Meditations: A New Translation (Modern Library Classics)

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The only thing that isn’t worthless: to live this life out truthfully and rightly. And be patient with those who don’t. 6.47 An athlete in the greatest of all contests — the struggle not to beoverwhelmedby anything that happens. 3.4

Wash yourself clean. With simplicity, with humility, with indifference to everything but right and wrong. Care for other human beings. Follow God. 7.31 To have that. Not a cistern but a perpetual spring. How? By working to win your freedom. Hour by hour. Throughpatience, honesty, and humility. 8.51 To live a good life: We have the potential for it If we can learn to be indifferent to what makes no difference. 11.16 The third discipline of will is in a sense the counterpart to the second, the discipline of action. Action governs our approach to the things in our control. The discipline of will governs our attitude to things that are not within our controlToday Iescapedfrom anxiety. Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions–not outside. 9.13 No matter what anyone says or does, my task is to be good. Like gold or emerald or purple repeating to itself, “No matter what anyone says or does, my task is to be emerald, my color undiminished.” 7.15 This requires not merely passiveacquiescence in what happens, but active cooperation with the world, with fate and, above all,with other human beings. We were made, Marcus tells us over and over, not for ourselves but for others, and our nature is fundamentally unselfish. In our relationship with others we must work for their collective good, while treating them justly and fairly as possible. But the man motivated by desire, who is mastered by pleasure, seems somehow more self-indulgent, less manly in his sins. 2.10 Dowhatnature demands. Get a move on–if you have it in you–and don’t worrywhetheranyone will give youcreditfor it. And don’t go expecting Plato’s republic; be satisfied with even the smallest progress, and treat the outcome of it all as unimportant. 9.29

Our duty is to exercise stringent control over the faculty of perception, with the aim of protecting our mind from error. It’s the pursuit of these things, and your attempts to avoid them, that leave your mind in such turmoil. And yet they aren’t seeking you out; you are the one seeking them.Suspendjudgmentabout them. And at once they will lie still, and you will be freed from fleeing and pursuing. 11.11 It would be wrong for anything to stand between you and attaining goodness — as a rational being and a citizen. 3.6 Objectivejudgment now at this very moment. Unselfish action, now at this very moment. Willing acceptance, now at this very moment. Of all external events. That’s all you need. 9.6 And for a human being to feel stress is normal–if he’s living a normal human life. And if it’s normal, how can it be bad? 6.33So this is how a thoughtful person should await death: not with indifference, not with impatience, not with disdain but simply viewing it as one of the things that happens to us. Now you anticipate the child’s emergence from its mother’s womb; that is how you should await the hour when your soul will emerge from its compartment. 9.3 The tranquility that comes when you stop caring what they say. Or think, or do. Only what you do. 4.18 Something (bad) happens to you. Good. It was meant for you by nature, woven into the pattern from the beginning. 3.26 It never ceases toamazeme: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own. 12.4 To follow the logos in all things is to be relaxed and energetic, joyful and serious at once. 10.12