Marcus Aurelius Quotes

619 quotes in 4760 categories

• To expect an impossibility is madness.
• Failing to understand the workings of one's own mind is bound to lead to unhappiness.
• Nature insists on whatever benefits the whole.
• Reason and the reasoning faculty need no foreign assistance, but are sufficient for their own purposes. They move within themselves, and make directly for the…
• What use do I put my soul to? It is a serviceable question this, and should frequently be put to oneself. How does my ruling…
• How very near us stand the two vast gulfs of time, the past and the future, in which all things disappear.
• What doesn't transmit light creates its own darkness.
• Not even the vicissitudes of fortune are contrary to nature or to the providential ordering of the universe. It all flows from the gods, who…
• Pray look upon the plants and birds, the ants, spiders, and bees, and you will see them all exerting their nature, and busy in their…
• Do you see what little is required of a man to live a well-tempered and god-fearing life? Obey these precepts, and the gods will ask…
• I will march on in the path of nature till my legs sink under me, and then I shall be at rest, and expire into…
• I bless the gods for not letting my education in rhetoric, poetry, and other literary studies come easily to me, and thereby sparing me from…
• Be mindful at all times of the following: the nature of the whole universe, the nature of the part that is me, the relation of…
• Even the stoics agree that certainty is very hard to come at; that our assent is worth little, for where is infallibility to be found?
• The gods have provided me with clear and compelling signs of what it means to live in conformity to nature. They did their part. So…
• Outward objects cannot take hold of the soul, nor force their passage into her, nor set any of her wheels going. No, the impression comes…
• Time is a kind of river, an irresistible flood sweeping up men and events and carrying them headlong, one after the other, to the great…
• The controlling Intelligence understands its own nature, and what it does, and whereon it works.
• My being consists of matter and form, that is, of soul and body; annihilation will reach neither of them, for they were never produced out…
• The gods sustain and guide all their works.

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