BEST QUOTES - Meditations Book 2 Summary (MARCUS AURELIUS) |
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Best stoicism quotes from Marcus Aurelius' second book.
2.1 - Begin the morning by saying to yourself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. ... I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him. 2.4 - A limit of time is fixed for you, which if you do not use for clearing away the clouds from your mind, it will go and you will go, and it will never return. 2.5 - You will give yourself relief, if you do every act of your life as if it were the last. 2.8 - Failure to observe what is in the mind of another has seldom made a man unhappy; but those who do not observe the movements of their own minds must of necessity be unhappy. 2.11 - Since it is possible that you might depart from life this very moment, regulate every act and thought accordingly. 2.11 - Death and life, honor and dishonor, pain and pleasure — all these things equally happen to good men and bad, being things which make us neither better nor worse. Therefore they are neither good nor evil. 2.12 - How quickly things disappear: in the universe the bodies themselves, but in time the memory of them. 2.14 - The present is the only thing of which a man can be deprived, if it is true that this is the only thing which he has, and that a man cannot lose something he does not already possess. 2.16 - Even the smallest thing should be done with reference to an end. 2.17 - What then can guide a man? One thing and only one, philosophy. But this consists in keeping the daimon within a man free from violence and unharmed, superior to pains and pleasures, doing nothing without a purpose, nor yet falsely and with hypocrisy. 2.17 - Finally, waiting for death with a cheerful mind, as being nothing else than a dissolution of the elements of which every living being is compounded. But if there is no harm to the elements themselves in each continually changing into another, why should a man have any apprehension about the change and dissolution of all the elements? |