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