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