Meditations - Marcus Aurelius (Emperor of Rome) [50]
71. It’s silly to try to escape other people’s faults. They are inescapable. Just try to escape your own.
72. Whenever the force that makes us rational and social encounters something that is neither, then it can reasonably regard it as inferior.
73. You’ve given aid and they’ve received it. And yet, like an idiot, you keep holding out for more: to be credited with a Good Deed, to be repaid in kind. Why?
74. No one objects to what is useful to him.
To be of use to others is natural.
Then don’t object to what is useful to you—being of use.
75. Nature willed the creation of the world. Either all that exists follows logically or even those things to which the world’s intelligence most directs its will are completely random.
A source of serenity in more situations than one.
Book 8
1. Another encouragement to humility: you can’t claim to have lived your life as a philosopher—not even your whole adulthood. You can see for yourself how far you are from philosophy. And so can many others. You’re tainted. It’s not so easy now—to have a reputation as a philosopher. And your position is an obstacle as well.
So you know how things stand. Now forget what they think of you. Be satisfied if you can live the rest of your life, however short, as your nature demands. Focus on that, and don’t let anything distract you. You’ve wandered all over and finally realized that you never found what you were after: how to live. Not in syllogisms, not in money, or fame, or self-indulgence. Nowhere.
—Then where is it to be found?
In doing what human nature requires.
—How?
Through first principles. Which should govern your intentions and your actions.
—What principles?
Those to do with good and evil. That nothing is good except what leads to fairness, and self-control, and courage, and free will. And nothing bad except what does the opposite.
2. For every action, ask: How does it affect me? Could I change my mind about it?
But soon I’ll be dead, and the slate’s empty. So this is the only question: Is it the action of a responsible being, part of society, and subject to the same decrees as God?
3. Alexander and Caesar and Pompey. Compared with Diogenes, Heraclitus, Socrates? The philosophers knew the what, the why, the how. Their minds were their own.
The others? Nothing but anxiety and enslavement.
4. You can hold your breath until you turn blue, but they’ll still go on doing it.
5. The first step: Don’t be anxious. Nature controls it all. And before long you’ll be no one, nowhere—like Hadrian, like Augustus.
The second step: Concentrate on what you have to do. Fix your eyes on it. Remind yourself that your task is to be a good human being; remind yourself what nature demands of people. Then do it, without hesitation, and speak the truth as you see it. But with kindness. With humility. Without hypocrisy.
6. Nature’s job: to shift things elsewhere, to transform them, to pick them up and move them here and there. Constant alteration. But not to worry: there’s nothing new here. Everything is familiar. Even the proportions are unchanged.
7. Nature of any kind thrives on forward progress. And progress for a rational mind means not accepting falsehood or uncertainty in its perceptions, making unselfish actions its only aim, seeking and shunning only the things it has control over, embracing what nature demands of it—the nature in which it participates, as the leaf’s nature does in the tree’s. Except that the nature shared by the leaf is without consciousness or reason, and subject to impediments. Whereas that shared by human beings is without impediments, and rational, and just, since it allots to each and every thing an equal and proportionate share of time, being, purpose, action, chance. Examine it closely. Not whether they’re identical point by point, but in the aggregate: this weighed against that.
8. No time for reading. For controlling your arrogance, yes. For overcoming pain and pleasure, yes. For outgrowing ambition, yes. For not feeling anger at stupid and unpleasant people—even