Marcus Aurelius · a new plain-English translation from the original language
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.