Meditations - Marcus Aurelius (Emperor of Rome) [45]
How much longer?
47. Keep this constantly in mind: that all sorts of people have died—all professions, all nationalities. Follow the thought all the way down to Philistion, Phoebus, and Origanion. Now extend it to other species.
We have to go there too, where all of them have already gone:
. . . the eloquent and the wise—Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Socrates . . .
. . . the heroes of old, the soldiers and kings who followed them . . .
. . . Eudoxus, Hipparchus, Archimedes . . .
. . . the smart, the generous, the hardworking, the cunning, the selfish . . .
. . . and even Menippus and his cohorts, who laughed at thewhole brief, fragile business.
All underground for a long time now.
And what harm does it do them? Or the others either—the ones whose names we don’t even know?
The only thing that isn’t worthless: to live this life out truthfully and rightly. And be patient with those who don’t.
48. When you need encouragement, think of the qualities the people around you have: this one’s energy, that one’s modesty, another’s generosity, and so on. Nothing is as encouraging as when virtues are visibly embodied in the people around us, when we’re practically showered with them.
It’s good to keep this in mind.
49. It doesn’t bother you that you weigh only x or y pounds and not three hundred. Why should it bother you that you have only x or y years to live and not more? You accept the limits placed on your body. Accept those placed on your time.
50. Do your best to convince them. But act on your own, if justice requires it. If met with force, then fall back on acceptance and peaceability. Use the setback to practice other virtues.
Remember that our efforts are subject to circumstances; you weren’t aiming to do the impossible.
—Aiming to do what, then?
To try. And you succeeded. What you set out to do is accomplished.
51. Ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say or do.
Self-indulgence means tying it to the things that happen to you.
Sanity means tying it to your own actions.
52. You don’t have to turn this into something. It doesn’t have to upset you. Things can’t shape our decisions by themselves.
53. Practice really hearing what people say. Do your best to get inside their minds.
54. What injures the hive injures the bee.
55. If the crew talked back to the captain, or patients to their doctor, then whose authority would they accept? How could the passengers be kept safe or the patient healthy?
56. All those people who came into the world with me and have already left it.
57. Honey tastes bitter to a man with jaundice. People with rabies are terrified of water. And a child’s idea of beauty is a ball. Why does that upset you? Do you think falsehood is less powerful than bile or a rabid dog?
58. No one can keep you from living as your nature requires. Nothing can happen to you that is not required by Nature.
59. The people they want to ingratiate themselves with, and the results, and the things they do in the process. How quickly it will all be erased by time. How much has been erased already.
Book 7
1. Evil: the same old thing.
No matter what happens, keep this in mind: It’s the same old thing, from one end of the world to the other. It fills the history books, ancient and modern, and the cities, and the houses too. Nothing new at all.
Familiar, transient.
2. You cannot quench understanding unless you put out the insights that compose it. But you can rekindle those at will, like glowing coals. I can control my thoughts as necessary; then how can I be troubled? What is outside my mind means nothing to it. Absorb that lesson and your feet stand firm.
You can return to life. Look at things as you did before. And life returns.
3. Pointless bustling of processions, opera arias, herds of sheep and cattle, military exercises. A bone flung to pet poodles, a little food in the fish tank. The miserable servitude of ants, scampering of frightened mice, puppets