next, and takes gladly whatever task the city hands him.
7. For the parts of the whole—everything that nature encloses within the universe—destruction is a necessity; let this be understood in the sense of alteration. But if this were by nature an evil and a necessity for them, the whole would not be well managed, with its parts moving on toward alteration and constituted variously for the purpose of being destroyed. Did nature herself set out to do evil to her own parts, and to make them liable to falling into evil and necessarily bound to fall into it—or did such things happen without her knowing? Both are implausible. And if someone, setting nature aside altogether, should explain these things simply as what happens by their inborn constitution, it would still be ridiculous to say in one breath that the parts of the whole are constituted by nature to change, and in the next to be astonished or vexed at something as though it happened against nature—especially since the dissolution of each thing is into the very elements out of which it was composed. For it is either a scattering of the elements from which it was compounded, or a turning of the solid into earth and of the breath-like into air, so that these too are taken back up into the reason of the whole, whether the whole is periodically consumed by fire or renewed by eternal exchanges. And do not imagine that the solid and the breath-like element in you date from your first birth: all of this took its influx only yesterday and the day before, from the food you ate and the air you drew in. So it is this that changes, which you took in—not what your mother bore. And suppose that you are bound up all too closely with that other thing, your own particular quality—that, I think, has no bearing on what is now being said.
8. Having set these names for yourself—good, modest, truthful, sound of mind, of one mind with what is common, above the mind's ordinary reach—take care never to be renamed from them; and if you should lose these names, return to them quickly. Remember that 'sound of mind' meant for you a discerning attention to each particular and a freedom from inattention; 'of one mind with what is common' meant a willing acceptance of what is assigned by the common nature; and 'above the mind's ordinary reach' meant the raising of the thinking part above the smooth or rough motion of the flesh, and above petty reputation, and death, and all such things. If, then, you keep yourself among these names, not hankering after being called by them by others, you will be a different person and will enter upon a different life. For to go on being the sort of person you have been until now, and to be torn and fouled in such a life, belongs to someone altogether without feeling and altogether too fond of his own life—like those half-eaten beast-fighters who, covered all over with wounds and gore, still beg to be kept alive until the next day, though they will be thrown to the same claws and teeth. So embark yourself upon these few names, and if you can remain in them, remain, as if you had been resettled on some Isles of the Blessed;
But if you perceive that you are falling out of them and not holding your ground, withdraw boldly into some corner where you will keep hold of them, or else depart from life altogether—not in anger, but simply, freely, and with due modesty, having accomplished this one thing in your life at least, that you left it in this way. And toward remembering these names it will greatly help you to remember the gods, and that what they want is not to be flattered, but that all rational beings should be made like themselves, and that the fig tree should do what belongs to a fig tree, the dog what belongs to a dog, the bee what belongs to a bee, and the human being what belongs to a human being.
9. Playacting, war, terror, torpor, slavery—each day these will wear away those sacred convictions of yours, all the ones you picture and pass by without examining them by natural philosophy. You must look at everything and act in everything in such a way that the practical task is at the same time accomplished and the contemplative faculty is at the same time exercised, and the self-assurance that comes from knowledge of each particular thing is preserved unnoticed, not hidden away. For when will you enjoy simplicity? When will you enjoy dignity? When will you enjoy the recognition of each thing—its underlying nature, the position it occupies within the cosmos, how long it is suited by nature to endure, what elements make it up, to whom it can belong, and who can give it and take it away?
10. A spider is proud of catching a fly, one man of catching a hare, another of netting a sprat, another of catching young boars, another of bears, another of Sarmatians. Are these not, if you examine their guiding convictions, all robbers alike?
11. Acquire a method for contemplating how all things change into one another; attend to this constantly and train yourself thoroughly in this branch of study, for nothing is so productive of greatness of mind. A man who has done this has stripped off the body, and reflecting that before long he must leave all these things behind and depart from among men, has given himself over wholly—as regards what he himself does—to justice, and in all else that happens to him, to the nature of the whole. Whatever others might say of him, imagine of him, or attempt against him, he refuses to allow it any foothold in his thinking; he rests satisfied with just these two things: that he himself is acting justly in what he is now doing, and that he loves what is now allotted to him. He has let go of all his busy occupations and ambitions, and wants nothing else than to run a straight course through the law, and, running it straight, to follow God.
12. What need is there for guesswork, when it is possible to examine what must be done? If you see it clearly, proceed that way, calmly and without turning back; but if you don't see it clearly, hold off and consult the best advisers. But if other considerations stand against this, go forward reasoning from your present resources, holding to what appears just — for it is best to hit that mark, since falling short of it is failure. Something leisurely and at the same time quick to move, cheerful and steady together, is the man who follows reason in everything.
13. Ask yourself, right when you rouse out of slumber: does it change anything for you if some other person finds fault with what is just and right? It does not. Have you forgotten that these people who bristle with praising and blaming others are the same kind in bed, the same kind at table — what they do, what they flee, what they chase, what they steal, what they grab, achieving it not through hand or foot, but through the most valuable part of themselves, which becomes — whenever it wishes — trust, shame, truth, law, a good guiding spirit?
14. To nature, which gives all things and takes them back, the educated and respectful man says: give what you want, take back what you want. And he says this not out of defiance, but only out of obedience and goodwill toward her.
15. Little is left of what remains. Live as if on a mountain — for it makes no difference there or here, if a man lives everywhere as in a city that is the world. Let men see, let them observe a true man living according to nature. If they cannot bear him, let them kill him — for that is better than living the way they do.
16. No longer discuss at all what sort of man the good man ought to be — just be one.
17. Keep constantly before you the image of the whole of time and the whole of substance, and that every particular thing, as regards substance, is a grain of millet, and as regards time, one turn of a drill.
18. Fix your attention on each thing before you and conceive of it as already dissolving, changing, becoming as it were rot or scattering — or however each thing is by nature made to die, so to speak.
19. What sort of people they are while eating, sleeping, mating, relieving themselves, and the rest — then what sort while lording it over others and strutting, or raging and rebuking from a position of power, though only a little before they were slaves to how many things, and for what reasons; and in a little while they will be slaves again.
20. What benefits each thing is whatever the nature of the whole brings to each — and it benefits precisely when that nature brings it.
21. 'The earth loves the rain, and the majestic sky loves' — and the universe loves to bring about whatever is about to come to be. So I say to the universe: I love along with you. And isn't this also what is meant when something is said to 'love to happen'?
22. Either you live here, and you are already used to it; or you go away elsewhere, and this too you wanted; or you die, and you have completed your service. Besides these there is nothing else. So keep your spirits up.
23. Let it always be plain to you that this field is just like that one, and that everything here is exactly the same as it is on a mountaintop, or on the shore, or wherever you like. You will find just what Plato says holds true: 'penning himself in a fold on a mountain, milking the bleating flocks.'
24. What is my ruling faculty to me, and what am I now making of it, and for what am I now using it? Is it empty of mind? Is it cut loose and torn away from fellowship with others? Has it melted into and been mixed together with this poor scrap of flesh, so that it now turns and sways along with it?
25. A runaway slave is one who flees his master; and the master is the law, so the lawbreaker is a runaway slave. But also the one who grieves, or is angry, or is afraid, does not want something that has happened, or is happening, or will happen, among the things ordained by the one who administers all things — which is law, allotting to each whatever falls to him. So the one who fears, or grieves, or is angry, is a runaway slave.
26. A man releases seed into a womb and departs, and then another cause takes over, works, and completes an infant — from so small a thing, what a thing! Again: a man sends food down through his throat, and then another cause takes over and produces sensation and impulse and, in a word, vitality and vigor and a host of other things — so many, so extraordinary! Consider these things, then, happening in such concealment, and see the power at work in this way — just as we see the force pulling things down and the force carrying things upward — not with the eyes, but no less clearly for that.
27. Constantly consider how everything now happening was already happening before, just as it is now, and consider that it will happen again; and set before your eyes whole dramas and scenes of the same kind, as many as you have come to know from your own experience or from older history — for instance, the entire reign of Hadrian, the entire reign of Antoninus, and the entire reigns of Philip, Alexander, and Croesus too. Every one of those was exactly like this present scene, merely acted out by different players.
28. Picture every man grieving over anything at all, or discontented, as like a little pig being sacrificed, kicking and squealing. The man who groans on his bed alone, in silence, is just the same. Consider our bondage — and that it is given only to the rational animal to follow willingly what happens, while mere following is a plain necessity laid on everyone.
29. Stop at each thing you do, one by one, and ask yourself: is death terrible because I would be deprived of this?
30. When you're offended at someone's wrongdoing, turn at once and consider what similar wrong you yourself commit — for instance, treating wealth as though it were a genuine good, or ranking pleasure that way, or a scrap of reputation, and so through each category. For if you turn your attention to this you'll quickly forget your anger, once it strikes you that the man is under compulsion — what else is he to do? Or else, if you can, remove the compulsion that drives him.
31. When you see Satyrion, picture a Socratic type, or a Eutyches, or a Hymen; and when you see Euphrates, picture a Eutychion or a Silvanus; and when you see Alciphron, picture a Trophy-bearer; and when you see Severus, picture a Crito or a Xenophon; and looking at yourself, picture one of the Caesars — and so on by proportion for each. Then let this strike you: where are they now? Nowhere, or who knows where. In this way you will continually see human affairs as smoke and nothing at all — especially if you keep in mind that once a thing has changed it will exist no more, for all the rest of infinite time. Why then do you strain yourself? Why isn't it enough for you to pass through this brief span in good order? What matter and occasion are you running from! What is all of this except exercises for a reason that has looked closely and scientifically at the things of life? Stay with it, then, until you have made even these things your own, the way a strong stomach makes everything its own, the way a bright fire turns whatever you throw into it into flame and light.
32. Let no one who speaks truly about you ever be able to say that you are not straightforward or not good — let anyone who thinks any such thing of you be a liar. This is entirely up to you: who is stopping you from being good and straightforward? Simply decide not to go on living unless you are such a person — for reason itself does not choose to keep on if you are not.
33. What is it that can be done or said upon this material in the healthiest way? Whatever that may be, it is possible for you to do it or say it, and do not make excuses that you are being hindered. You will not stop groaning until you have come to feel about this the way the soft-living feel about their luxury: that to do, upon whatever matter is put before you and falls to you, the things proper to a human being's constitution — this is what you should take as enjoyment; and this is available everywhere. A cylinder is not given leave to move everywhere with its own proper motion, nor water, nor fire, nor anything else governed by nature or by an irrational soul, since the things that block and obstruct them are many. But mind and reason are able to travel through everything that stands against them, in just the way their nature is and just as they wish. Set before your eyes this ease with which reason will be carried through all things — as fire upward, as a stone downward, as a cylinder down a slope — and seek nothing further; for the remaining obstacles either belong to the dead little body, or, apart from opinion and the yielding of reason itself, they do not crush nor do any harm at all. Otherwise the one who suffers them would immediately become bad himself —
whereas among all other constructed things, whatever bad thing happens to any of them, the thing that suffers it becomes worse on that account; but here, if it must be said, the human being even becomes better and more praiseworthy by making right use of what befalls him. And in general remember this: nothing harms the natural citizen that does not harm the city, and nothing harms the city that does not harm the law; and of these so-called misfortunes, none harms the law. So then, what does not harm the law harms neither city nor citizen.
34. For the person soaked through with true doctrines, even the briefest and most ordinary saying suffices as a reminder to be free of grief and fear — for instance: 'leaves — some the wind scatters to the ground; so too the generation of men.' Little leaves too are your own children; little leaves too are these people shouting their trustworthy-sounding praise, or on the other side cursing, or quietly finding fault and mocking; little leaves likewise are those who will take up the fame that comes after. For all these things 'spring up in the season of spring'; then the wind has knocked them down; then the wood grows others in their place. A short time for all is common to everything, but you flee and pursue all things as though they were going to be eternal. A little while and you will close your eyes, and before long someone else will be mourning the one who carried you out.
35. A healthy eye ought to look at all visible things and not say, 'I want green things' — that is the mark of a diseased eye. And a healthy hearing and sense of smell ought to be ready for all things audible and smellable, and a healthy stomach ought to be disposed toward all foods alike, as a mill is constructed for grinding whatever is put to it. So too a healthy mind ought to be ready for everything that happens; but a mind that instead insists, 'keep my children safe from all harm,' or, 'make everyone applaud whatever I do,' is like an eye demanding only green things, or teeth wanting nothing but soft food.
36. No one is so fortunate that when he dies there will not be some standing by who welcome the misfortune that has befallen them. He was a serious and wise man - won't there be someone in the end saying to himself: at last we can breathe again, free from this schoolmaster? He was harsh with none of us, but I could feel that he silently condemned us. So much for the serious man - yet turning to ourselves, think how many further reasons exist that make plenty of people eager to be rid of us! You will keep this in mind, then, as you die, and you will leave more easily, reasoning: I am departing from a life in which even my own partners, on whose behalf I struggled so hard, prayed, and worried, they themselves want me to go, hoping for some further ease from it. Why then would anyone cling to a longer stay here? Do not, however, for this reason go away any less kindly disposed toward them, but keeping to your own character, friendly and well-meaning and gracious - and not, again, as though being torn away, but as when someone dies an easy death and the little soul is readily released from the body, so too should your departure from these people be. For nature bound you to them and joined you together, but now she unbinds. I am being unbound as from kin, yet not being dragged away resisting, but without compulsion - for this too is one of the things according to nature.
37. Make it a habit, as far as possible, to ask yourself in the case of whatever is done by anyone: to what does this man refer this? But begin with yourself, and examine yourself first.
38. Remember that what pulls the strings is that thing hidden within: that is the eloquence, that is the life, that is - if it must be said - the man. Never picture along with it the vessel-like body surrounding it and these little organs molded onto it. They are like a carpenter's axe, differing only in that they are attached and growing. For indeed these parts are no more useful without the cause that moves and holds them than the shuttle is to the weaving-woman, or a stylus is useful apart from whoever writes with it, or a whip apart from the one driving.

======== Book 11 ========

1. The properties of the rational soul: it sees itself, it articulates itself, it makes itself whatever it wishes to be, it reaps the fruit it bears itself (whereas the fruits of plants, and the corresponding thing in animals, are reaped by others), it attains its own end wherever the limit of life is set upon it, unlike dancing or acting or the like, where the whole performance is left incomplete if something cuts it off - no, at every part, and wherever it may be overtaken, it renders what was set before it full and lacking nothing of itself, so that it can say: I have what is mine. Further, it ranges over the entire cosmos, the emptiness that surrounds it, and its form, and stretches out into the endlessness of time, and grasps and revolves in thought the cyclical renewal of all things, and sees that those who come after us will see nothing new, nor did those before us see anything more, but that in a way the man of forty, if he has any understanding at all, has seen all that has been and all that will be, by virtue of their likeness in kind. It is also a property of the rational soul to love one's neighbors, and truthfulness, and reverence, and to honor nothing above itself - which is also a property of law; and so it turns out that right reason and the reason of justice are no different from each other.
2. You will look down on delightful song and dancing and the pankration if you break the melodious voice down into each of its separate notes and ask yourself, note by note, whether you are its inferior - for you will recoil from it; and if you do the same for dancing, movement by movement or pose by pose, and likewise for the pankration. In general, then, apart from virtue and what comes from virtue, remember to run to the individual parts of a thing and, by dividing it up, to arrive at contempt for it - and transfer this same practice to your whole life.
3. What a soul it is that stands ready, if it must already be released from the body, either to be extinguished or scattered or to persist. But let this readiness come from one's own judgment, not out of sheer defiance as with the Christians, but reasoned through and dignified and, if it is to persuade another too, without theatrics.
4. I have done something for the common good - so I have benefited myself. Let this be ready at hand for you always, and never stop it.
5. What is your craft? To be good. And how is this achieved well, except by principles - some about the nature of the whole, others about the particular constitution of man?
6. Tragedies were first brought in as reminders of what happens, and that these things naturally come about this way, and that you should not be burdened on the greater stage by the very things that charm you on the stage - for you can see that these things must be brought to their end this way, and that even those who cry out "O Cithaeron!" must bear them. And some things are said usefully too by those who compose the plays - one saying above all is this: "But if I have been neglected by the gods, and my child too, even this has its reason" - and again: "we must not rage at events" - and: "to reap life as one reaps a fruitful ear of corn" - and other such lines. After tragedy the Old Comedy was brought in, having an educative frankness, and through its very plainness of speech reminding us, not uselessly, against puffed-up pride - it was for something of this sort that Diogenes too took such things up. After this consider for what purpose Middle Comedy, and then in turn New Comedy, was adopted, which gradually slid away into a mere artful pursuit of imitation. That some useful things are said even by these writers is not unknown - but toward what end did the whole aim of such poetry and playwriting look?
7. How clear it becomes: there is no other subject-matter for life so well suited to philosophizing as the one you happen to be in right now.
8. A branch severed from the branch beside it is thereby severed from the whole shrub as well. In the same way a man torn away from even one other man has fallen away from the whole community. Now a branch is cut off by someone else; but a man separates himself from his neighbor by his own hatred and turning away, and does not realize that in doing so he has cut himself off from the whole political body as well. Except that this much is a gift from Zeus, who established the community: it is possible for us to grow back together with the one next to us and once more become completing members of the whole. Still, if this kind of splitting happens too often, it makes the part that has withdrawn hard to reunite and hard to restore. And in any case the branch that grew up together from the start and kept breathing with the tree is not the same as the one grafted back on after being cut off, whatever the gardeners may say about it. Grow together on the same stem, yes — but do not share the same opinions.
9. Those who stand in your way as you go forward according to right reason will not be able to turn you aside from sound action — so do not let them knock you off course in your goodwill toward them either, but guard yourself equally on both fronts: not only in steady judgment and action, but also in gentleness toward those who try to obstruct you or are otherwise annoyed with you. For this too is a weakness — being harsh with them — just as much as abandoning the action and giving in, terrified. Both are equally deserters from their post: the one who shrinks back in fear, and the one who becomes estranged from the man who is by nature his kin and friend.
10. "No nature is inferior to art" — for the arts imitate nature. If so, then the nature that is most perfect and most all-embracing of all the others could hardly fall short of the resourcefulness of art. And every art produces the lesser things for the sake of the better; so too, then, does the common nature. And indeed from this arises the birth of justice, and from justice the rest of the virtues stand established; for the just will not be preserved if we are divided over indifferent things, or are easily deceived, hasty to fall in and hasty to fall out.
11. If it is not the things themselves that come at you — the ones whose pursuit and flight disturb you — but rather you in some way go out to them, then let your judgment about them be at rest, and they will remain still, and you will be seen neither pursuing nor fleeing.
12. The sphere of the soul keeps its own shape when it is neither stretched out toward anything nor drawn together inward, neither scattered nor collapsed in on itself, but shines with the light by which it sees the truth of all things and the truth within itself.
13. Will someone despise me? That is his business. But I will see to it that I am not found doing or saying anything deserving of contempt. Will someone hate me? That is his business. But I will be kind and well-disposed to everyone, and ready to show even this very person his mistake — not reproachfully, nor as though making a display of my patience, but genuinely and generously, like that Phocion, if indeed he was not merely pretending. For a man's inner state should be such, and be seen as such by the gods, that he is disposed toward nothing with resentment and suffers nothing as an outrage. What harm is there for you, if you yourself are now doing what is proper to your own nature, and welcoming what is timely now for the nature of the whole — a man stretched toward bringing about, by whatever means, what serves the common good?
14. Despising one another, they still flatter one another; and wanting to get the better of one another, they still grovel before one another.
15. How rotten and false is the man who says: "I have simply decided to deal with you plainly." What are you doing, man? There is no need to announce this beforehand. It will show itself. It ought to be written on your forehead; your voice should ring with it at once, it should show at once in your eyes, just as a beloved reads everything at once in the glance of the one who loves him. The good and simple man should be exactly like this — like someone with a certain smell about him — so that the person standing next to him perceives it the moment he comes near, whether he wants to or not. But the cultivated pose of simplicity is a knife in the back. Nothing is more shameful than the friendship of wolves; avoid that above all else. The good, simple, well-meaning man has all this in his eyes, and it does not go unnoticed.
16. To live the best life — this power lies in the soul, if one is indifferent toward the things that are indifferent. And one will be indifferent to them if one looks at each of them broken down into its parts and as a whole, and remembers that none of them creates any opinion about itself in us, nor comes at us on its own — rather the things themselves stay still, and it is we who generate the judgments about them and, as it were, write them into ourselves, when it is possible not to write them, and possible, even if one has let something slip in unnoticed, to erase it at once; and remembers too that this attentiveness will be needed only a short time, and then life will be over. What, after all, is so hard about keeping these things straight? If a thing is in accordance with nature, take pleasure in it and let it be easy for you; if it is against nature, seek out what is in accordance with your own nature and hasten toward that, even if it brings no glory — for everyone is forgiven for seeking his own good.
17. Where each thing has come from, out of what underlying substances each is composed, what it turns into next, what shape that transformation gives it, and that no harm at all comes to it from the process.
18. First, what relation do I have to them, and that we were born for one another; and, seen another way, that I was born to stand over them, as a ram stands over its flock or a bull over its herd. Go further back still, from this: if the world is not a mere scattering of atoms, then it is nature that governs the whole; and if that is so, the lesser things exist for the sake of the better, and these for the sake of one another. Second, what kind of people they are at table, in bed, and so on — and above all, under what compulsions of belief they act, and with what conceit they do even these very things. Third, that if they act rightly in this, there is no cause for irritation; and if not rightly, then clearly they do it unwillingly and in ignorance. For every soul is deprived unwillingly, both of the truth and of the ability to treat each person as he deserves. That is why men resent being called unjust, ungrateful, greedy — in short, wrongdoers toward their neighbors. Fourth, that you yourself commit many faults, and are the same sort of person as they are; and even if you abstain from certain faults, you still have the disposition that would produce them, even if cowardice, concern for reputation, or some other such fault keeps you from the like offenses. Fifth, that you have not even grasped for certain that they are at fault; for many things happen as part of a larger design, and one must learn a great deal before pronouncing with any certainty on another's action.
Sixth, that when you are especially indignant or impatient, remember that human life lasts only a moment, and soon all of us will be laid out flat. Seventh, that it is not their actions that disturb us — those belong to their own ruling faculties — but our own judgments about them. Cast off, then, and be willing to let go of the judgment that treats it as some terrible thing, and your anger is gone. How will you cast it off? By reasoning that there is nothing shameful in it; for if shame is not the only evil, then you too are bound to commit many faults, to become a thief, and anything else besides. Eighth, how much harsher are the effects of the anger and grief we feel over such things than the things themselves that provoke our anger and grief. Ninth, that goodwill is unconquerable, provided it is genuine and not a smirk or a pretense. For what will the most insolent man do to you if you go on being good-natured toward him, and, if the occasion allows, gently advise him and calmly set him right at the very moment he is trying to do you harm — 'No, child; we were made for something else. I will certainly not be harmed, but you are harming yourself, child.' And show him neatly and thoroughly that this is so, that not even bees do this, nor any creature built by nature to live in community.
But this must be done without irony and without reproach, but with affection and without any bitterness in the soul, and not as if in a lecture hall, nor so that some bystander will admire you, but either to him alone, even if others happen to be standing about. Remember these nine points as gifts received from the Muses, and begin at last, while you still live, to be a human being. But you must guard equally, alongside anger at them, against flattering them; for both are unsociable and lead to harm. Keep close at hand, in moments of anger, that raging is not manly, but that the gentle and mild is more human, and for that very reason more truly manly as well — it is this that has a share in strength and sinew and courage, not the man who is indignant and discontented. For the closer a thing is to freedom from passion, the closer it is to strength. Just as grief belongs to weakness, so does anger; both have been wounded and have given way. And, if you wish, take a tenth gift as well, from the leader of the Muses: that to expect the wicked not to do wrong is madness, for that is to wish for the impossible. But to allow that they be such toward others, and yet demand that they not wrong you, is unreasonable and tyrannical.
19. There are four particular turns of the ruling faculty that must be watched for constantly, and as soon as you catch one, it must be erased, saying to yourself of each in turn: this impression is not necessary; this is corrosive of community; this is not what you are really about to say, from yourself — for to speak what is not your own you should count among the most absurd of things. The fourth is when you will reproach yourself, because this means that the more divine part in you has been overcome and has bowed down to the less honorable, mortal part — the body — and to its rough or smooth motions.
20. Your little breath, and all the fiery element mixed within you, though by nature they tend upward, nevertheless obey the ordering of the whole and are held here in check within the compound. And likewise all the earthy and moist element within you, though it tends downward, has nonetheless been raised up and stands in a position not natural to it. In this way even the elements obey the whole, remaining stationed wherever they have been posted by force, until the signal for their release sounds again from that same source. Is it not strange, then, that only your intelligent part should be disobedient and resentful of its own station? And yet nothing violent is imposed on it, only what is in accordance with its nature; but it will not put up with this, and instead is carried the opposite way. For the movement toward injustice, toward wanton acts, toward anger, grief, and fear is nothing other than a falling away from nature. And whenever the ruling faculty is vexed at something that happens, it likewise abandons its own proper station; for it has been constituted for holiness and reverence toward the divine no less than for justice. Indeed these too belong to the class of right community with others — or rather they are even prior in rank to acts of justice.
21. "Whoever does not have one and the same aim throughout his life cannot himself remain one and the same throughout his life." What has been said is not enough unless you add what that aim ought to be. For just as the notion of what counts as good is not the same for everything that most people in whatever way suppose to be good, but only for certain things, namely the things held in common, so too the aim must be established as a communal and political one. For the man who directs all his personal impulses toward this will make all his actions alike, and by this will always remain the same.
22. The mountain mouse and the house mouse, and the fright and scurrying of the latter.
23. Socrates used to call the opinions of the many "Lamias," bogeys to frighten children.
24. The Spartans, at their festivals, set out seats in the shade for foreign visitors, but they themselves sat down wherever they happened to be.
25. Socrates, declining to go to Perdiccas, said: "So that I may not perish by the worst destruction" - that is, so that he might not receive a benefit and be unable to repay it.
26. In the writings of the Epicureans there was laid down a precept that one should continually recall some man of old who practiced virtue.
27. The Pythagoreans: look up at the sky at dawn, so that we may be reminded of those bodies that always keep their own work going in the same way, in the same manner, and of their order, their purity, their nakedness; for no star wears a covering.
28. Socrates, girded with a sheepskin, when Xanthippe took his cloak and went out with it, and what Socrates said to his companions, ashamed and drawing back, when they saw him dressed like that.
29. In writing and reading you will not be able to lead until you have first been led. Much more so in life.
30. "You were born a slave; reason is no share of yours."
31. "And my own dear heart laughed."
32. "They will find fault with virtue, speaking harsh words against it."
33. To look for a fig in winter is madness; such is the man who looks for his child when it is no longer given to him.
34. Epictetus said that when kissing your child, you should say quietly to yourself: tomorrow perhaps it will die. - "These are words of ill omen." - "Nothing is ill-omened," he said, "that signifies some natural process; or else it is also ill-omened for the ears of grain to be harvested."
35. Unripe grape, ripe cluster, raisin - all are changes, not into what does not exist, but into what does not yet exist now.
36. No one becomes a thief of another's moral choice - the saying of Epictetus.
37. He said one must find an art for giving assent, and in the area of impulses keep close watch, so that they are qualified, so that they serve the common good, so that they are in proportion to worth; and abstain entirely from desire, and use aversion toward nothing that is not up to us.
38. "The struggle," he said, "is not about some chance matter, but about whether we are to be mad or not."
39. Socrates used to say: what do you want, souls of rational beings or of irrational ones? - Of rational ones. - Rational of what kind, sound or corrupt? - Sound. - Then why do you not seek them? - Because we have them. - Then why do you fight and quarrel?

======== Book 12 ========

1. All those things you pray to reach by a roundabout course you can have already, if you do not begrudge them to yourself. And this happens if you leave behind all the past, entrust the future to providence, and direct only the present toward reverence and justice. Toward reverence, so that you may love what has been allotted to you; for nature brought this to you and you to it. Toward justice, so that freely and without evasion you may speak the truth and act according to law and according to worth; and let nothing hinder you - neither another's wickedness, nor opinion, nor any word, nor even the sensation of this bit of flesh wrapped around you; for that part will see to its own suffering. If, then, whenever you come near your departure, having left behind all else, you honor only your ruling faculty and the divine within you, and if you fear not the ceasing of life at some point, but rather the never having begun to live according to nature, you will prove yourself deserving of the cosmos that fathered you, and you will stop being a foreigner in your own native land, marveling at the events of each day as though unexpected, and hanging dependent on this thing and that.
2. God sees all ruling faculties stripped bare of their material vessels, their husks, and their impurities; for with his own intellect alone he touches only what has flowed out from himself into these things and been channeled into them. If you too accustom yourself to do this, you will remove from yourself much of the distraction that surrounds you; for a man who does not look at the bits of flesh that lie around him will surely not busy himself with gazing at clothing, house, reputation, and all such trappings and stage-scenery.
3. There are three things of which you are composed: a little body, a little breath, and mind. Of these, the first two are yours only insofar as you must care for them, but only the third truly belongs to you. So if you separate from yourself - that is, from your own understanding - whatever others do or say, whatever you yourself have done or said, whatever troubles you as something to come, and whatever, belonging to the little body wrapped around you or to the connate breath, is attached without your choice, and whatever the external whirl of circumstance sweeps along; so that, freed from the things bound up with fate and pure, the power of your mind may live independent, on its own, doing what is just, willing what happens, and speaking the truth - if, I say, you separate from this ruling faculty the things attached to it through undue attachment, and the stretches of time both ahead and behind, and make yourself like Empedocles' sphere, "rounded, rejoicing in its circling stillness," and practice living only what you actually live, that is, the present, then you will be able to live out the time remaining to you until death untroubled, kindly, and at peace with your own guiding spirit.
4. I have often wondered how it is that each of us loves himself more than anyone else, and yet rates his own judgment of himself below what others think of him. At any rate, if a god came and stood before someone, or a wise teacher, and commanded him never to hold or plan any inward thought that he would not, in that very instant, say out loud, he would not endure it for even a single day. So much more weight do we give to what the neighbors will make of us than to our own private verdict on ourselves.
5. How is it that the gods, having arranged everything so well and with such kindness toward mankind, overlooked this one thing alone: that some men, thoroughly good men who through their actions made, as it were, covenants with the divine, and who through pious deeds and rites became familiar friends of the divine, once they die, never come to be again, but are utterly extinguished? But if this is really so, be assured that if it ought to have been otherwise, they would have made it so. For if it were just, it would also have been possible, and had it accorded with the nature of things, nature itself would have made it happen. So from the fact that it is not so — if indeed it is not so — let it convince you that it need not have been so; for you can see for yourself that in raising this question you are arguing a case of justice against god. But we would not be arguing with the gods like this unless they were supremely good and supremely just; and if that is so, they would not have overlooked anything in the ordering of the world being unjustly and unreasonably neglected.
6. Practice even the things you have despaired of. For the left hand, though unpracticed for most other tasks because unaccustomed to them, holds the rein more strongly than the right — because it has been trained to do that.
7. In what condition death should find a man, in body and in soul; the shortness of life; the immensity of time before and after; the frailty of all matter.
8. To see causes stripped bare of their husks; to see the ends toward which actions tend; what pain is; what pleasure is; what death is; what fame is; who is responsible for his own lack of ease; how no one is hindered by another; that everything is a matter of judgment.
9. In the use of your principles you must be like a pancratiast, not like a gladiator with a sword. For the one lays down the weapon he uses and picks it up again; the other always has his hand with him, and needs only to clench it.
10. See things as they are, dividing them into matter, cause, and end.
11. What power a man has to do nothing but what god is going to approve, and to accept everything that god assigns him — what follows in accordance with nature.
12. The gods are not to be blamed, for they do wrong neither willingly nor unwillingly; nor are men, for they too do wrong only unwillingly. So no one is to be blamed.
13. How ridiculous and how much a stranger to the world is the man who is amazed at anything that happens in life.
14. Either it is necessity and unalterable order, or it is providence open to persuasion, or it is a chaos without direction or purpose. If it is unalterable necessity, why do you resist it? If it is providence that admits of being appeased, make yourself worthy of help from the divine. If it is a chaos without a guiding mind, then be glad that in such a flood you yourself have within you a ruling mind; and if the flood carries you along, let it carry along the poor flesh, the little breath, everything else — for it will not carry away the mind.
15. The light of a lamp shines and does not lose its brightness until it is put out; will truth and justice and self-control be extinguished in you before that?
16. When the impression comes to you that someone has done wrong: how do I know that this was actually a wrong? And even if he did wrong, he has already condemned himself, and that is like a man tearing his own face. Consider that the man who does not want a bad person to do wrong is like a man who does not want the fig tree to bear its acrid sap in its figs, or babies to cry, or a horse to neigh, or any of the other things that must be. For what else can such a person do, given the character he has? If it really troubles you, cure his character.
17. If it is not fitting, do not do it; if it is not true, do not say it. Let your impulse always be directed wholly toward this: always to see what it is that is producing the impression in you, and to unfold it by dividing it into cause, matter, its bearing on other things, and the time within which it must come to an end.
19. Realize at last that you have within you something stronger and more divine than the things that produce the passions and altogether pull you like a puppet on strings. What is my mind now? Is it fear? Is it suspicion? Is it desire? Is it something else of that kind?
20. First, do nothing at random or without reference to an end. Second, direct your actions toward nothing other than a goal that serves the common good.
21. That soon you will be nowhere, no one — nor will any of these things you now look at, nor any of these people now living. Everything is by nature made to change, to turn, to perish, so that other things in turn may come to be.
22. That everything is judgment, and this judgment is up to you. Lift it away, then, whenever you wish, and — like a ship rounding the headland — all is calm, a still bay, unruffled by any wave.
23. Any single activity whatsoever, once it stops at its proper time, suffers no harm simply from having stopped; nor does the one who performed it suffer any harm simply from its having stopped. In the same way, then, the whole made up of all one's actions — which is one's life — if it stops at its proper time, suffers no harm simply from having stopped; nor is the one who brought this chain to a close at its proper time badly off. Nature gives the time and the limit — sometimes one's own nature, when it comes with old age, but in every case the nature of the whole, by whose changing parts the universe as a whole remains ever young and in its prime. And whatever serves the whole is always good and fitting. So the ending of life is, for each person, no evil — since it is not even shameful, being neither a matter of choice nor cut off from the common good — and it is in fact beneficial, arriving right on schedule for the whole, serving the whole, and moving in step with it. For it is in this way that a person is carried by god, moving on the same course as god and toward the same ends in his purpose.
24. You must keep these three things ready at hand. First, regarding what you do: that it be neither done at random nor in a way that departs from what Justice would choose. Regarding what happens from outside: that it comes either by chance or by providence — and one must not blame chance, nor accuse providence. Second: what each thing is, from seed to the ensouling of it, and from the ensouling to the giving back of the soul — out of what elements it is put together, and into what it is dissolved. Third: that if you were suddenly lifted up on high and looked down on human affairs in all their endless variety, you would despise them, seeing at the same time how vast the region of air and ether surrounding them is; and that however many times you are lifted up, you will see the same things — sameness of kind, shortness of span. That is what all this vanity amounts to.
25. Throw out the judgment. You are saved. Who, then, is stopping you from throwing it out?
26. Whenever you are upset at something, you have forgotten that everything happens according to the nature of the whole; and that the wrongdoing is another's, not yours to carry; and besides this, that everything that happens has always happened this way, will happen this way, and is happening this way now, everywhere; you have forgotten how close the kinship is between one human being and the whole human race — a kinship not of blood or seed, but a sharing in the same mind. You have also forgotten that each person's mind is god, and has flowed from there; that nothing belongs to anyone as his own, but that his child, his body, and his very soul have all come from there; that everything is judgment; and that each person lives only the present moment, and it is only this that he loses.
27. Constantly call to mind those who were once fiercely indignant over something — those who rose to the greatest fame, or the worst misfortunes, or the bitterest enmities, or any other kind of fortune at all. Then stop and ask: where is all of that now? Smoke and ash and a story — or not even a story. Let a whole set of such cases come to mind alongside this: Fabius Catullinus on his country estate, Lucius Lupus tending his gardens, Stertinius down at Baiae, Tiberius up on Capri, Velius Rufus — and in general, any striving after anything done with self-importance. How cheap all that straining after things is, and how much more fitting for a philosopher, given whatever material is granted him, to show himself just, self-controlled, following the gods, simply and without pretense. For the vanity that hides under a show of freedom from vanity is the hardest of all to bear.
28. To those who keep asking: where have you seen the gods, or how have you grasped that they exist, that you worship them so? First of all, they are in fact visible even to the eye. And besides, I have never seen my own soul either, and yet I honor it. So too with the gods: from the power of theirs that I experience again and again, from this I grasp that they exist, and I revere them.
29. The salvation of life is this: to see each thing all the way through for what it is — what its material is, what its cause is; to do what is just with your whole soul, and to speak the truth. What is left, then, but to enjoy living by joining one good deed to the next, so that you leave not even the smallest gap between them?
30. One light of the sun, even though it is broken up by walls, mountains, and countless other things. One common substance, even though it is divided among countless bodies each of its own particular kind. One soul, even though it is divided among countless natures with their own individual boundaries. One intelligent soul, even though it seems to be split apart. Now the other parts of what has been named — such as vital breath, and the material substrates — are without sensation and have no natural affinity for one another; and yet even in their case something holds them together as one, a downward pull toward the same place. But mind, in its own particular way, is drawn toward what is of its own kind and unites with it, and this shared, communal feeling is never divided.
31. What are you seeking? To keep breathing? Or to have sensation, impulse, growth, and then decline again -- to use speech, to think? Which of these seems to you worth longing for? And if each of them is easily despised, go on to the last thing: to follow reason and god. But it conflicts with this to prize these things, and to be grieved that death will deprive one of them.
32. How small a portion of infinite and gaping time has been allotted to each of us -- it vanishes very quickly into eternity. How small a portion of the whole substance, how small a portion of the whole soul. On how small a clod of the whole earth do you crawl. Keeping all this in mind, imagine nothing great except this: to act as your own nature leads you to act, and to undergo what the common nature brings.
33. How does the ruling faculty use itself? For everything is in this. Everything else, whether within your choice or not, is dead and smoke.
34. Most apt to rouse contempt for death is this: that even those who count delight a good thing and suffering a bad one have nonetheless looked past it.
35. For the man for whom only what is timely is good, for whom it is all the same whether he performs more right actions in accordance with reason or fewer, and for whom it makes no difference whether his span of watching this world runs long or runs brief -- for this man not even death is terrible.
36. Man, you have been a citizen in this great city -- what does it matter to you whether for five years or three? What is according to the laws is equal for everyone. What is terrible, then, if it is not a tyrant nor an unjust judge who sends you out of the city, but the nature that brought you into it -- just as if the praetor who engaged a comic actor were now releasing him from the stage? 'Yet I have completed only three acts, not the five.' Well said -- but in life, three acts are the whole play. For the one who determines the completion is he who was once the cause of your composition, and is now the cause of your dissolution; you are the cause of neither. Go, then, graciously -- for indeed the one dismissing you is gracious too.