Top 500 Marcus Aurelius Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Discard everything except these few truths: we can live only in the present moment, in this brief now; all the rest of our life is dead and buried or shrouded in uncertainty. Short is the life we lead, and small our patch of earth.”

— Marcus Aurelius

52. “Your task is to stand straight; not to be held straight.”

— Marcus Aurelius

53. “In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present – I am rising to the work of a human being. Why then am I dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist and for which I was brought into the world?”

— Marcus Aurelius

54. “When force of circumstance upsets your equanimity lose no time in recovering your self-control, and do not remain out of tune longer than you can help. Habitual recurrence to the harmony will increase your mastery of it.”

— Marcus Aurelius

55. “The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing.”

— Marcus Aurelius

56. “The blazing fire makes flames and brightness out of everything thrown into it.”

— Marcus Aurelius

57. “Look well into thyself; there is a source of strength which will always spring up if thou wilt always look.”

— Marcus Aurelius

58. “To refrain from imitation is the best revenge.”

— Marcus Aurelius

59. “It is in your power to withdraw yourself whenever you desire. Perfect tranquility within consists in the good ordering of the mind, the realm of your own.”

— Marcus Aurelius

60. “No one was ever injured by the truth; but he who persists in self-deception and ignorance is injured.”

— Marcus Aurelius

61. “Regain your senses, call yourself back, and once again wake up. Now that you realize that only dreams were troubling you, view this ‘reality’ as you view your dreams.”

— Marcus Aurelius

62. “He who pays no attention to what his neighbor does, says or thinks, preferring to concentrate on making his own actions appropriate and justifiable, better uses his time.”

— Marcus Aurelius

63. “Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now, take what’s left and live it properly. What doesn’t transmit light creates its own darkness.”

— Marcus Aurelius

64. “Find joy in simplicity, self-respect, and indifference to what lies between virtue and vice. Love the human race. Follow the divine.”

— Marcus Aurelius

65. “Be content to seem what you really are.”

— Marcus Aurelius

66. “A little flesh, a little breath, and a Reason to rule all – that is myself.”

— Marcus Aurelius

67. “Accept whatever comes to you woven in the pattern of your destiny, for what could more aptly fit your needs?”

— Marcus Aurelius

68. “A man must stand erect, not be kept erect by others.”

— Marcus Aurelius

69. “Humans have come into being for the sake of each other, so either teach them, or learn to bear them.”

— Marcus Aurelius

70. “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 colour and complexion of thought.”

— Marcus Aurelius

71. “Whatever may happen to you was prepared for you from all eternity; and the implication of causes was from eternity spinning the thread of your being.”

— Marcus Aurelius

72. “Treat with utmost respect your power of forming opinions, for this power alone guards you against making assumptions that are contrary to nature and judgments that overthrow the rule of reason.”

— Marcus Aurelius

73. “Whatever anyone does or says, I must be emerald and keep my colour.”

— Marcus Aurelius

74. “You are a little soul carrying about a corpse, as Epictetus used to say.”

— Marcus Aurelius

75. “Never value anything as profitable to thyself which shall compel thee to break thy promise, to lose thy self-respect, to hate any man, to suspect, to curse, to act the hypocrite, to desire anything which needs walls and curtains.”

— Marcus Aurelius

76. “Take the shortest route. The one that nature planned – to speak and act in the healthiest way. Do that, and be free of pain and stress, free of all calculations and pretension.”

— Marcus Aurelius

77. “We are born for cooperation.”

— Marcus Aurelius

78. “When jarred, unavoidably, by circumstance revert at once to yourself and don’t lose the rhythm more than you can help. You’ll have a better grasp of harmony if you keep going back to it.”

— Marcus Aurelius

79. “Spend your brief moment according to nature’s law, and serenely greet the journey’s end as an olive falls when it is ripe, blessing the branch that bare it, and giving thanks to the tree that gave it life.”

— Marcus Aurelius

80. “Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.”

— Marcus Aurelius

81. “Body. Soul. Mind. Sensations: the body. Desires: the soul. Reasoning: the mind.”

— Marcus Aurelius

82. “The perfection of moral character consists in this, in passing every day as the last, and in being neither violently excited nor torpid nor playing the hypocrite.”

— Marcus Aurelius

83. “Were you to live three thousand years, or even thirty thousand, remember that the sole life which a man can lose is that which he is living at the moment; and furthermore, that he can have no other life except the one he loses...”

— Marcus Aurelius

84. “Look to nothing, not even for a moment except to reason.”

— Marcus Aurelius

85. “And in the case of superior things like stars, we discover a kind of unity in separation. The higher we rise on the scale of being, the easier it is to discern a connection even among things separated by vast distances.”

— Marcus Aurelius

86. “One universe made up all that is; and one God in it all, and one principle of being, and one law, the reason shared by all thinking creatures, and one truth.”

— Marcus Aurelius

87. “We ought to do good to others as simply as a horse runs, or a bee makes honey, or a vine bears grapes season after season without thinking of the grapes it has borne.”

— Marcus Aurelius

88. “How powerful is man! He is able to do all that God wishes him to do. He is able to accept all that God sends upon him.”

— Marcus Aurelius

89. “Yet living and dying, honour and dishonour, pain and pleasure, riches and poverty, and so forth are equally the lot of good men and bad. Things like these neither elevate nor degrade; and therefore they are no more good than they are evil.”

— Marcus Aurelius

90. “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 that air which has given me my daily breath.”

— Marcus Aurelius

91. “Perhaps there are none more lazy, or more truly ignorant, than your everlasting readers.”

— Marcus Aurelius

92. “Flinch not, neither give up nor despair, if the achieving of every act in accordance with right principle is not always continuous with thee.”

— Marcus Aurelius

93. “The universal order and the personal order are nothing but different expressions and manifestations of a common underlying principle.”

— Marcus Aurelius

94. “The soul is dyed by the thoughts. Dye it then, with a continuous series of such thoughts as these – that where a man can live, there – if he will – he can also live well.”

— Marcus Aurelius

95. “If any man can convince me and bring home to me that which I do not think or act aright, gladly will I change; for I search after truth, by which man never yet was harmed. But he is harmed who abideth on still in his deception and ignorance.”

— Marcus Aurelius

96. “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 station. Pray, shall not a man act like a man?”

— Marcus Aurelius

97. “Remind oneself continually of one of those who practiced virtue in days gone by.”

— Marcus Aurelius

98. “Deem not life a thing of consequence. For look at the yawning void of the future, and at that other limitless space, the past.”

— Marcus Aurelius

99. “Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered: and all this in a nook of this part of the world; and not even here do all agree, no, not any one with himself: and the whole earth too is a point.”

— Marcus Aurelius

100. “Direct thy attention to what is said. Let thy understanding enter into the things that are doing and the things which do them.”

— Marcus Aurelius