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