Top 500 Marcus Aurelius Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “He who follows reason in all things is both tranquil and active at the same time, and also cheerful and collected.”

— Marcus Aurelius

302. “The offender needs pity, not wrath; those who must needs be corrected, should be treated with tact and gentleness; and one must be always ready to learn better. ‘The best kind of revenge is, not to become like unto them.’”

— Marcus Aurelius

303. “Snow endures but for a season, and joy comes with the morning.”

— Marcus Aurelius

304. “To expect an impossibility is madness.”

— Marcus Aurelius

305. “Because your own strength is unequal to a task, do not assume it is beyond the powers of man.”

— Marcus Aurelius

306. “When thou art above measure angry, bethink thee how momentary is man’s life.”

— Marcus Aurelius

307. “It is right that man should love those who have offended him. He will do so when he remembers that all men are his relations, and that it is through ignorance and involuntarily that they sin, – and then we all die so soon.”

— Marcus Aurelius

308. “Just as the sand-dunes, heaped one upon another, hide each the first, so in life the former deeds are quickly hidden by those that follow after.”

— Marcus Aurelius

309. “When you have done a good deed that another has had the benefit of, why do you need a third reward-as fools do-praise for having done well or looking for a favor in return.”

— Marcus Aurelius

310. “To live each day as though one’s last, never flustered, never apathetic, never attitudinizing – here is the perfection of character.”

— Marcus Aurelius

311. “Let thine occupations be few, saith the sage, if thou wouldst lead a tranquil life.”

— Marcus Aurelius

312. “Vex not thy spirit at the course of things, they heed not thy vexations.”

— Marcus Aurelius

313. “At day’s first light have in readiness, against disinclination to leave your bed, the thought that “I am rising for the work of man.””

— Marcus Aurelius

314. “You must become an old man in good time if you wish to be an old man long.”

— Marcus Aurelius

315. “If it’s time for you to go, leave willingly – as you would to accomplish anything that can be done with grace and honor.”

— Marcus Aurelius

316. “Failure to read what is happening in another’s soul is not easily seen as a cause of unhappiness: but those who fail to attend the motions of their own soul are necessarily unhappy.”

— Marcus Aurelius

317. “Be content with what you are, and wish not change; nor dread your last day, nor long for it.”

— Marcus Aurelius

318. “There is nothing happens to any person but what was in his power to go through with.”

— Marcus Aurelius

319. “It were well to die if there be gods, and sad to live if there be none.”

— Marcus Aurelius

320. “Take away the complaint, ‘I have been harmed,’ and the harm is taken away.”

— Marcus Aurelius

321. “Take full account of what Excellencies you possess, and in gratitude remember how you would hanker after them, if you had them not.”

— Marcus Aurelius

322. “The healthy eye ought to see all visible things and not to say, I wish for green things; for this is the condition of a diseased eye.”

— Marcus Aurelius

323. “Nothing proceeds from nothingness, as also nothing passes away into non-existence.”

— Marcus Aurelius

324. “God overrules all mutinous accidents, brings them under His laws of fate, and makes them all serviceable to His purpose.”

— Marcus Aurelius

325. “Think of the universal substance, of which thou has a very small portion; and of universal time, of which a short and indivisible interval has been assigned to thee; and of that which is fixed by destiny, and how small a part of it thou art.”

— Marcus Aurelius

326. “Thou sufferest justly: for thou choosest rather to become good to-morrow than to be good to-day.”

— Marcus Aurelius

327. “Look deeply. Don’t miss the inherent quality and value of everything.”

— Marcus Aurelius

328. “The whole universe is change and life itself is but what you deem it – either gratefully better than or bitterly worse than something else that you alone choose.”

— Marcus Aurelius

329. “He who eats my bread, does my will.”

— Marcus Aurelius

330. “Man must be arched and buttressed from within, else the temple wavers to the dust.”

— Marcus Aurelius

331. “A man does not sin by commission only, but often by omission.”

— Marcus Aurelius

332. “We are the other of the other.”

— Marcus Aurelius

333. “Stick to what’s in front of you – idea, action, utterance.”

— Marcus Aurelius

334. “Everything is mere opinion.”

— Marcus Aurelius

335. “From my grandfather’s father, I learned to dispense with attendance at public schools, and to enjoy good teachers at home, and to recognize that on such things money should be eagerly spent.”

— Marcus Aurelius

336. “The best way of avenging thyself is not to become like the wrong-doer.”

— Marcus Aurelius

337. “He does not write at all whose poems no man reads.”

— Marcus Aurelius

338. “Both happiness and unhappiness depend on perception.”

— Marcus Aurelius

339. “Always bear this in mind, that very little indeed is necessary for living a happy life.”

— Marcus Aurelius

340. “Consider thyself to be dead, and to have completed thy life up to the present time; and live according to nature the remainder which is allowed thee.”

— Marcus Aurelius

341. “Men despise one another and flatter one another; and men wish to raise themselves above one another, and crouch before one another.”

— Marcus Aurelius

342. “Socrates used to call the opinions of the many by the name of Lamiae, bugbears to frighten children.”

— Marcus Aurelius

343. “Know the joy of life by piling good deed on good deed until no rift or cranny appears between them.”

— Marcus Aurelius

344. “How many after being celebrated by fame have been given up to oblivion; and how many who have celebrated the fame of others have long been dead.”

— Marcus Aurelius

345. “I can at once become happy anywhere, for he is happy who has found himself a happy lot. In a word, happiness lies all in the functions of reason, in warrantable desires and virtuous practice.”

— Marcus Aurelius

346. “When you find an unwillingness to rise early in the morning, endeavor to rouse your faculties, and act up to your kind, and consider that you have to do the business of a man; and that action is both beneficial and the end of your being.”

— Marcus Aurelius

347. “The one thing worth living for is to keep one’s soul pure.”

— Marcus Aurelius

348. “Praise adds nothing to beauty – makes it neither better nor worse.”

— Marcus Aurelius

349. “The constant recollection of death is the test of human conduct.”

— Marcus Aurelius

350. “No form of nature is inferior to art; for the arts merely imitate natural forms. – Variant: There is no nature which is inferior to art, the arts imitate the nature of things.”

— Marcus Aurelius