Meditations

To see them from above: the thousands of animal herds, the rituals, the voyages on calm or stormy seas, the different ways we come into the world, share it with one another, and leave it. Consider the lives led once by others, long ago, the lives to be led by others after you, the lives led even now, in foreign lands. How many people don’t even know your name. How many will soon have forgotten it. How many offer you praise now—and tomorrow, perhaps, contempt.

That to be remembered is worthless. Like fame. Like everything.

Marcus would have read Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and the tragedies of Euripides side by side with the Aeneid, and studied the speeches of the great Athenian orator Demosthenes as intensively as those of the Roman statesman Cicero.

ther who brought him up, for his father died when he was very young.

Marcus sprang from a distinguished enough family.

The present is all that they can give up, since that is all you have, and what you do not have, you cannot lose.

Whatever the nature of the whole does, and whatever serves to maintain it, is good for every part of nature. The world is maintained by change—in the elements and in the things they compose.

, you can—if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable.

instead of treating yourself with respect, you have entrusted your own happiness to the souls of others.

do exist, they do care what happens to us, and everything a person needs to avoid real harm they have placed within him.

feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.