77 Powerful Marcus Aurelius Quotes That Will Change Your Life
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (born 26 April 121 AD, Rome, Italy – died 17 March 180 AD, Sirmium) was Roman emperor from 161 to 180 and a Stoic philosopher. He is best known as the author of the philosophical work Meditations and as the last of Rome's Five Good Emperors (following Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and Antoninus Pius). Marcus Aurelius has symbolized the Golden Age of the Roman Empire in the West for many generations.
The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive – to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.Be tolerant with others and strict with yourself. To love only what happens, what was destined. No greater harmony.Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.A person’s worth is measured by the worth of what he values.Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts.Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature’s delight.Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinions than our own.Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul.Life is neither good or evil, but only a place for good and evil.Our life is what our thoughts make it.Whenever you are about to find fault with someone, ask yourself the following question: What fault of mine most nearly resembles the one I am about to criticize?The opinion of 10,000 men is of no value if none of them know anything about the subject.How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.
Think of all the years passed by in which you said to yourself "I'll do it tomorrow," and how the gods have again and again granted you periods of grace of which you have not availed yourself. It is time to realize that you are a member of the Universe, that you are born of Nature itself, and to know that a limit has been set to your time. Use every moment wisely, to perceive your inner refulgence, or 'twill be gone and nevermore within your reach.
Marcus Aurelius
Because most of what we say and do is not essential. Ask yourself at every moment, ‘Is this necessary?’Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others.Though you break your heart, men will go on as before.If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it.Do not indulge in dreams of having what you have not, but reckon up the chief of the blessings you do possess, and then thankfully remember how you would crave for them if they were not yours.
Live a good life. If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by. If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them. If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.
Marcus Aurelius
To live a good life: We have the potential for it. If we learn to be indifferent to what makes no difference.The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.It’s silly to try to escape other people’s faults. They are inescapable. Just try to escape your own.Do every act of your life as though it were the very last act of your life.
Say to yourself first thing in the morning: today I shall meet people who are meddling, ungrateful, aggressive, treacherous, malicious, unsocial. All this has afflicted them through their ignorance of true good and evil. But I have seen that the nature of good is what is right, and the nature of evil what is wrong; and I have reflected that the nature of the offender himself is akin to my own — not a kinship of blood or seed, but a sharing in the same mind, the same fragment of divinity. Therefore I cannot be harmed by any of them, as none will infect me with their wrong. Nor can I be angry with my kinsman or hate him. We were born for cooperation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of upper and lower teeth. So to work in opposition to one another is against nature: and anger or rejection is opposition.
Marcus Aurelius
Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now, take what’s left and live it properly. What doesn’t transmit light creates its own darkness.How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks, but only at what he does himself, to make it just and holy.Do not be wise in words – be wise in deeds.You’re better off not giving the small things more time than they deserve.You don’t have to turn this into something. It doesn’t have to upset you.The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.No man can escape his destiny, the next inquiry being how he may best live the time that he has to live.If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed. It is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance who is harmed.Begin – to begin is half the work, let half still remain; again begin this, and thou wilt have finished.
When another blames you or hates you, or people voice similar criticisms, go to their souls, penetrate inside and see what sort of people they are. You will realize that there is no need to be racked with anxiety that they should hold any particular opinion about you.
Marcus Aurelius
What we do now echoes in eternity.A man’s worth is no greater than the worth of his ambitions.Just that you do the right thing. The rest doesn’t matter.Here is a rule to remember in future, when anything tempts you to feel bitter: not, ‘This is a misfortune’ but ‘To bear this worthily is good fortune.’Tomorrow is nothing, today is too late; the good lived yesterday.Understand that your time has a limit set to it. Use it, then to advance your enlightenment; or it will be gone, and never in your power again.To the wise, life is a problem; to the fool, a solution.Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too.Everything that happens happens as it should, and if you observe carefully, you will find this to be so.Give yourself a gift: the present moment.We ought to do good to others as simply as a horse runs, or a bee makes honey, or a vine bears grapes season after season without thinking of the grapes it has borne.Look well into thyself; there is a source of strength which will always spring up if thou wilt always look.Take a good hard look at people’s ruling principle, especially of the wise, what they run away from and what they seek out.While you live, while it is in your power, be good.The memory of everything is very soon overwhelmed in time.The only wealth which you will keep forever is the wealth you have given away.Confine yourself to the present.He who lives in harmony with himself lives in harmony with the universe.You must become an old man in good time if you wish to be an old man long.The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing.Nothing happens to any man that he is not formed by nature to bear.Let men see, let them know, a real man, who lives as he was meant to live.Each day provides its own gifts.A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself; and a mean man, by one lower than himself. The one produces aspiration; the other ambition, which is the way in which a vulgar man aspires.Accept whatever comes to you woven in the pattern of your destiny, for what could more aptly fit your needs?You shouldn’t give circumstances the power to rouse anger, for they don’t care at all.You always own the option of having no opinion. There is never any need to get worked up or to trouble your soul about things you can't control. These things are not asking to be judged by you. Leave them alone.It’s a disgrace in this life when the soul surrenders first while the body refuses to.
