Meditations - Marcus Aurelius (Emperor of Rome) [51]
9. Don’t be overheard complaining about life at court. Not even to yourself.
10. Remorse is annoyance at yourself for having passed up something that’s to your benefit. But if it’s to your benefit it must be good—something a truly good person would be concerned about.
But no truly good person would feel remorse at passing up pleasure.
So it cannot be to your benefit, or good.
11. What is this, fundamentally? What is its nature and substance, its reason for being? What is it doing in the world? How long is it here for?
12. When you have trouble getting out of bed in the morning, remember that your defining characteristic—what defines a human being—is to work with others. Even animals know how to sleep. And it’s the characteristic activity that’s the more natural one—more innate and more satisfying.
13. Apply them constantly, to everything that happens: Physics. Ethics. Logic.
14. When you have to deal with someone, ask yourself: What does he mean by good and bad? If he thinks x or y about pleasure and pain (and what produces them), about fame and disgrace, about death and life, then it shouldn’t shock or surprise you when he does x or y.
In fact, I’ll remind myself that he has no real choice.
15. Remember: you shouldn’t be surprised that a fig tree produces figs, nor the world what it produces. A good doctor isn’t surprised when his patients have fevers, or a helmsman when the wind blows against him.
16. Remember that to change your mind and to accept correction are free acts too. The action is yours, based on your own will, your own decision—and your own mind.
17. If it’s in your control, why do you do it? If it’s in someone else’s, then who are you blaming? Atoms? The gods? Stupid either way.
Blame no one. Set people straight, if you can. If not, just repair the damage. And suppose you can’t do that either. Then where does blaming people get you?
No pointless actions.
18. What dies doesn’t vanish. It stays here in the world, transformed, dissolved, as parts of the world, and of you. Which are transformed in turn—without grumbling.
19. Everything is here for a purpose, from horses to vine shoots. What’s surprising about that? Even the sun will tell you, “I have a purpose,” and the other gods as well. And why were you born? For pleasure? See if that answer will stand up to questioning.
20. Nature is like someone throwing a ball in the air, gauging its rise and arc—and where it will fall. And what does the ball gain as it flies upward? Or lose when it plummets to earth?
What does the bubble gain from its existence? Or lose by bursting?
And the same for a candle.
21. Turn it inside out: What is it like? What is it like old? Or sick? Or selling itself on the streets?
They all die soon—praiser and praised, rememberer and remembered. Remembered in these parts or in a corner of them. Even there they don’t all agree with each other (or even with themselves).
And the whole earth a mere point in space.
22. Stick to what’s in front of you—idea, action, utterance.
22a. This is what you deserve. You could be good today. But instead you choose tomorrow.
23. What I do? I attribute it to human beneficence.
What is done to me? I accept it—and attribute it to the gods, and that source from which all things together flow.
24. Like the baths—oil, sweat, dirt, grayish water, all of it disgusting.
The whole of life, all of the visible world.
25. Verus, leaving Lucilla behind, then Lucilla. Maximus, leaving Secunda. And Secunda. Diotimus, leaving Epitynchanus. Then Epitynchanus. Faustina, leaving Antoninus. Then Antoninus.
So with all of them.
Hadrian, leaving Celer. And Celer.
Where have they gone, the brilliant, the insightful ones, the proud? Brilliant as Charax and Demetrius the Platonist and Eudaemon and the rest of them. Short-lived creatures, long dead. Some of them not remembered at all, some become legends, some lost even to legend.
So remember: your components will be scattered too, the life within you quenched. Or marching orders and another posting.
26. Joy for