Marcus Aurelius Quotes

619 quotes in 4760 categories

• Look deep into the hearts of men, and see what delights and disgusts the wise.
• It is not right to vex ourselves at things, for they care not about it.
• It is a disgrace to let ignorance and vanity do more with us than prudence and principle.
• Your manners will depend very much upon the quality of what you frequently think on; for the soul is as it were tinged with the…
• Praise adds nothing to beauty--makes it neither better nor worse.
• Reflect frequently upon the instability of things, and how very fast the scenes of nature are shifted. Matter is in perpetual flux. Change is always…
• Death--a stopping of impressions through the senses, and of the pulling of the cords of motion, and of the ways of thought, and of service…
• Wherever a man lives, he may live well.
• Death, like birth, is one of nature's mysteries, the combining of primal elements and dissolving of the same into the same.
• The gods gave me a father who ruled over me and rid me of any trace of arrogance and showed me that one can live…
• When the sovereign spirit within us is true to nature, it stands poised and ready to adjust to every change in circumstances and to seize…
• Do not suffer a sudden impression to overbear your judgment.
• When you find an unwillingness to rise early in the morning, make this short speech to yourself: I am getting up now to do the…
• Thanks to the gods I didn't spend much time while growing up with my grandfather's mistress and preserved the flower of my youth, waiting for…
• Never act without purpose and resolve, or without the means to finish the job.
• Flinch not, neither give up nor despair, if the achieving of every act in accordance with right principle is not always continuous with thee.
• But if we judge only those things which are in our power to be good or bad, there remains no reason either for finding fault…
• Direct thy attention to what is said. Let thy understanding enter into the things that are doing and the things which do them.
• Thou mayest foresee... the things which will be. For they will certainly be of like form, and it is not possible that they should deviate…
• That which had grown from the earth, to the earth, But that which has sprung from heavenly seed, Back to the heavenly realms returns. This…

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