Meditations

1. From my grandfather Verus I learned to be good-natured and not to lose my temper.

2. From what I heard and remembered about my father I learned modesty and courage.

3. From my mother I learned devotion to the gods, generosity, and restraint—not just from doing harm, but even from letting such a thought enter my mind. I also learned to live simply, far from the lifestyle of the rich.

4. From my great-grandfather I learned not to go to public schools, but to have good teachers at home, and to recognize that this was something worth spending freely on.

5. From my tutor I learned not to support the Greens or the Blues, or the Palm or Shield factions; to put up with hard work and need little; to do things for myself and not meddle in other people’s business; and not to be quick to believe accusations.

6. From Diognetus I learned not to waste my time on empty interests; not to believe what miracle-workers and magicians say about spells, driving out spirits, and things like that; not to train fighting quails or get excited about such pastimes; to accept honest, open speech; to become familiar with philosophy; to study first with Baccheius, then with Tandasis and Marcianus; to write dialogues when I was a boy; and to want a simple cot, an animal skin, and the other things associated with Greek training.

7. From Rusticus I learned to recognize that my character needed correction and treatment; not to be drawn into showing off as a sophist, writing about theories, giving little moral lectures, or posing impressively as a disciplined or charitable man; to give up rhetoric, poetry, and clever turns of phrase; not to walk around the house in formal clothes or do similar things; to write letters in a simple style, like the letter he wrote from Sinuessa to my mother; to be quick to call back and make peace with people who had become angry or behaved badly, as soon as they were willing to come back; to read carefully, not settle for a general understanding, and not agree too quickly with people who talk at length about a subject; and to read the notes of Epictetus, which he lent me from his own library.

8. From Apollonius I learned to be independent, to leave nothing uncertain to chance, and never, even briefly, to look to anything except reason; to stay the same through severe pain, the loss of a child, and long illness; to see in a living person that someone can be both intensely committed and at ease; not to become impatient when explaining something; to see a man who clearly considered his experience and skill in teaching principles the least of his good qualities; and to learn how to accept apparent favors from friends without becoming beholden to them or rejecting them insensitively.

9. From Sextus I learned kindness; the example of a household guided by a father; the idea of living according to nature; dignity without posing; thoughtful concern for friends; patience with uninformed people and with those who hold views without thinking them through; the ability to get along with everyone, so that his company was more pleasant than any flattery, while the people with him also respected him deeply; the skill to identify and organize, clearly and methodically, the principles needed for life; never to show even a trace of anger or any other strong emotion, but to be both completely untroubled by passion and deeply affectionate; to praise others quietly, and to be very learned without showing it off.

10. From Alexander the grammarian I learned not to criticize people or rebuke them when they used a foreign expression, made a grammatical mistake, or said something badly. Instead, I would tactfully use the right expression myself—in a reply, in agreement, in a discussion of the subject rather than the wording, or through some other appropriate kind of indirect reminder.

11. From Fronto I learned what envy, deceit, and hypocrisy are found in tyrants, and that, for the most part, the people we call patricians are rather lacking in affection.

12. From Alexander the Platonist I learned not to keep telling people, in person or by letter, “I’m busy,” unless it was really necessary, and not to use current demands as a constant excuse for avoiding the duties I owe to those who share my life.

13. From Catulus I learned not to dismiss a friend’s complaint, even when it was unreasonable, but to try to restore the relationship to what it had been; to praise my teachers warmly, as he is remembered for praising Domitius and Athenodotus; and to love my children sincerely.

14. From Severus I learned love of family, truth, and justice. Through him I came to know Thrasea, Helvidius, Cato, Dio, and Brutus, and formed the idea of a state with equal laws, governed through equality and equal freedom to speak, and of a monarchy that respects the freedom of its subjects above all else. I also learned from him to be steady and committed in valuing philosophy; to do good, give freely and generously, and remain hopeful; to trust that my friends loved me; to be open with people whose conduct I condemned; and to make what I wanted and did not want so clear that my friends never had to guess.

15. From Maximus I learned self-control and not to be carried away by anything; to stay cheerful in all circumstances, including illness; to have a balanced, gentle, and dignified character; to complete the work before me without complaining; to make everyone trust that I meant what I said and had no bad purpose in what I did; not to be amazed or shocked, never rushed or hesitant, never helpless, gloomy, or scowling, and never angry or suspicious; to be helpful, forgiving, and truthful; to seem naturally upright rather than corrected; to ensure that no one would think I looked down on him, or presume to consider himself better than me; and to be gracious in …

16. From my father I learned to be gentle and to hold firmly to decisions made after careful thought; not to be vain about supposed honors; to work hard and steadily; to listen to people who had something useful to offer the community; to give each person exactly what he deserved; to know from experience when to press hard and when to ease off; to put an end to sexual affairs with young men; to have a sense of fellowship, and to let his friends choose not to dine with him every time or travel with him whenever he went away, while always treating in the same way those who had stayed behind to meet some obligation; to investigate matters in council carefully and persistently, rather than stop the inquiry too soon and settle for the first impressions available; to keep his friends and never become quickly tired of them or excessively attached to them; to be self-reliant in every situation and cheerful; to plan well ahead and arrange even the smallest matters beforehand without making a drama of it; to suppress public cheering and every kind of flattery in his presence; always to protect what the government needed, spend its funds carefully, and bear the criticism this sometimes caused; not to be superstitious about the gods, nor to win people over by courting popularity, pleasing them, or catering to the crowd, but to stay clear-headed and firm in everything, never showing poor taste or chasing novelty; to use without conceit or excuses the comforts of life that fortune had provided generously, so that he enjoyed them simply when they were there and did not miss them when they were gone; and to be someone no one could describe as a sophist, a homegrown clever talker, or a pedant, but as a mature and complete man, immune to flattery and able to manage both his own affairs and those of others.

He also respected people who genuinely practiced philosophy. He did not criticize the others, but neither was he easily influenced by them. He was pleasant company and gracious, but never excessively so. He took reasonable care of his body, not because he clung to life, wanted to beautify himself, or was careless of it, but so attentively that he very rarely needed doctors, medicines, or treatments applied to the body. Most of all, he willingly gave way, without jealousy, to people with some special ability, such as skill in speaking or knowledge of laws, customs, or other subjects from history; and he worked with them to help each gain recognition for his own particular strengths. He did everything according to ancestral custom without trying to make a show even of preserving ancestral custom. He was not easily moved or constantly changing direction, but stayed with the same places and the same work. After severe headaches, he returned immediately to his usual duties fresh and vigorous. He had very few secrets, and only rarely, and those concerned public affairs alone. He showed good judgment and restraint in putting on public shows, constructing public works, making distributions, and similar matters, like a man focused on what actually needed to be done rather than on the praise he would receive for doing it.

He did not bathe at odd hours. He was not obsessed with building, with devising new dishes, with the weave and color of clothing, or with physical beauty. The clothes he wore at Lorium when he came up from the lower country house; much of his behavior at Lanuvium; the way he treated the tax collector at Tusculum when the man appealed to him—his conduct was consistently like this. There was nothing harsh, merciless, or aggressive in him, nothing that could make anyone say, “he worked himself into a sweat.” Instead, he considered and reasoned through each thing separately, as if he had all the time he needed, calmly, methodically, firmly, and consistently.

What is said about Socrates would apply to him: he could both go without and enjoy things that many people are too weak to do without and too ready to surrender themselves to enjoying. To be strong, endure, and remain clear-headed in either situation is the mark of a man whose soul is balanced and invincible, as Maximus was during his illness.

17. From the gods I received good grandfathers, good parents, a good sister, good teachers, good members of the household, relatives, and friends—almost everyone around me was good. I also never went so far as to do anything wrong to any of them, though I had the kind of disposition from which I might have done so if the opportunity had come. It was the gods’ kindness that no combination of circumstances arose that would have exposed me.

I was not brought up for too long in the home of my grandfather’s concubine. I preserved my youth, did not become sexually mature before the proper time, and even remained that way beyond the usual time.

I was put under the authority of a ruler and father who was going to remove all my vanity and make me understand that a person can live at court without needing bodyguards, special clothing, torches, statues, or any such display and pomp. It is possible to keep one’s way of life very close to that of a private citizen without becoming any less dignified or less energetic in carrying out, as a ruler, the duties required for the common good.

I had the good fortune to have a brother whose character could rouse me to take care of my own character, and who also made me happy by his respect and affection.

My children were not born unintelligent or physically deformed.

I did not advance further in rhetoric, poetry, and other pursuits in which I might perhaps have become absorbed if I had felt that I was making good progress.

I made sure, while there was still time, to give those who had raised me the rank I thought they wanted. I did not postpone it on the assumption that, because they were still young, I could do it later.

I came to know Apollonius, Rusticus, and Maximus.

I was given a clear and repeated picture of what a life according to Nature is like. So, as far as the gods and the gifts, help, and inspiration that come from them are concerned, nothing now prevents me from living according to Nature. If I still fall short, it is my own fault, because I fail to keep the gods’ reminders and what are almost their direct lessons continually in mind.

My body has endured for so long under this kind of life.

I had sexual relations with neither Benedicta nor Theodotus. Later, when I did fall into sexual passions, I recovered from them.

Although I was often angry with Rusticus, I never went on to do anything I would later have regretted.

Although my mother was destined to die young, she still spent the last years of her life with me.

Whenever I wanted to help someone who was poor or needed something else, I was never told that I did not have the money to do it. And I myself never fell into a similar need that required me to accept help from someone else.

My wife is as she is: so cooperative, so affectionate, and so straightforward.

I had plenty of suitable tutors for my children.

Help was given to me through dreams, including remedies to keep me from spitting blood and from suffering vertigo, as well as the message at Caieta: “As you shall use...”

When I wanted to study philosophy, I did not fall in with a sophist or settle down to writing treatises, analyzing syllogisms, or studying heavenly phenomena.

For all these things require “the help of the gods and fortune.”

1. In the morning, tell yourself in advance: I will meet people who are meddlesome, ungrateful, abusive, deceitful, envious, and unwilling to cooperate. All this has happened to them because they do not know what is good and what is evil. But I have understood that good is morally beautiful and evil is shameful, and that the person who does wrong is related to me—not by the same blood or ancestry, but because we share reason and a portion of the divine. So none of them can harm me, because no one can involve me in anything shameful. Nor can I be angry with or hate someone related to me. We came into being to work together, like feet, hands, eyelids, and the upper and lower rows of teeth. Working against one another is therefore against nature; and being resentful or turning away from someone is working against them.

2. Whatever I am, I am a bit of flesh, a bit of breath, and the mind that governs me. Think little of the flesh: it is blood and small bones, a woven network of sinews, veins, and arteries. Look also at what the breath is: air, never remaining the same, but breathed out and drawn in again every moment. What remains, then, is the governing mind. Let go of books. Stop being pulled in different directions; you have not been given time for that. Instead, think of yourself as already dying: you are old. Do not let your mind remain a slave. Do not let it be jerked around like a puppet by selfish impulses. Do not be dissatisfied with what fate brings now or view the future with fear.

3. What comes from the gods is full of providence. What comes from chance is not separate from nature, or from the interweaving and entanglement of everything governed by providence. Everything flows from that source, together with necessity and what benefits the whole universe, of which you are a part. What the nature of the whole produces is good for every part of nature, and so is whatever preserves the whole. The universe is preserved through changes both in the elements and in the things made from them. Let this be enough for you, and keep it always as your basic conviction. Give up your thirst for books, so that you may die without complaining, truly at peace and sincerely grateful to the gods.

4. Remember how long you have been putting this off, and how many times the gods have given you more time and you have failed to use it. You must now understand what universe you belong to, from what power governing the universe you have flowed, and that your time has a fixed limit. If you do not use it to bring yourself into the light, it will be gone, and so will you, and you will have no further opportunity.

5. At every moment, make a firm effort—as a Roman and a man—to do the work in front of you with exact... and natural dignity, affection, freedom, and justice, and to free yourself from all other impressions. You will do this if you carry out each action as if it were the last action of your life, without aimlessness, without an emotional resistance to the reason that guides your choices, without hypocrisy or selfishness, and without dissatisfaction with what fate has assigned you. You can see how few rules a person needs to master in order to live an untroubled life that respects the gods. The gods will ask nothing more from someone who observes them.

6. You are mistreating yourself, my soul, mistreating yourself, and soon you will have no time left to respect yourself. Everyone’s life lasts only a moment, and yours is nearly over, yet you do not respect yourself: you make your well-being depend on what other people think.

7. Are outside events distracting you? Give yourself time to learn something more that is good, and stop wandering. But you must also guard against another kind of wandering. People who are tired of life and have no goal toward which they direct every impulse and every impression without exception talk nonsense even through their actions.

8. People rarely become miserable because they do not know what is happening in someone else’s mind. But those who do not pay attention to the movements of their own mind are bound to be miserable.

9. Always keep these points in mind: what the nature of the whole universe is; what your own nature is; how your nature is related to the whole; what kind of part you are and what kind of whole you belong to; and that no one can prevent you from always acting and speaking in accordance with the nature of which you are a part.

10. When Theophrastus compares kinds of wrongdoing in philosophical terms, as someone might compare such things in the usual way, he says that wrongs committed from desire are more serious than those committed from anger. An angry person seems to turn away from reason because of pain and an involuntary inner tightening. But someone who does wrong from desire, overcome by pleasure, seems less self-controlled and more effeminate in wrongdoing. So Theophrastus was right, and spoke as a philosopher should, when he said that wrongdoing accompanied by pleasure deserves more blame than wrongdoing accompanied by pain. In general, the angry person is more like someone who was wronged first and was driven by pain to become angry. The other person begins the move toward wrongdoing himself, carried by desire to do something.

11. Do, say, and think everything as if you might leave this life right now. If there are gods, there is nothing frightening about leaving human beings, because the gods would not involve you in evil. But if there are no gods, or if they do not care about human affairs, why should I live in a universe without gods or providence? Yet the gods do exist and do care about human affairs. They have put it entirely within a person’s own power to avoid falling into things that are truly evil. If any of the other things were evil, they would also have arranged for everyone to have the power to avoid them. (How could something that does not make a person worse make that person’s life worse?) The nature of the whole would not have overlooked these matters from ignorance. Nor would it have known about them but been unable to prevent or correct them. Nor would it have made so great a mistake through lack of power or skill that good and evil happen indiscriminately to good and bad people alike. But death and life, fame and lack of fame, pain and pleasure, wealth and poverty all happen equally to good and bad people, and they are neither morally beautiful nor shameful. Therefore they are neither good nor evil.

12. How quickly everything disappears: the bodies themselves into the universe, and the memories of them into eternity. Think what all perceptible things are like, especially those that lure us with pleasure, frighten us with pain, or are loudly praised out of vanity—how worthless, contemptible, dirty, perishable, and dead they are. Consider also who these people are whose opinions and voices give someone a good or bad reputation. Consider what death is. If a person looks at death by itself and analyzes the idea of it, breaking down the images attached to it, he will no longer think it is anything except a natural process. Anyone who fears a natural process is a child. Yet death is not only a natural process; it also benefits nature. Consider how a human being makes contact with god, by what part of himself, and what condition that human part must be in when he does.

13. Nothing is more miserable than someone who investigates everything around him, “searching,” as the saying goes, “what lies beneath the earth,” and trying to guess what is in other people’s minds, without realizing that it is enough to stay close to the divine spirit within himself and care for it sincerely. Caring for it means keeping it free from emotion, pointless activity, and resentment at what gods and human beings bring about. What comes from the gods should be respected because it is good; what comes from people should be met with affection because we are related. Sometimes it should also be pitied, in a way, because people do not know what is good and what is bad. That disability is no less serious than being unable to tell white from black.

14. Even if you were going to live for three thousand years, or ten thousand times that long, remember that no one loses any life other than the life he is living, and no one lives any life other than the life he loses. So the longest life and the shortest amount to the same thing. The present is equal for everyone, so what passes away is equal, and what is lost turns out to last only an instant. No one can lose the past or the future. How could anyone take from you what you do not have?

So always remember two things. First, everything has been the same in kind from all eternity and keeps coming around again in cycles. It makes no difference whether you see the same things over a hundred years, two hundred years, or endless time. Second, the person who lives longest and the person who dies soonest lose the same amount. The present is the only thing a person can be deprived of, since it is the only thing he has, and no one loses what he does not have.

15. Everything is a judgment. The criticisms made against Monimus the Cynic are obvious. The usefulness of the statement is also obvious, as long as you accept its appealing part only to the extent that it is true.

16. The human soul does greatest violence to itself when it becomes, as far as it can, an abscess or a kind of tumor in the universe. Resenting anything that happens is a rebellion against Nature, which contains within itself the individual natures of all other things.

It also harms itself when it turns away from another person or acts against him in order to hurt him, as angry people do.

Third, it harms itself when pleasure or pain defeats it.

Fourth, when it pretends and does or says something falsely and insincerely.

Fifth, when it directs an action or impulse toward no goal, but acts at random and without thinking about what it is doing. Even the smallest actions should be carried out with their final purpose in view. The purpose of rational beings is to follow the reason and law of the oldest city and political community.

17. The time of a human life is a moment; its substance is always flowing; perception is faint; the whole body is made of material that soon decays; the soul wanders; fortune is hard to predict; reputation is undiscerning. In short, everything bodily is a river, and everything in the soul is dream and conceit. Life is a war and a foreigner’s temporary stay; later fame is forgetfulness.

What, then, can guide us through? One thing only: philosophy. This means keeping the divine spirit within us free from violation and harm, stronger than pleasures and pains; doing nothing at random, falsely, or hypocritically; not depending on another person to do or not do something; and accepting whatever happens and is assigned to us as coming from the same source from which that spirit itself came. Above all, it means waiting for death with a peaceful mind, since death is nothing more than the separation of the elements from which every living thing is composed. If the elements themselves suffer nothing terrible by constantly changing into one another, why should anyone distrust the change and dissolution of them all? It is in accordance with nature, and nothing in accordance with nature is bad.

1. Do not consider only that life is used up day by day and that less and less of it remains. Consider also that, even if a person lives longer, it is uncertain whether the mind will continue to be equally capable of understanding events and of the reflection that gives us knowledge of divine and human matters. If the mind begins to fail, the person will still be able to breathe, eat, receive impressions, have impulses, and do other things like these. But the ability to direct oneself, work out exactly what duty requires, analyze what appears to us, consider whether it is already time to take oneself out of life, and do all the other things that require a thoroughly trained power of reasoning will die out first. So we must act without delay, not only because we are continually getting closer to death, but also because our understanding of events and our ability to keep track of them may end sooner.

2. We should also notice that even the side effects of natural processes can have something pleasing and attractive about them. For example, when bread is baked, some parts crack open. These cracks are in a sense contrary to what baking is meant to produce, yet they look good in their own way and especially stimulate our appetite. Figs split open when they are fully ripe. In olives that ripen on the tree, being close to decay gives the fruit a special beauty. The drooping heads of grain, a lion’s furrowed brow, foam running from boars’ mouths, and many other things are not beautiful when considered separately. Yet because they result from natural processes, they add beauty to those processes and give pleasure. So if a person has sensitivity and a deeper understanding of what happens in the universe, almost nothing that occurs as a consequence of something else will seem to lack a pleasing arrangement. That person will enjoy seeing the actual open jaws of wild animals no less than the imitations shown by painters and sculptors. With clear and self-controlled eyes, he will be able to see a certain vigor and mature beauty in an old woman or an old man.. and the loveliness of children. Many things like these, which do not appeal to everyone, will occur only to someone who has a genuine affinity with nature and its works.

3. Hippocrates cured many diseases, then became ill himself and died. The Chaldaeans predicted the deaths of many people, and then fate caught up with them too. Alexander, Pompey, and Gaius Caesar completely destroyed whole cities many times and slaughtered many tens of thousands of cavalry and infantry in battle; eventually they too left this life. Heraclitus wrote at length about the natural causes of the world’s destruction by fire, but died with his body full of water and covered in cow dung. Lice killed Democritus, and other lice killed Socrates. So what? You boarded the ship, you sailed, you reached port. Now get off. If you are entering another life, not even there will any place be empty of gods. If you are entering unconsciousness, you will stop having to bear pain and pleasure and to serve a container far inferior to the thing that serves it. The servant is mind and divine spirit; the container is earth and filth.

4. Do not use up the rest of your life thinking about other people unless your thoughts contribute to the common good. You keep yourself from doing other work.. when you imagine what a certain person is doing and why, what he is saying, thinking, or planning, and similar things that distract you from watching your own ruling mind.

You must remove from the sequence of your thoughts everything pointless and useless, and especially everything nosy or spiteful. Train yourself to think only thoughts that would let you answer openly and at once if someone suddenly asked, “What are you thinking about now?” You should be able to say, “This” or “That,” and your answer should immediately show that all your thoughts are straightforward and kind, the thoughts of a social being who is not concerned with ideas of pleasure or self-indulgence of any kind, or with rivalry, envy, suspicion, or anything else you would be ashamed to admit was on your mind.

A person like this, who no longer puts off joining the best, is a kind of priest and assistant of the gods. He also uses the power settled within him, which keeps a person unpolluted by pleasures, unharmed by any pain, untouched by any insult, and unresponsive to every kind of evil. He is a competitor in the greatest contest: not to be defeated by any passion. He is deeply saturated with justice, accepts with all his heart everything that happens and is assigned to him, and rarely thinks about what another person says, does, or thinks—and never does so without a serious need connected with the common good.

He treats only his own affairs as material for action, and he constantly considers what the universe weaves into his fate. He makes his own actions honorable, and he is convinced that what happens to him is good, because the lot assigned to each person is carried along with him and carries him along. He also remembers that every rational being is related to him and that caring for all people is part of human nature. But he should value the approval not of everyone, only of those who clearly live in agreement with nature. As for people who do not live that way, he continually remembers what they are like at home and away from home, at night and during the day, and what kind of company they keep. He therefore places no value on praise from people like that, since they are not even pleased with themselves.

5. Do nothing unwillingly, without concern for the community, without examining it, or while divided against yourself. Do not decorate your thoughts with clever affectation. Do not talk too much or involve yourself in too many things.

Let the god within you guide a mature and manly human being, a citizen, a Roman, and a leader—someone at his post, waiting for the signal recalling him from life and ready to leave, needing neither an oath nor another person as witness. Keep a cheerful spirit, needing no help from outside and no peace supplied by others. You must stand straight on your own, not be kept straight by someone else.

6. If you find anything in human life better than justice, truth, self-control, courage, and, in short, than having your mind satisfied with itself when it enables you to act according to right reason and satisfied with fate in what is assigned to you without your choice—if, I repeat, you see anything better than this, turn to it with your whole soul and enjoy the best thing you have found.

But if nothing seems better than the inner spirit set within you, which has put its own impulses under its control, tests its impressions, has detached itself—as Socrates said—from the senses’ attempts to persuade it, submits itself to the gods, and cares for human beings; if you find everything else smaller and less valuable than this, then give nothing else any room. Once you lean and turn toward something else, you will no longer be able to give undistracted priority to that good which belongs properly and personally to you. For it is wrong to place anything of a different kind in competition with the good of a rational, social being—such as popular praise, positions of power, wealth, or pleasurable enjoyment. All these things, even if they seem compatible with that good for a short time, suddenly take control and carry you away.

So choose the better thing plainly and freely, and stick to it. “But the better thing is what is beneficial.” If it benefits you as a rational being, keep to it. If it benefits you merely as an animal, say so, and maintain your judgment without vanity. Just make sure that you conduct the examination reliably.

7. Never treat as being to your advantage anything that will eventually force you to betray a trust, give up your sense of decency, hate anyone, be suspicious, curse, pretend, or want something that has to be hidden behind walls and curtains. A person who puts his own mind, his inner spirit, and the sacred practice of its virtue first does not turn life into a tragedy, does not complain, and will need neither isolation nor a crowd. Above all, he will live without chasing things or running from them. He does not care at all whether his soul remains contained in his body for a longer or shorter time. Even if he has to leave right now, he will depart as easily as he would do anything else that can be done decently and properly. During his whole life, he is careful of this one thing only: that his mind should not enter a state unfit for a rational and social creature.

8. In the mind of someone trained and purified, you would find nothing infected, bruised, or festering beneath the surface. Fate does not catch his life incomplete, as might be said of a tragic actor who leaves before finishing his part and performing the whole play. Nor is there anything in him that is slavish, artificial, attached, cut off, accountable to another, or hiding away.

9. Respect your ability to form judgments. Everything depends on preventing any judgment from arising in your governing mind that conflicts with nature and with the way a rational creature is made. This ability offers freedom from hasty conclusions, a sense of kinship with other people, and obedience to the gods.

10. So throw everything else away and keep hold of only these few things. Also remember that each person lives only the present moment, which is instantaneous. Everything else has either already been lived or is uncertain. The time each person lives is short; the little corner of the earth where he lives is small; and even the longest fame after death is small. That fame is handed down through a succession of insignificant people who will die very soon and who do not even know themselves, still less someone who died long ago.

11. Add one more rule to those already given: always define or describe whatever appears to you, so that you can see what it is in its actual substance—stripped bare, viewed as a whole, and analyzed into all its parts. Tell yourself its own proper name and the names of the things from which it was put together and into which it will break down.

Nothing produces a noble mind as effectively as being able to examine each thing that occurs in life methodically and truthfully, and always to look at it in a way that lets you understand at the same time what sort of universe it belongs to, what use it serves there, what value it has in relation to the whole, and what value it has for a human being, who is a citizen of the highest city, while all other cities are like its households. Ask: What is this thing that is now making an impression on me? What is it made of? How long is it naturally able to last? What virtue do I need in dealing with it—gentleness, courage, honesty, faithfulness, simplicity, self-reliance, or some other virtue?

So in every case you must say: “This comes from a god. This other thing results from the combination of events, the threads woven together with them, and this particular meeting and chance. And this comes from a member of my own people, family, and community, although he does not know what is in accordance with his own nature. But I do know. That is why I treat him kindly and justly, following the natural law of community, while also aiming, in matters that are neither good nor bad, to give each thing its appropriate value.”

12. If you do what is in front of you in accordance with right reason, seriously, energetically, and kindly; if you let no secondary concern interfere, but keep your inner spirit pure and upright as if you might have to give it back at once; if you hold to this without expecting anything or running from anything, and are satisfied with your present natural action and with complete, courageous truth in everything you say, you will live well. No one can stop you.

13. Just as doctors always keep their tools and surgical knives at hand for unexpected treatments, keep your principles ready so that you can understand divine and human matters and do everything, even the smallest thing, while remembering the connection between them. You cannot do anything human well without relating it to what is divine, or anything divine without relating it to what is human.

Stop wandering. You are not going to read your notebooks, the histories of the ancient Romans and Greeks, or the selections from books that you were saving for your old age. So hurry toward the goal, give up empty hopes, and help yourself—if you care about yourself at all—while you still can.

14. Stop wandering. You are not going to read your notebooks, the histories of the ancient Romans and Greeks, or the selections from books that you were saving for your old age. So hurry toward the goal, give up empty hopes, and help yourself—if you care about yourself at all—while you still can.

15. People do not know how many meanings there are in “stealing,” “sowing,” “buying,” “being still,” and “seeing what needs to be done”—which is seen not with the eyes, but with a different kind of vision.

16. Body, soul, mind. The body has sensations, the soul has impulses, and the mind has judgments. Even grazing animals receive impressions. Even wild beasts, androgynes, Phalaris, and Nero are pulled around by their impulses like puppets. Even people who do not believe in gods, people who desert their country, and people who do ‹anything at all› after closing their doors can use the mind to guide them toward what seems to be their duty.

So if everything else is shared with the kinds of beings just mentioned, what belongs especially to a good person is this: to love and accept what happens and what fate has woven together with him; not to corrupt the divine spirit seated within his chest or disturb it with a crowd of impressions, but to keep it calm, following God with proper conduct, saying nothing untrue and doing nothing unjust. Even if everyone doubts that he lives sincerely, modestly, and cheerfully, he does not become angry with any of them or turn away from the road leading to the end of life. He must reach that end pure, calm, ready to be set free, and brought into harmony with his own fate without compulsion.

1. When the ruling part within us is in its natural condition, it responds to events by readily adapting to what is possible and available. It does not require any particular material. It pursues preferred things with a reservation, and turns whatever obstructs it into material for its own use. It is like a fire strong enough to master what is thrown onto it, though the same things would put out a small lamp. A bright fire quickly takes in what is piled on it, consumes it, and grows higher because of it.

2. Do nothing aimlessly or except according to a principle that completes the art.

3. People look for retreats in the countryside, by the sea, and in the mountains, and you too tend to want such places very much. But this is extremely naive, because you can withdraw into yourself whenever you choose. Nowhere can a person find a quieter or less troubled retreat than in his own soul, especially if he has within himself thoughts that he can examine and immediately become completely at ease. By ease I mean nothing but inner order. So keep giving yourself this retreat and renew yourself. The thoughts you meet there should be brief and basic, enough to wash away all distress at once and send you back without irritation toward what you must return to.

What are you irritated by? Other people's badness? Think again about the conclusion that rational beings were made for one another, that tolerance is part of justice, and that people do wrong unwillingly. Remember how many people who were enemies, suspicious of one another, full of hatred, and stabbing one another with spears are now dead and reduced to ashes. Stop at last.

Or are you irritated by what the universe assigns you? Recall the alternatives: either providence or atoms. Recall also all the arguments showing that the universe is like a city.

Or will bodily conditions still affect you? Remember that once the mind separates itself and recognizes its own authority, it does not mix with the vital breath whether that breath is moving smoothly or roughly. Remember too everything you have heard and accepted about pain and pleasure.

Or will your little bit of fame distract you? Look at how quickly everything is forgotten, at the endless gulf of time before and after us, at the emptiness of echoed praise, at the changeability and poor judgment of those who appear to praise us, and at how small the place is in which fame is confined. The whole earth is a point, and this inhabited region is only a tiny corner of it. Even here, how many people will praise you, and what sort of people are they?

So remember to withdraw into this small field of your own. Above all, do not pull yourself apart or strain yourself. Be free, and look at things as a man, as a human being, as a citizen, and as a mortal creature. Keep these two thoughts especially ready for examination: first, external things do not touch the soul but remain outside it, unmoving, while disturbances come only from the judgment within; second, everything you see will very soon change and cease to exist. Constantly remember how many changes you have already seen yourself.

The universe is change; life is judgment.

4. If intelligence is shared by us all, then reason, which makes us rational, is also shared. If that is so, then the reason that tells us what to do and what not to do is shared. If so, law is shared too. If so, we are citizens. If so, we belong to some common political community. If so, the universe is like a city. What other shared political community could anyone say the whole human race belongs to? It is from there, from this common city, that our intelligence, reason, and sense of law come—or where else could they come from? The earthy part of me was apportioned from earth, the watery part from another element, the breath in me from some source, and my heat and fire from their own particular source. Nothing comes from nothing, just as nothing passes into nonexistence. In the same way, intelligence too comes from somewhere.

5. Death is like birth, one of nature's mysteries: in birth the same elements are combined, and in death they are dissolved into the same elements. There is nothing shameful about it. It does not violate the proper course of an intelligent creature or the reason for which it was constituted.

6. People of this kind necessarily do things of this kind. Anyone who does not want that is asking a fig tree to have no sap. In any case, remember that very soon both you and this person will be dead, and soon after that not even your names will remain.

7. Remove the judgment, and the thought “I have been harmed” disappears. Remove the thought “I have been harmed,” and the harm disappears.

8. Anything that does not make a person morally worse does not make his life worse and does not harm him externally or internally. The nature of what is beneficial required this to happen.

9. “Everything that happens happens justly.” If you observe carefully, you will find this is true. I do not mean only that each event follows in order, but that it happens according to justice, as if someone were assigning each person what he deserves. So continue the careful observation you have begun. Whatever you do, do it while being good, in the specific sense in which a good person is truly understood. Maintain this in every action.

10. Do not think about things as the person insulting you judges them or wants you to judge them. See them as they really are.

11. You must always be ready in two ways: first, to do only what kingly and lawgiving reason recommends for people's benefit; second, to change your view if someone present corrects you and turns you away from a belief. But you should always change your mind because a reason convinces you that something is just or benefits everyone. Only things like these should be preferred, not something merely because it seemed pleasant or prestigious.

12. “Do you have reason?”“Yes.”“Then why not use it? If reason is doing its proper work, what more do you want?”

13. You came into existence as a part. You will disappear back into what produced you—or rather, through change you will be taken back into its generative reason.

14. Many pieces of incense lie on the same altar. One falls into the fire earlier and another later. There is no difference.

15. Within ten days, the same people who now think you are a wild animal and an ape will think you are a god, if you return to your principles and your respect for reason.

16. Do not act as if you were going to live for ten thousand years. Death hangs over you. While you are alive, while you still can, become good.

17. A person gains so much free time by not looking at what someone else has said, done, or thought, and looking only at what he himself is doing, so that his own action is just and right, or what a good person would do. He should not look around for bad character in others, but run straight along his course without straying.

18. Someone obsessed with being famous after death fails to realize that every person who remembers him will soon die too, and then the next person after that, until the whole memory fades as it passes through people who come to life and die. But suppose the people who remember you are immortal, and the memory is immortal too. What does that matter to you? I will not even ask what it matters to the dead person. What does praise matter to the living, except perhaps for some practical purpose? You are now, at the wrong time, neglecting the natural gift that depends on no other consideration. In short...

19. Anything beautiful, in whatever way, is beautiful in itself and complete in itself; praise is not part of it. So something does not become better or worse by being praised. This is true even of things commonly called beautiful, such as physical objects and things made by skilled work. What, then, does what is truly beautiful need? Nothing—just as law, truth, goodwill, and modesty need nothing. Which of these is beautiful because people praise it, or ruined because they criticize it? Does an emerald become worse than it was if no one praises it? What about gold, ivory, purple cloth, a lyre, a small knife, a little flower, or a young tree?

20. If souls continue to exist, how can the air have had room for them from all eternity? And how does the earth have room for the bodies of all those buried over so long a time? Bodies remain in the earth for a while, then change and dissolve, making room for other dead bodies. In the same way, souls that move into the air remain together for a while, then change, disperse, and catch fire as they are taken back into the generative reason of the universe. In this way they make room for souls that arrive later. That would be one answer if we assume that souls continue to exist.

We should think not only about the great number of bodies buried in this way, but also about all the animals eaten every day by us and by other animals. An enormous number are consumed and, in a sense, buried in the bodies of the creatures they feed. Yet there is room for them because they are turned into blood and changed into air-like or fire-like substance.

How do we investigate the truth of this? By separating the material element from the causal element.

21. Do not wander off course. With every intention, do what is just; with every impression, keep your judgment able to grasp the truth.

22. Everything that suits you suits me, universe. Nothing is too early or too late for me if it comes at the right time for you. Everything your seasons produce is fruit for me, nature. Everything comes from you, everything exists in you, and everything returns to you. One man says,

“Dear city of Cecrops”;

will you not say,

“Dear city of Zeus”?

23. “Do few things,” he says, “if you want peace of mind.” But perhaps it is better to do what is necessary: whatever the reason of a naturally social being chooses, and in the way it chooses to do it. This brings the peace of mind that comes both from acting well and from doing few things. Most of what we say and do is unnecessary. If a person cuts it out, he will have more free time and be less troubled. So in each situation we should remind ourselves: “Is this perhaps unnecessary?” We should remove not only unnecessary actions but also unnecessary impressions, since pointless actions will then no longer follow them.

24. Try living the life of a good person: someone who is content with what the universe assigns him, and satisfied that his own actions are just and his attitude is kind.

25. You have considered those things; now consider these. Do not upset yourself. Be straightforward. Has someone done wrong? He harms himself. Has something happened to you? Good. From the beginning, everything that happens to you was allotted and woven into your fate by the universe. In short, life is brief. Make good use of the present with clear thinking and justice. Stay alert, but relaxed.

26. Either there is an ordered universe, or there is a confused mixture that still forms a universe. Can there be order in you but disorder in the whole, especially when everything is distinct, spread through everything else, and mutually connected?

27. A corrupt character, a weak character, a twisted character; savage, animal-like, childish, stupid, false, vulgar, dishonest, domineering.

28. A person who does not know what exists in the universe is a stranger to it, and so is a person who does not know what happens in it. The person who runs away from the reason that binds society is a fugitive. The person who closes his mind’s eye is blind. The person who depends on someone else and does not have within himself everything needed for life is poor. The person who resents what happens and separates himself from the reason of our common nature is an infected growth on the universe, because the same nature that produces each event also produced him. The person who cuts his own soul off from the single shared soul of rational beings is a fragment broken from the community.

29. One person practices philosophy without a shirt, another without a book. Here is someone else, half naked, who says, “I have no bread, but I remain faithful to reason.” I have the nourishment supplied by my studies, yet I do not remain faithful to reason.

30. Love the craft you have learned and find rest in it. Live the rest of your life as someone who has wholeheartedly entrusted everything of his own to the gods, while making himself neither master nor slave of any other person.

31. Imagine, for example, the time of Vespasian. You will see all the same things: people getting married, bringing up children, getting sick, dying, fighting wars, celebrating festivals, doing business, farming, flattering others, acting arrogantly, distrusting people, making plots, wishing for certain people to die, complaining about present conditions, falling in love, storing up wealth, and wanting consulships and imperial power. That whole way of life now exists nowhere. Move on to the time of Trajan: once again, all the same things. That life too has died. Survey in the same way the records of other periods and entire nations, and see how many people pushed themselves hard, then soon fell and dissolved into the elements. Remember especially those you personally knew who wore themselves out over empty things, neglecting the work suited to their own nature instead of holding firmly to it and being content with it. But remember also that the attention you give each action should have its own proper value and proportion. Then you will not become discouraged, as long as you do not spend more time than you should on minor matters.

32. Words that used to be common are now obscure terms. In the same way, the names of people who were once widely celebrated have now become, in a sense, obscure terms: Camillus, Caeso, Volesus, Dentatus; soon afterward Scipio and Cato too; then Augustus; and then Hadrian and Antoninus. Everything fades, quickly turns into legend, and is soon buried in complete forgetfulness. I am speaking here even of people who shone with extraordinary fame. Everyone else, as soon as they breathed their last, was “unseen, unheard of.” And what does being remembered forever really amount to? Complete emptiness. So what deserves our serious effort? Only this: a just mind, actions that serve the community, words that never deceive, and a disposition that welcomes everything that happens as necessary, familiar, and flowing from an origin and source of the same nature.

33. Willingly hand yourself over to Clotho, and let her weave you together with whatever circumstances she wishes.

34. Everything lasts only a day: both the person who remembers and the thing remembered.

35. Keep looking at how everything comes into being through change, and get used to understanding that the nature of the universe loves nothing more than changing existing things and making new ones like them. Everything that exists is, in a way, a seed of what will come from it. But you think only what is planted in the ground or placed in a womb is a seed. That is a very narrow view.

36. You will soon be dead, and you are still not straightforward or calm. You are still not free from the belief that outside things can harm you, not kind toward everyone, and not convinced that wisdom consists only in acting justly.

37. Look closely into their minds, including the minds of intelligent people, and see what they avoid and what they seek.

38. Your evil cannot exist in someone else’s mind, or in any change or alteration in the world around you. Where can it exist, then? In the part of you that judges things to be evil. So let that part make no such judgment, and everything is fine. Even if what is closest to it—this small body—is cut, burned, filled with pus, or left to rot, the part that judges these things should remain calm. It should decide that anything that can happen equally to a bad person and a good person is neither bad nor good. Whatever happens equally to someone who lives against nature and someone who lives according to nature is itself neither according to nature nor against it.

39. Keep thinking of the universe as one living being, with one substance and one soul. Think how everything is taken into its single awareness, how it does everything through one impulse, how everything that happens helps cause everything else that happens, and how closely all things are woven and twisted together.

40. You are a small soul carrying a dead body, as Epictetus said.

41. There is nothing bad for things undergoing change, just as there is nothing good for things that come into existence through change.

42. Time is a river of events, a powerful current. The moment each thing appears, it is carried away; another is carried past, and the next will be carried along.

43. Everything that happens is as normal and familiar as roses in spring and fruit in summer. The same is true of illness, death, abuse, plots, and everything else that makes foolish people happy or sad.

44. What comes next always follows appropriately from what came before. Events are not just a numbered list of separate items linked only by necessity; they form a reasonable connection. Just as existing things are arranged in harmony, events show not merely a sequence but an extraordinary relationship with one another.

45. Always remember what Heraclitus said: earth dies by becoming water, water dies by becoming air, and air dies by becoming fire—and the process also goes the other way. Remember the person who forgets where the road leads. Remember that people disagree with what they are in contact with most constantly: the reason that governs the universe. What they encounter every day seems foreign to them. We should not act and speak as if asleep, since even in sleep we seem to act and speak. And we should not behave simply as children of our parents—that is, do things blindly just because that is how we received them.

46. If a god told you that you would die tomorrow, or certainly by the day after tomorrow, you would not care much whether it was the day after tomorrow rather than tomorrow, unless you were extremely cowardly. How much difference is there between them? In the same way, do not think it makes any great difference whether you die many years from now or tomorrow.

47. Keep thinking how many doctors have died after often furrowing their brows over their patients; how many astrologers have died after making a great display of predicting other people’s deaths; how many philosophers have died after arguing endlessly about death or immortality; how many warriors after killing many people; how many tyrants after using their power over human lives with terrible arrogance, as if they were immortal; and how many entire cities have, so to speak, died—Helice, Pompeii, Herculaneum, and countless others. Then go through all the people you know, one after another. One person buried someone else and was then laid out for burial himself; another buried him. It all happened in a short time. The point is always to see human affairs as short-lived and of little value: yesterday a little drop of mucus, tomorrow preserved flesh or ashes. So pass through this brief moment of time in accordance with nature, and finish life contentedly, like a ripe olive falling from its tree, praising the earth that bore it and thanking the tree that made it grow.

48. Be like a rocky headland that the waves keep crashing against. It remains standing, and the raging water settles down around it.

“I am unlucky because this happened to me.” No. Say instead: “I am lucky because, although this happened to me, I continue without distress, neither broken by what is happening now nor afraid of what may come.” Something like this could happen to anyone, but not everyone could go through it without distress. So why call the event bad luck rather than your response good luck? Can you call something a human misfortune when it is not a failure of human nature? And do you think something is a failure of human nature if it does not oppose what human nature intends? You have learned what it intends. So does this event stop you from being just, generous in spirit, self-controlled, sensible, steady, truthful, honorable, free, or from having any of the other qualities that together give human nature what properly belongs to it?

From now on, whenever something is leading you toward distress, remember to use this principle: the event is not bad luck; bearing it nobly is good luck.

49. One ordinary but effective way to help yourself stop fearing death is to remember people who stubbornly held on to life. What advantage do they have now over those who died young? By this time they are all lying somewhere—Caedicianus, Fabius, Julianus, Lepidus, or anyone else like them. They buried many people and were later buried themselves. The whole span is short—and think of all that must be endured during it, the people one must endure it with, and the frail little body one must endure it in. So do not treat it as a matter... Look back at the endless stretch of time and forward at another infinity. In all that time, what is the difference between someone who lives three days and someone who lives to three times old age?

50. Always take the direct route. The direct route is the one that follows nature: say and do everything in the soundest way. This aim frees you from hard labor, struggle, all kinds of maneuvering, and showing off.

1. At dawn, when you have trouble making yourself get up, keep this thought ready: I am getting up to do a human being’s work. So why am I still annoyed if I am going to do the things I was born and brought into the world to do? Or was I made to lie in bed under warm blankets?

“But that is more pleasant.”

Then were you born just to feel pleasure—to receive sensations rather than to act? Don’t you see the plants, birds, ants, spiders, and bees doing their own work, each helping in its own way to put the world in order? Yet you don’t want to do the work of a human being. You don’t hurry to do what your nature calls for.

“But I also need to rest.”

Yes, you do; I say that too. But nature has set limits for rest, just as it has for eating and drinking. Yet in those things you go past the limits and beyond what is enough. In your actions, however, you do not: there you stay below what you are capable of. You do not really love yourself, because if you did, you would love your nature and what it wants. Other people love their trades so much that they wear themselves out at their work without washing or eating. Do you respect your own nature less than an engraver respects engraving, a dancer dancing, a greedy person money, or a vain person a little fame? When these people are absorbed in what they care about, they would rather go without food and sleep than stop advancing it. But do actions that serve other people seem less valuable to you and less worthy of effort?

2. It is so easy to push away and wipe out any disturbing or unsuitable impression, and immediately be completely calm.

3. Consider yourself fit for every word and action that agrees with nature, and do not let other people’s later criticism or comments turn you aside. If it is right to do or say something, do not think yourself unworthy of it. They have minds of their own and act on their own impulses. Do not keep looking to them. Go straight ahead, following both your own nature and the nature we all share, since both follow the same road.

4. I go on through the things that agree with nature until I fall and rest. I will breathe my last into the air from which I breathe every day, and I will fall onto the earth from which my father got the seed, my mother the blood, and my nurse the milk; the earth that has fed and watered me every day for so many years, and that supports me as I walk on it and use its resources in so many ways.

5. People cannot admire you for being intellectually sharp. Fine. But you have many other qualities for which you cannot say, “I was not born with them.” So show the qualities that are entirely under your control: honesty, dignity, the ability to bear hard work, lack of attachment to pleasure, no complaints about your fate, few needs, kindness, freedom, simplicity, no pointless talk, and greatness of character. Don’t you realize how many qualities you can already show, with no excuse that you lack the talent or ability, and yet you still choose to fall short? Does the way you were born force you to complain, be stingy, flatter people, blame your weak little body, try to please others, boast, and let your mind be thrown around in so many ways? No, by the gods. You could have freed yourself from all that long ago. At worst, you might be criticized for being rather slow and not quick to understand. But you must train this too, without dismissing your slowness or enjoying it.

6. One person, after doing someone a good turn, is quick to count the favor as something that person owes him. Another does not do that openly, but still thinks of the person as a debtor and remains aware of what he has done. A third person, in a sense, does not even know what he has done. He is like a grapevine that produces a bunch of grapes and asks for nothing more after bearing its own fruit. A horse runs, a dog follows a scent, a bee makes honey, and a human being does good without keeping track of it, then moves on to do something else, just as a vine bears another bunch of grapes when the season comes.

So we should be among those who do good, in a sense, without monitoring themselves as they do it.

“Yes, but we need to be aware of this very fact. It is a social being’s special trait,” someone says, “to know that he is acting for others and, by Zeus, to want the other person to know it too.”

“What you say is true, but you are misunderstanding the present point. That will make you one of the people I mentioned earlier, because they too are misled by an argument that sounds reasonable. But if you are willing to understand what is being said, don’t be afraid that it will make you neglect any action that helps others.”

7. An Athenian prayer:

“Send rain, send rain, dear Zeus,on the Athenians’ farmlandand plains.”

Either we should not pray at all, or we should pray this simply and openly.

8. Saying, “Asclepius prescribed horseback riding, cold baths, or going barefoot for this person,” means the same sort of thing as saying, “The nature of the universe prescribed illness, injury, loss, or something similar for this person.” In the first case, “prescribed” means that the treatment was assigned to the person because it suited his health. In the second, whatever happens to each person has somehow been assigned because it suits his destined course. We say that events “happen to” us in the same way builders say that squared stones in walls or pyramids “fit together”: in that particular arrangement, they join one another properly.

There is one harmony in everything. Just as the universe is one body made complete from all bodies, destiny is one cause made complete from all causes. Even completely uneducated people understand this when they say, “That was what came to him.” So it came to him and was prescribed for him. We should therefore accept these events as we accept the treatments Asclepius prescribes. Many of those treatments are unpleasant, but we welcome them because we hope to become healthy.

Think of the completion and fulfillment of what universal nature intends as you think of your own health. Accept everything that happens in this way, even if it seems very harsh, because it leads to the health of the universe and to the successful progress and work of Zeus. He would not have brought something upon a person unless it benefited the whole. No nature produces anything that is unsuited to what it directs.

You should therefore willingly accept what happens to you for two reasons. First, it happened to you, was assigned to you, and was connected with you in some way, woven into your life from the oldest causes above. Second, even what comes to an individual helps the ruler of the whole achieve his successful course and completion and, by Zeus, his continued existence. The whole is damaged if you cut even the smallest thing out of the connection and continuity of its parts, and the same is true of its causes. As far as you are able, you make such a cut whenever you resent what happens; in a sense, you destroy it.

9. Do not become sick of it, give up, or get discouraged if you do not manage to act consistently from sound judgments in every situation. When you are pushed off course, come back again. Be glad if most of your conduct is becoming more worthy of a human being, and value what you are returning to. Do not return to philosophy as though you were going back to a strict tutor. Return as people with inflamed eyes turn to a sponge and an egg, or as someone turns to a poultice or a soothing wash. Then you will not be making a show of obeying reason; you will be finding relief in it.

Remember that philosophy wants only what your own nature wants. You were the one who wanted something else, against nature. What could be more pleasant than what nature wants? Is that appearance of pleasantness not exactly how pleasure deceives us? Consider whether nobility of mind, freedom, honesty, reasonableness, and piety are not more pleasant. And what could be more pleasant than good judgment itself, when you remember how steadily and effortlessly our capacity to understand and know can move through everything?

10. Reality is hidden so deeply that many serious philosophers have thought it completely impossible to understand. Even the Stoics themselves think it is hard to understand. Every judgment to which we assent can change—for who never changes his mind? Now consider the actual things involved. They last a short time, have little value, and can belong to a male prostitute, a sex worker, or a thief. Then consider the character of the people around you. It is hard to tolerate even the most agreeable person, not to mention that each of us can barely tolerate himself.

Everything is so dark and dirty, and substance, time, motion, and moving things are all in such constant flux, that I cannot see what could deserve to be highly valued or treated as truly important. Instead, comfort yourself and wait for your natural end. Do not be irritated by the wait, but take comfort in only these two thoughts: nothing will happen to me that is contrary to the nature of the universe; and I am able to do nothing contrary to my own god and guiding spirit. No one can force me to disobey that spirit.

11. What am I using my mind for right now? Ask yourself this about everything, and examine what is now in the part called the governing mind. What kind of person’s mind do I have at this moment? A child’s? A teenager’s? A petty woman’s? A dictator’s? A farm animal’s? A wild animal’s?

12. Here is another way to see what sort of things most people consider good. Suppose someone thinks first of things that really are good, such as practical wisdom, self-control, justice, and courage. After thinking of these, he would not be able to accept the phrase “because of all the good things,” since it would not fit. But if someone first thinks of what most people regard as good, he will hear the rest and easily accept the comic poet’s line as an appropriate ending. Most people also recognize the difference. Otherwise, the first use would not sound wrong and be rejected, while we accept the same words as apt and clever when they refer to wealth and the lucky advantages that provide luxury or fame.

So continue, and ask whether we should value and regard as good things of which it can appropriately be said that the person who owns them, because he has so much, “has nowhere to shit.”

13. I consist of cause and matter. Neither of them will be destroyed into nothing, just as neither came into existence from nothing. Every part of me will therefore be changed and placed among some part of the universe. That part will then change into another part of the universe, and the process will continue without limit. I came into being through this kind of change, and so did my parents, with the same process extending endlessly backward. We can say this even if the universe is governed through cycles that are themselves limited.

14. Reason and the skill of reasoning are capacities that need nothing beyond themselves to perform their own work. They begin from their own starting point and travel toward the goal set before them. Such deeds are therefore called correct actions, indicating that their path is straight.

15. A person need not value any of these things if they do not belong to being human as such. They are not human requirements. Human nature does not call for them, and they do not perfect human nature. So the goal of a human being does not lie in them, nor does the good that completes that goal. Besides, if any of them were proper to a human being, it would not be proper to despise and resist them. A person who made himself need none of them would not deserve praise, and anyone who deprived himself of one of them would not be good, if these things really were good. Yet in fact, the more someone gives up these and similar things—or endures being deprived of them—the better he is.

16. Your mind will take the character of the thoughts you repeatedly form, because the soul is colored by its impressions. So keep coloring it with thoughts like these: wherever you can live, you can also live well. You can live at the imperial court; therefore you can also live well at the imperial court. Again, each thing was made for some purpose. It moves toward the purpose for which it was made, and its goal lies in what it moves toward. Where its goal is, there too are its benefit and its good. It follows that the good of a rational being is community. It has already been established that we were made for community. Was it not obvious that lower things exist for higher things, while higher things exist for one another? Living things are higher than things without life, and rational beings are higher than other living things.

17. It is insane to chase what is impossible. And it is impossible for bad people not to do bad things of this sort.

18. Nothing happens to anyone that he is not naturally able to bear. The same event happens to someone else, and he stays steady and unharmed, either because he does not realize it has happened or because he wants to show how noble-minded he is. Is it not terrible if ignorance and showmanship are stronger than good judgment?

19. External things do not touch the mind at all. They cannot enter it, change it, or set it in motion. The mind alone changes and moves itself, and it makes the circumstances before it conform to the judgments it chooses to make.

20. In one sense, another person is the being closest to me, because I must help people and be patient with them. But when someone obstructs the work that belongs to me, that person becomes as indifferent to me as the sun, the wind, or a wild animal. These things may block a particular action, but they cannot block my intention or state of mind, because I can act with a condition in reserve and redirect myself. The mind turns every obstacle to action to its own advantage and gives it a new role: what hindered the work helps the work forward, and what blocked the path helps me along the path.

21. Respect the highest power in the universe: the power that uses everything and directs everything. Likewise, respect the highest power within you, which is of the same nature as that. It is what uses everything else in you, and it directs your life.

22. Anything that does not harm the community does not harm one of its citizens. Whenever you think you have been harmed, use this test: if this does not harm the community, then it has not harmed me either. If it does harm the community, do not get angry; point out to the person harming it what he has overlooked.

23. Think often about how quickly existing things and new events are swept away and removed. Matter is like a river flowing without a break. Its activities are always changing, and its causes take countless turns. Almost nothing is stable, not even what is close at hand. Past and future are boundless abysses in which everything disappears. So anyone who becomes conceited, agitated, or miserable about these things is foolish, as if what bothered him would remain for a long time.

24. Remember the whole of matter, of which your share is tiny; all of time, of which only a short instant has been assigned to you; and fate, of which you are only the smallest part.

25. Someone else does wrong. What has that to do with me? That is for him to deal with. His state of mind and his action belong to him. At this moment I have what the nature of the whole wants me to have, and I do what my own nature wants me to do.

26. Do not let the ruling part of your mind be changed by pleasant or painful movements in the body, and do not let it mix with them. It should keep itself separate and limit those effects to the parts of the body. But when they pass into the mind through the natural connection within the body as a whole, do not try to fight the physical sensation. The ruling mind should simply avoid adding its own opinion that the sensation is good or bad.

27. “Live with the gods.” A person lives with the gods when he constantly shows them that his soul is satisfied with what it has been given and does everything the inner divinity wishes. Zeus gave each person this divinity as a guardian and leader, a part of himself. It is each person’s mind and reason.

28. Are you angry with someone who smells of sweat? Are you angry with someone who has bad breath? What do you expect him to do? He has that kind of mouth and those kinds of armpits, so that kind of smell must come from them. “But he has the power of reason,” you say, “and if he thinks about it, he can understand what he is doing wrong.” Very well: you have reason too. Use your reasonable attitude to influence his. Explain it to him; remind him. If he listens, you will correct him, and there will be no need for anger.Do not be either a tragic performer or a prostitute.

29. You can live here in the same way you plan to live after leaving. But if people do not let you, then leave life itself, though without thinking that anything bad is happening to you. “There is smoke, so I am going.” Why consider that a serious matter? Until something like that forces me to leave, I remain free, and no one can stop me from doing what I choose. I choose to do what fits the nature of a rational and social being.

30. The intelligence of the universe is directed toward community. It therefore made lower things for the sake of higher ones and fitted the higher ones together. You can see how it placed some below others, arranged them together, gave each what matched its value, and brought the highest beings into agreement with one another.

31. How have you treated the gods, your parents, brother, wife, children, teachers, caregivers, friends, relatives, and servants up to now? Is it true of your conduct toward them all, right up to now, that you have neither done nor said anything wrongful to anyone?

Also remember what you have gone through, how much you have been able to endure, that the record of your life is now full and your service complete, how many fine things you have seen, how many pleasures and pains you have disregarded, how many distinctions you have passed up, and how many ungrateful people you have treated with gratitude.

32. Why do untrained and ignorant minds confuse a trained and knowledgeable mind? What kind of mind is trained and knowledgeable? One that knows the beginning and the end, and knows the rational principle that extends through all existence and governs the universe throughout eternity in ordered cycles.

33. Very soon you will be ashes or a skeleton, and either a name or not even a name. A name is only a sound and an echo. The things highly valued in life are empty, decayed, and trivial. They are like puppies biting one another and argumentative children who laugh and then immediately cry.

But Faith, Respect, Justice, and Truthhave left the broad-pathed earth for Olympus.

So what is still keeping you here? Things perceived by the senses change easily and never stay fixed. The senses themselves are weak and easily influenced. The little soul is a vapor rising from blood. And being admired by people like these is empty. What should you do, then? Wait calmly for either extinction or a change of place. Until that time comes, what is enough? Simply this: respect the gods and speak well of them; do good to people, put up with them, and refrain from harming them; and remember that everything contained within the limits of this bit of flesh and breath is neither yours nor under your control.

34. You can always move smoothly if you can travel the right path—that is, if you judge and act in accordance with that path. The soul of a god, a human being, and every rational creature shares two qualities: no one else can obstruct it, and its good consists in a just state of mind and just action, with all its desire ending there.

35. If this is not a fault of mine, is not something I am doing because of my own fault, and does not harm the community, why should I be concerned about it? How does it harm the community?

36. Do not let an impression carry you away completely. Help as much as you can and as the situation deserves. Even if people lose some advantage in matters that are morally indifferent, do not imagine that the loss itself is real harm; that is a bad habit. Be like the old man who, as he was leaving, asked for his foster-child’s spinning top, remembering that it was only a spinning top. Act the same way here.

When you find yourself crying out on the public platform, ask yourself: Have you forgotten what these things really are?

“Yes, but these people care intensely about them.”

Does that mean you must become a fool too?

37. “Once, no matter where circumstances caught me, I was a fortunate man.”

But being fortunate means assigning yourself a good fortune. And good fortune consists in good states of mind, good motives, and good actions.

1. The substance of the universe is yielding and easy to reshape. The reason governing it has no motive in itself for causing harm, because it contains no evil. It does nothing wrong, and nothing is harmed by it. Everything happens and is completed in accordance with it.

2. Do not care whether you are cold or warm when you do what you should; whether sleepy or well rested; whether criticized or praised; whether dying or engaged in some other action. Dying is itself one of the things we do in life. So even then, it is enough to handle the present well.

3. Look inside. Do not overlook what any thing is like in itself or what value it has.

4. Everything that exists will change very quickly. It will either evaporate, if substance forms one whole, or disperse.

5. The reason that governs knows what state it is in, what it is doing, and what material it is working on.

6. The best retaliation is not to imitate the person who wronged you.

7. Enjoy and refresh yourself in this alone: move from one action that serves the community to another, remembering God.

8. The directing mind rouses and redirects itself. It makes itself whatever it chooses to be, and makes whatever happens seem to it the way it chooses.

9. Everything is completed in line with the nature of the universe. It does not follow some other nature that surrounds it externally, is enclosed inside it, or hangs detached beyond it.

10. Either there is a jumble, a mutual snarl, and a scattering; or there is unity, order, and providence. If it is the first, why do I want to remain in an accidental mixture and this kind of mess? What should matter to me except how eventually “to become earth”? Why am I disturbed? No matter what I do, dissolution will come to me. But if it is the second, I worship, remain steady, and trust the governor of all.

11. When surrounding events force you into something like confusion, quickly come back to yourself. Do not lose your rhythm for longer than necessary. You will master the harmony better by returning to it again and again.

12. If you had both a stepmother and your own mother, you would care for your stepmother, but you would keep going back to your mother. The imperial court and philosophy now stand in that relation for you. Come back to philosophy often and find rest in her. Because of her, life at court seems tolerable to you, and you are tolerable while there.

13. With rich dishes and similar foods, form an impression such as this: this is a dead fish; that is a dead bird or pig. Or again: Falernian wine is some juice from grapes, and a purple-edged robe is sheep’s wool stained with the blood of a shellfish. About sex: it is the rubbing of an internal organ and the release of a little mucus in a spasm. Impressions like these get down to the actual things and go through them, letting us see what they really are. You should do this throughout life. Whenever things present themselves as highly impressive, uncover them, examine how little they are worth, and take away the tale that makes them grand. Vanity is a powerful cheat. When you think you are most engaged in important business, that is when it most completely casts its spell on you. Just consider what Crates says even about Xenocrates.

14. Most things the crowd admires belong to the most general class of objects held together by physical structure or natural growth: stone, wood, fig trees, grapevines, and olive trees. People with a little more discernment admire things governed by animal life, such as owning flocks, herds, or simply many slaves. More refined people admire things governed by a rational mind, though not for its rationality, but for its technical skill or some other kind of cleverness. But anyone who values a rational mind made for civic life pays no more attention to those other things. Above all, that person keeps their own mind rational and cooperative in its condition and activity, and helps others of the same nature do likewise.

15. Some things are rushing into existence; others are rushing into the past. Even while something is coming into being, part of it has already disappeared. Continuous flows and changes constantly renew the universe, just as time’s uninterrupted movement keeps infinite duration always fresh. In this river, where no one can remain still, what could anyone value among the things speeding past? It would be like starting to love a small bird as it flies by: it has already gone from view. Each person’s life is much the same: vapor rising from the blood and breath drawn from the air. We inhale air once and return it, as we do moment by moment. In the same way, we return our entire capacity to breathe—the capacity we received when we were born yesterday or the day before—to the source from which we first drew it.

16. It is not admirable merely to exchange air like plants, to breathe like livestock and wild animals, to receive the imprint of sense impressions, to be pulled by impulses like a marionette, to gather in groups, or to eat—for eating is much like expelling the waste left from food. What is admirable, then? Being applauded? No. So neither is receiving applause from people’s tongues, since popular praise is only the noise of tongues. You have now given up your little reputation too. What remains to be valued? I think it is acting and restraining yourself in accordance with your own design. All practical care and every craft aim at that. (Every craft seeks to make its product fit for the work it was designed to perform. A gardener and a person tending a vineyard, a horse trainer and a dog keeper all seek this.) What do education and instruction aim for? There is the thing to value. If that is in good condition, you will not try to obtain anything else for yourself. Will you not stop valuing many other things? If not, you will never be free, self-sufficient, or calm. You will have to be envious and jealous, suspicious of people who can take those things from you, and hostile toward people who have what you value. In general, anyone who needs one of those things is bound to be confused and, in addition, often to blame the gods. But respecting and valuing your own mind will make you pleased with yourself, harmonious with your companions, and in agreement with the gods—that is, approving everything they allot and arrange.

17. The elements move up, down, and in circles. Virtue does not move in any of these ways. Its movement is something more divine: it advances successfully along a path that is difficult to comprehend.

18. Look at what they do. They do not want to praise the people who are alive at the same time and living among them, but they care greatly about being praised by people born later, whom they have never seen and never will see. That is almost the same as being upset because people born before you did not praise you too.

19. Do not think that something is impossible for a human being just because you yourself find it hard to do. If it is possible and natural for a human being, believe that you too can achieve it.

20. While training, someone may scratch us with a nail or hit us by colliding headfirst with us. But we do not hold it against him, take offense, or afterward suspect him of trying to harm us. We are careful around him, but not as if he were an enemy and not with suspicion; we avoid him in a friendly way. Do the same in the rest of life: overlook many things done by people who are, so to speak, training alongside us. As I said, we can keep out of their way without suspecting or hating them.

21. If someone can prove to me and show me that I am thinking or acting wrongly, I will gladly change. I am looking for the truth, and the truth has never harmed anyone. The person who is harmed is the one who remains stuck in his own error and ignorance.

22. I do the duty that belongs to me. Everything else does not distract me, because it is either without life, without reason, or lost and unaware of the way.

23. Treat animals without reason, and things and objects in general, generously and freely, as a rational being dealing with what has no reason. Treat human beings as members of the same community, since they do have reason. In everything, call on the gods. Do not worry about how long you will live this way; even three hours like this are enough.

24. After they died, Alexander of Macedon and his mule driver came to the same state. Either they were taken back into the same generative principles of the universe, or they were both dispersed into atoms.

25. Think how many physical and mental processes happen at the same instant in each of us. Then you will not be surprised that many more things—in fact, everything that happens within the single whole we call the universe—exist in it at the same time.

26. If someone asks you how to spell the name Antoninus, won’t you clearly say each letter? Then what if people get angry? Will you get angry back? Won’t you calmly go through the letters one by one? Remember that every duty is likewise completed through a certain number of steps. Pay attention to those steps, do not become upset or respond angrily to angry people, and finish the task in front of you in an orderly way.

27. How cruel it is not to let people pursue what seems suitable and beneficial to them. Yet in a sense you refuse to let them do that when you are angry at them for making mistakes, because they are always moving toward what they think is suitable and beneficial for themselves. “But they are wrong.” Then teach them and show them, without getting angry.

28. Death is rest from the impact of sensation, the tugging of impulses, the activity of thought, and service to the body.

29. It is shameful for your mind to give up while your body is still holding out.

30. Take care not to become thoroughly Caesar-like or dyed by the role; that does happen. Keep yourself honest, good, unspoiled, dignified, unpretentious, devoted to justice, respectful of the gods, kind, affectionate, and strong in doing what you should. Work to remain the person philosophy wanted to make you. Respect the gods and protect people. Life is short. The one fruit of life on earth is a godly character and actions that serve the community.

In everything, act as a student of Antoninus. Remember his energy in doing what reason required, his steady character in every situation, his reverence, his calm expression, his gentleness, his lack of vanity, and his determination to understand things. Remember that he never let anything pass until he had examined it carefully and understood it clearly; that he endured unjust criticism without criticizing in return; that he rushed into nothing; that he did not accept accusations made behind people’s backs; that he carefully examined people’s character and actions without finding fault, taking fright, becoming suspicious, or showing off his cleverness; that he was satisfied with little in his home, bedding, clothes, food, and servants; that he worked hard and was patient; that his simple diet allowed him to stay at the same work until evening without needing to relieve himself outside his usual time; that he was firm and consistent in his friendships; that he tolerated people who openly disagreed with his views and was glad when anyone showed him a better way; and that he respected the gods without superstition. Live so that your final hour finds your conscience as clear as his.

31. Come to your senses, call yourself back, and wake up again. Once you understand that dreams were disturbing you, look at the things around you while awake just as you looked at those dreams.

32. I am made of a small body and a mind. Everything is indifferent to the body, because the body cannot judge differences. For the mind, everything that is not its own action is indifferent, while all its own actions are under its control. Even then, it deals only with its present action, since its future and past actions are already indifferent to it.

33. Pain is not unnatural for a hand or a foot as long as the foot does what a foot should do and the hand does what a hand should do. In the same way, pain is not unnatural for a human being as long as that person does what a human being should do. And if pain is not unnatural for someone, it is not bad for that person either.

34. Think how much pleasure robbers, sexually depraved men, men who beat their fathers, and tyrants have enjoyed.

35. Don’t you see how ordinary craftsmen adapt to people outside their trade up to a point, but still hold firmly to the rules of their craft and refuse to abandon them? Isn’t it terrible if an architect or doctor respects the principles of his own profession more than a human being respects his own reason, which he shares with the gods?

36. Asia and Europe are corners of the world. Every sea is a drop in the world. Mount Athos is a clod of earth in the world. The whole present is a point in eternity. Everything is small, easily changed, and disappearing.

Everything comes from that source, either set in motion by the common governing mind or arising as a consequence. So too the lion’s open jaws, poison, and everything harmful—like thorns and mud—are by-products of things that are majestic and beautiful. Do not think these things are foreign to what you revere. Instead, consider the source of everything.

37. Anyone who has seen what exists now has seen everything that has happened from eternity and everything that will happen without end, because it is all of the same kind and pattern.

38. Often think about how everything in the world is connected and how things relate to one another. In a sense, everything is woven together, and for that reason all things belong together. One thing follows another because of the movement of tension, the shared breath, and the unity of matter.

39. Adapt yourself to the circumstances assigned to you, and genuinely love the people who share your lot.

40. Any instrument, tool, or piece of equipment is in good condition when it does what it was made to do, even though its maker is no longer present. But in things formed and held together by nature, the power that made them stays within them. You should therefore respect nature all the more and believe that, if you live and act according to her purpose, everything will be as you would rationally wish. In the same way, everything belonging to the universe is as its governing mind intends.

41. If you regard anything outside your control as good or bad, then whenever you meet with that supposed evil or fail to obtain that supposed good, you are bound to blame the gods and hate the people who caused—or whom you suspect may cause—the failure or misfortune. We do many wrongs because we treat these external things as making a real difference. But if we judge only what depends on us to be good or bad, we have no reason either to accuse a god or to oppose another person as an enemy.

42. We all help produce one result. Some do so knowingly and with awareness, while others do so without knowing it. Heraclitus, I think, even says that people who are asleep are workers and partners in what happens in the world. Different people contribute in different ways. Even the person who complains, resists, and tries to undo events contributes in an extra way, because the world needed that kind of person too. So understand which group you are placing yourself in. The power governing the universe will certainly make good use of you and include you as one of its workers and active parts. But do not become the kind of part represented by the cheap, absurd line in the play that Chrysippus mentions.

43. Does the Sun try to do the work of the god who brings rain? Does Asclepius try to do the work of the goddess who brings crops? And what about each star? Their tasks differ, but do they not all work together toward the same end?

44. If the gods have made plans for me and for what is meant to happen to me, their plans are good. It is hard even to imagine a god who acts without thought. And why would they intend to harm me? What benefit would that bring either to them or to the common good, which is their chief concern? If they have not planned for me personally, they have certainly planned for the common good. Since what happens to me follows from that plan, I ought to welcome and accept it.

But suppose they plan nothing at all. It is irreverent to believe this; otherwise, let us stop sacrificing, praying, swearing oaths, and doing all the other things we constantly do as if the gods were present and living with us. Still, suppose they plan nothing that concerns us. I can plan for myself, and I can consider what benefits me. What benefits any being is what suits its own make-up and nature, and my nature is rational and social.

As Antoninus, my city and homeland is Rome. As a human being, it is the world. So only what benefits these two cities is good for me.

45. Whatever happens to each individual benefits the whole. That is enough. But if you pay attention, you will also generally see that what happens to one person benefits other people too. Here the word “benefit” should be understood in a broader sense when applied to things that are neither good nor bad in themselves.

46. The events in the amphitheater and similar places become tiresome because you keep seeing the same things, and their sameness makes the spectacle tedious. You have the same experience with life as a whole. Everything, high and low, is the same and comes from the same sources. So how long will this continue to trouble you?

47. Keep thinking of all kinds of people—people with every sort of occupation and from every nation—who have died. Carry the thought down to Philistion, Phoebus, and Origanion. Then move on to other groups. We must go to the same place where so many powerful speakers and respected philosophers now are—Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Socrates—as well as so many earlier heroes and, after them, so many generals and tyrants. There too are Eudoxus, Hipparchus, Archimedes, and other people who were sharp-minded, high-minded, hardworking, crafty, or arrogant, including men like Menippus who mocked the brief and perishable life of human beings. Think about all of them: they have been lying there for a long time. What is so terrible about that for them? And what about those whose names are not known at all?

One thing here is of great value: to live with truth and justice while remaining kind toward liars and unjust people.

48. When you want to cheer yourself, think of the good qualities of the people who live with you: one person’s energy, another’s modesty, another’s generosity, and some other quality in someone else. Nothing is as cheering as seeing examples of the virtues in the characters of those around us, especially when many appear together. So keep these qualities in mind.

49. You are not upset that you weigh only a certain number of pounds rather than three hundred. In the same way, do not be upset that you are to live only a certain number of years rather than more. Just as you accept the amount of matter allotted to you, accept the amount of time as well.

50. Try to persuade them, but act even without their consent when justice directs you to do so. If someone uses force to stop you, then accept it calmly and without distress, and use the obstacle as an opportunity to practice another virtue. Remember that you began with the reservation that your action might be prevented, and that you were not trying to achieve the impossible. What were you trying to achieve, then? To make the right kind of effort. You have achieved that. What we set ourselves in motion to do has been accomplished.

51. A person who loves fame thinks someone else’s activity is his own good; a person who loves pleasure thinks his own experience is; but a person with understanding thinks his own action is.

52. You can have no opinion about this and not let your mind be disturbed. Things themselves cannot create our judgments about them.

53. Train yourself to listen to what another person is saying without adding your own thoughts, and as far as you can, put yourself inside the speaker’s mind. What is not good for the hive is not good for the bee either.

54. If sailors criticized their pilot, or patients their doctor, would he pay attention to anything else? Otherwise, how could he keep those sailing with him safe, or make those he was treating healthy?

55. How many people who entered the world with me have already departed.

56. Honey tastes bitter to people with jaundice, water frightens people bitten by a rabid dog, and a ball seems wonderful to children. So why am I angry? Do you think a mistaken belief is less powerful than bile in someone with jaundice, or poison in someone bitten by a rabid dog?

57. No one can stop you from living in accordance with the reason of your own nature. Nothing can happen to you against the reason of nature as a whole.

58. Think what the people they want to please are like, what they seek to gain, and what actions they use to gain it. How quickly time will cover everything, and how much it has already covered.

1. What is wrongdoing? What you have seen many times before. Whatever happens, remember at once that this too is something you have often seen. Everywhere, from top to bottom, you will find the same things that fill ancient, later, and recent histories, and that now fill cities and homes. Nothing is new. Everything is familiar and lasts only a short time.

2. Your principles are still alive. They can die only if the impressions that correspond to them are put out, and you can keep reviving those impressions. I can judge this in the way I should. If I can do that, why am I upset? Things outside my mind have no effect on the mind itself. Learn this and stand firm. You can begin living again. Look at things again as you once did. That is what it means to begin living again.

3. The pointless commotion of a parade; plays on a stage; flocks and herds; people fighting with spears; a small bone thrown to puppies; a scrap of bread tossed into fish tanks; ants struggling and carrying loads; frightened flies darting about; little figures pulled by strings. You should stand among these things kindly and without looking down on them, but remember that each person is worth as much as the things they devote themselves to.

4. Pay attention to what people say, word by word, and to what they do, motive by motive. With an action, see at once what goal it is directed toward; with a statement, watch carefully for its meaning.

5. Is my mind capable of this or not? If it is, I use it for the job as a tool given by the nature of the universe. If it is not, I either give the job to someone who can do it better, provided that this is right for me to do, or I do what I can and get help from someone able to use my judgment and direction to produce what the community needs and can use now. Whatever I do, alone or with someone else, should aim only at what is useful and fitting for everyone.

6. Many people who were once widely praised have already been forgotten, and those who praised them have long been gone.

7. Do not be ashamed of being helped. Your task is to do the duty assigned to you, like a soldier attacking a wall. Suppose you are lame and cannot climb the battlement by yourself, but can climb it with someone’s help—what then?

8. Do not be troubled by the future. If necessary, you will face it with the same power of reason you now use to deal with the present.

9. Everything is intertwined, and the connection is sacred. Almost nothing is foreign to anything else, because all things are arranged together and together make up the same ordered universe. There is one universe made from everything, one god present through everything, one substance, one law, one reason shared by all rational beings, and one truth—if there is also one perfection for beings of the same kind who share the same reason.

10. Everything made of matter quickly disappears into the substance of the universe. Every cause is quickly taken back into the universe’s reason, and every memory is quickly buried in eternity.

11. For a rational being, acting naturally is the same as acting rationally.

12. Stand straight—or let yourself be helped to stand straight.

13. Rational beings, though physically separate, relate to one another as the body’s limbs do when joined together: they are made to work together for one purpose. You will understand this more clearly if you often tell yourself, “I am a member of the community of rational beings.” But if you think of yourself only as a part, not a member, you do not yet love people from the heart. Helping others does not yet make you glad simply because you understand it. You still do it only because it is proper, not because you see it as helping yourself.

14. Let outside events strike whatever can be affected by them. The affected parts can complain, if they choose. But unless I decide that what happened is bad, I have not been harmed, and I can choose not to decide that it is bad.

15. Whatever anyone does or says, I must remain good. It is as if gold, an emerald, or purple dye were always saying, “Whatever anyone does or says, I must remain an emerald and keep my own color.”

16. The ruling mind does not disturb itself. I mean that it does not frighten itself... into desire. If someone else can frighten or upset it, let them try. Its own judgments will not turn it toward such reactions. Let the small body look after itself, if it can, so that nothing happens to it; and if something does happen, let it report it. But the small soul that fears and suffers—the part that forms judgments about all this—need not suffer anything, because it will not be forced to make that kind of judgment. The ruling mind has no needs of its own unless it creates a need for itself. In the same way, it is calm and unobstructed unless it disturbs and obstructs itself.

17. Happiness is having a good inner spirit, a good divinity within. So what are you doing here, impression? For the gods’ sake, leave the way you came. I do not need you. You came because of an old habit. I am not angry with you. Just go.

18. Is someone afraid of change? What can happen without change? What is more natural or more welcome to the nature of the universe? Can you take a bath unless the firewood changes? Can you be fed unless the food changes? Can anything useful be done without change? Then do you not see that your own change is the same kind of thing and just as necessary to the nature of the universe?

19. All bodies pass through the substance of the universe as if through a rushing stream. They belong to the whole and work with it, just as the parts of our bodies work with one another. How many people like Chrysippus, Socrates, and Epictetus has eternity already swallowed? Think the same about every person and every thing you encounter.

20. Only one thing concerns me: that I might do something human nature does not want, or do it in a way it does not want, or do it at a time when it does not want it.

21. Soon you will forget everything, and soon everyone will forget you.

22. A human being naturally loves even people who do wrong. You can do this when you remember that they are related to you, that they make mistakes from ignorance and unwillingly, that both of you will soon be dead, and above all that they have not harmed you, because they have not made your ruling mind any worse than it was before.

23. The nature of the universe takes the substance of the universe as if it were wax. It has just shaped it into a little horse, then melted that down and used its material for a little tree, then for a little human being, then for something else. Each form lasted only a very short time. Being taken apart is no more terrible for the little box than being put together.

24. A scowling face is very unnatural. When the scowl is repeated often, the expression dies away and is finally extinguished, until it cannot be stirred up again at all. Try to infer from this that it is contrary to reason. For if even the awareness that one is doing wrong disappears, what reason is there to go on living?

25. Very soon, the nature that directs the universe will change everything you see. It will make other things from their substance, and then more things from those, so that the world is always young.

26. When someone does you wrong, immediately think about what he believed was good or bad when he did it. Once you understand that, you will feel compassion for him instead of surprise or anger. Either you still believe that the same thing, or something like it, is good, in which case you should forgive him; or you no longer regard such things as good and bad, in which case it will be easier to treat someone kindly when he has misjudged.

27. Do not imagine that things you lack are already present. Instead, choose the best of what you have, and remember gratefully how much you would want those things if you did not have them. But be careful not to enjoy them so much that you get used to overvaluing them and become upset if they are ever gone.

28. Draw inward into yourself. The rational governing mind is naturally content with itself when it acts justly, and finds calm in doing so.

29. Wipe away the impression. Stop being pulled like a puppet. Limit yourself to the present moment. Understand what is happening, whether it is happening to you or to someone else. Separate the thing in question into its cause and its material. Think about your last hour. Leave another person’s wrongdoing where it occurred—with him.

30. Follow what is being said with your understanding. Look closely into both the action and the person acting.

31. Make yourself cheerful through simplicity, modesty, and indifference to everything that is neither virtue nor vice. Love humanity. Follow God. One man says, “Everything exists by convention; in reality, only the elements exist.” But it is enough to remember that everything depends on convention. There are very few things after all.

32. About death: if reality is atoms, death is their scattering; if it is a unity, death is either an ending or a change of place.

33. About pain: unbearable pain brings life to an end, while pain that lasts is bearable. The mind can keep its calm by stepping back from its judgment, and its governing part is not made worse. If the parts of the body hurt by the pain can say anything about it, let them do so.

34. About fame: look at people’s minds, what they are like, what they avoid, and what they chase. Just as new sand dunes pile over and hide the earlier ones, so in life later events quickly cover what came before.

35. “Do you think that human life can seem very important to someone with a great mind who contemplates all time and all existence?”“That is impossible,” he said.“So a person like that will not think death is something terrible either?”“Not at all.”

36. “A king does good even when people speak badly of him.”

37. It is shameful that the face obeys the mind and is shaped and composed as the mind directs, while the mind does not shape and compose itself.

38. You should not be angry at events. They do not care.

39. May you give delightto the immortal gods and to us.

40. To harvest life like a ripe head of grain:one exists, another no longer does.

41. If the gods have failed to care for me and my children,there is a reason for that too.

42. For goodness and justice are on my side.

43. Do not join others in wailing or groaning.

44. “I would give him this fair reply: ‘You are wrong, sir, if you think a man of even a little value should weigh his chances of living or dying. When he acts, he should consider only whether what he is doing is just or unjust, and whether it is the work of a good man or a bad one.’”

45. “The truth is this, men of Athens: when a man takes a position because he thinks it best, or is assigned one by his commander, he must stay there and face the danger. He must put neither death nor anything else ahead of avoiding disgrace.”

46. “But, my friend, consider whether being noble and good is something other than saving lives and having your own life saved. A true man should stop caring about living for any particular length of time and should not cling to life. He should leave that to God and trust what the women say—that no one can escape fate. Then he should think about how to live the time he has as well as possible.”

47. Watch the paths of the stars as if you were moving around with them, and keep thinking about how the elements change into one another. Such thoughts wash away the dirt of life down here.

48. When you think about human beings, look down on earthly life as if from somewhere high above: herds, armies, farms, marriages, breakups, births, deaths, noisy courts, empty regions, the many different foreign peoples, festivals, mourning, markets—the entire mixture, formed into an ordered whole from opposites.

49. Review the past and the many changes of governments. You can foresee the future too, because it will certainly be much the same and cannot break away from the pattern of what happens now. So observing human life for forty years is the same as observing it for ten thousand. What more would you see?

50. Things grown from earth go back to earth;what grows from the seed of the upper airreturns again to the sky.

51. Or death is this: the interlocking atoms come apart, and the elements, which cannot be harmed, are scattered.

52. With food, drink, and magic remedies,they divert the flow so that they will not die.But when a wind blows from God, we must bear itwith hard work and without complaint.

53. “A better horseman”—but not more cooperative, more modest, steadier in what happens, or more forgiving of other people’s mistakes.

54. There is nothing terrible wherever you can complete an action in line with the reason common to gods and humans. If an activity goes well, proceeds as you are made to proceed, and can bring benefit, you need not fear any harm in it.

55. At every place and at all times, you can accept your present circumstances with reverence for the gods, treat the people around you justly, and examine your present impression carefully, so that nothing you have failed to understand gets in.

56. Do not look around at other people’s directing minds. Look straight at where nature is leading you: universal nature leads you through what happens to you, and your own nature through what you have to do. Each being must do what follows from the way it is made. Other things are made for rational beings, just as in every other case lower things exist for higher ones; and rational beings are made for one another.

So the first feature of a human being’s nature is sociability. The second is not giving in to the body’s pressures. Rational, intelligent activity can set limits for itself and need never be defeated by sensations or impulses. Sensation and impulse are both animal activities, while intelligence intends to take the lead and not be controlled by them. That is right, because intelligence is naturally able to make use of them all. The third feature of rational nature is not rushing into judgment or being deceived.

If the directing mind holds to these things, let it follow a straight course to the end, and it will have what belongs to it.

57. Think of yourself as already dead and as having lived no real life up to now. From this point on, live the time left over in accordance with nature.

58. Love only what happens to you and what fate has woven together with you. What could suit you better?

59. Whenever something happens, picture the people who met with the same thing and then became upset, shocked, and complaining. Where are they now? Nowhere. Do you want to behave the same way? Instead, leave those reactions to the people who produce them and are changed by them, and concentrate entirely on how to make use of what happens. You will use it well, and it will give you material to work on. In everything you do, pay attention and aim to see your own conduct as noble. Remember both points: your action makes a moral difference, but the thing your action deals with is morally indifferent.

60. Dig inside yourself. The source of good is inside, and it can always keep flowing if you keep digging.

61. Your body should also be held together firmly, not sprawled about when moving or when still. The mind keeps the face looking composed and dignified; require the same of the whole body. But take care that none of this looks practiced or artificial.

62. Living is more like wrestling than dancing, because you must stay ready and keep your footing when unexpected things come at you.

63. Keep stopping to ask who the people are whose approval you want and what their directing minds are like. Look at the sources of their beliefs and desires; then you will not blame them for mistakes they make unwillingly, and you will not need their endorsement.

64. “Every soul,” he says, “loses the truth unwillingly.” The same is true of justice, self-control, kindness, and everything like them. You must remember this constantly, because it will make you more patient with everyone.

65. Whenever you are in pain, keep in mind that pain is not disgraceful and does not make your directing mind worse. It does not damage the mind’s ability to reason or to live with others. With most pains, this thought from Epicurus can also help you: pain is neither impossible to bear nor endless, as long as you remember its limits and do not make it greater by adding your own judgments.

Also remember that many experiences are really forms of pain without being recognized as such, even though people resent them—for example, sleepiness, being overheated, and having no appetite. Whenever one of these bothers you, tell yourself, “You are giving in to pain.”

66. Be careful not to treat cruel people with the same hostility that cruel people show toward others.

67. How do we know that Telauges did not have a better character than Socrates? It is not enough that Socrates had a more famous death, argued more skillfully with the sophists, spent the night in the freezing cold with greater endurance, seemed more courageous when he refused an order to arrest the man from Salamis, and “strutted through the streets”—something worth questioning, if the story was even true.

What we need to examine is what kind of soul Socrates had. Was he able to be satisfied with treating people justly and the gods reverently? Did he avoid pointless anger at other people’s badness without becoming a slave to anyone’s ignorance? Did he accept whatever the universe assigned him without treating it as alien or finding it unbearable? Did he keep his mind from sharing in the sufferings of his little piece of flesh?

68. Nature has not mixed you so completely with your physical body that you cannot set yourself apart and keep what is truly yours under your own control. Always remember this. Remember too that living happily depends on very little. Even if you have lost hope of becoming skilled in logic and natural philosophy, do not give up hope of being free, honorable, concerned for others, and obedient to God. It is quite possible to become a godlike person without anyone knowing it.

69. You can live your whole life without strain and in the greatest good spirits, even if everyone shouts whatever they want and wild animals tear apart the small limbs of this mass of flesh that has grown around you. None of that prevents your mind from remaining calm, judging your circumstances truthfully, and standing ready to use whatever is placed before it. Your judgment can say to what meets you, “This is what you really are, even if people’s opinions make you look different.” Your ability to act can say to what comes its way, “I was looking for you. Whatever is present is always material on which I can practice rational and social virtue—in short, the art of a human being or a god.” Everything that happens is naturally familiar to god or human beings. It is not new or difficult to deal with, but known and useful.

70. Perfect character means living through every day as if it were your last, without agitation, dullness, or pretense.

71. The gods are immortal, but they do not complain that through all eternity they must keep putting up with so many bad people. They even care for them in every possible way. Yet you, whose life will end very soon, are worn out by them—even though you are one of them yourself?

72. It is ridiculous not to escape your own badness, which you can do, while trying to escape other people’s badness, which you cannot do.

73. Whatever our rational and social capacity finds neither rational nor social, it rightly considers inferior to itself.

74. When you have helped someone and that person has benefited, what more do you want, as foolish people do—to be seen as having done good, or to receive something in return?

75. No one gets tired of receiving a benefit, and helping someone is an action in keeping with nature. So do not get tired of benefiting yourself while you help someone else.

76. The nature of the whole undertook to create the ordered universe. So either everything that happens follows as a consequence, or even the most important things—the very things toward which the universe’s governing principle directs its own impulse—are irrational. Keeping this in mind will make you calmer about many things.

1. This too should help free you from concern for reputation: you can no longer have lived your whole life, or even your life from youth, as a philosopher. Many other people, and you yourself, can clearly see that you are far from philosophy. You are compromised, so it is no longer easy for you to gain a philosopher’s reputation; your position also works against you. So if you have truly understood where the real issue lies, forget what people will think of you. Be satisfied if, for however much of your life remains, you live in the way your nature requires. Think carefully about what it requires, and let nothing else distract you. Experience has taught you that, though you have wandered after many things, you have nowhere found the good life—not in reasoning, wealth, reputation, or pleasure. Where is it, then? In doing what human nature demands. How can you do that? By having principles that guide your impulses and actions. What principles? Those about good and evil: nothing is good for a person if it does not make that person just, self-controlled, brave, and free; and nothing is evil if it does not make that person the opposite of these.

2. With every action, ask yourself: What does this mean for me? Will I regret doing it? Soon I will be dead and everything will be gone. What more am I looking for, if what I am doing now is the work of a rational, social being governed by the same law as god?

3. What were Alexander, Gaius, and Pompey compared with Diogenes, Heraclitus, and Socrates? The philosophers understood things, their causes, and their materials, and their directing minds were self-sufficient. But the others had countless concerns and were servants to countless things.

4. They will keep doing the same things even if you work yourself into a fury.

5. First, do not be disturbed. Everything happens in accordance with the nature of the whole, and before long you will be nobody, nowhere, just like Hadrian and Augustus. Then look closely at the matter and see it clearly. Remember that you must be a good person and what human nature demands; do that without wavering. Say what seems most just to you, but say it kindly, modestly, and sincerely.

6. The nature of the whole has one task: to move what is here somewhere else, change it, take it from one place, and carry it to another. Everything changes, but everything receives its fair share. It has all happened before, so there is no reason to fear anything new.

7. Every kind of being is satisfied with itself when it functions well. A rational being functions well by not accepting any impression that is false or uncertain; by directing its impulses only toward actions that benefit the community; by limiting desire and avoidance to things under our control; and by welcoming everything assigned by universal nature. Human nature is part of universal nature, just as a leaf’s nature is part of the plant’s nature. But a leaf belongs to something without awareness or reason and capable of being obstructed, while a human being belongs to a nature that cannot be obstructed and is intelligent and just, since it gives each person an equal and appropriate share of time, substance, causation, activity, and circumstance. Do not try to find equality by comparing each individual thing with another. Compare the total given to one person with the total given to another.

8. You may not have time to read. But you can restrain your arrogance. You can master pleasure and pain. You can rise above petty concern for reputation. You can refuse to be angry with insensitive, ungrateful people and can even care for them.

9. Never again let anyone hear you complain about life at court, and do not let yourself hear it either.

10. Regret means blaming yourself because you missed something useful. What is good must be useful, and a good person must care about it. But no good person would regret passing up a pleasure. So pleasure is neither useful nor good.

11. What is this thing in itself, as it is actually made? What is its substance and material? What causes it to be what it is? What does it do in the universe, and how long does it last?

12. When you have trouble getting out of bed, remind yourself that your make-up and human nature call you to perform actions for the common good, while even animals without reason sleep. What suits a being’s nature is more proper to it, more natural, and also more pleasant.

13. As far as possible, examine every impression continually: what it is by nature, what response it produces in you, and whether the reasoning about it is sound.

14. Whenever you encounter someone, immediately ask yourself: What does this person believe about good and evil? If he has certain beliefs about pleasure and pain and what causes them, about fame and disgrace, and about death and life, I will not find it surprising or strange when he acts in certain ways. I will remember that his beliefs compel him to act that way.

15. Remember that it is as foolish to be surprised when the world produces the kinds of things it naturally produces as it is to be surprised when a fig tree grows figs. It is also foolish for a doctor to be surprised that a patient has developed a fever, or for a ship’s captain to be surprised by a headwind.

16. Remember that changing your mind and following someone who corrects you is just as much an act of freedom. The action is your own, carried out according to your own impulse, judgment, and understanding.

17. If it is under your control, why are you doing it? If it is under someone else’s control, whom do you blame—the atoms or the gods? Either choice is absurd. Blame no one. If you can, correct the person. If you cannot, correct the situation itself. If you cannot even do that, what is the point of blaming anyone? You should do nothing without a purpose.

18. What dies does not leave the universe. If it stays here and changes here, it also dissolves here into the lasting elements that make up both the universe and you. Those elements also change, without complaining.

19. Everything exists for some purpose—a horse and a grapevine, for example. Why are you surprised? The Sun will also say, “I exist to perform a certain work,” and the other gods will say the same. So what do you exist for? To enjoy pleasure? Consider whether that idea holds up.

20. Nature intends the end of each thing just as much as its beginning and its course, like someone throwing a ball into the air. What good happens to the ball as it rises, or what harm as it falls, or after it has landed? What good happens to a bubble while it stays whole, or what harm when it bursts? The same applies to a lamp.

21. Turn it inside out and see what it is like, what it becomes when it grows old, when it gets sick, when it prostitutes itself. The person who praises and the person praised are both short-lived, as are the person who remembers and the person remembered. And this all happens in one corner of this part of the world, where people do not even agree with one another, and no one even agrees with himself. The whole earth is only a point.

22. Pay attention to the matter itself, or to the action, or to the belief, or to what is meant. You deserve what you are suffering: you would rather become a good person tomorrow than be one today.

23. Am I doing something? I do it for the benefit of human beings. Does something happen to me? I accept it as coming from the gods and from the source of everything, from which all that happens is woven together.

24. Think what bathing is like: oil, sweat, dirt, slimy water—everything disgusting. Every part of life and every material thing is like that.

25. Lucilla buried Verus, and then Lucilla died; Secunda buried Maximus, and then Secunda; Epitynchanus buried Diotimus, and then Epitynchanus; Antoninus buried Faustina, and then Antoninus. Everything is like this. Celer buried Hadrian, and then Celer. And where are those famously sharp-minded men, prophets, or conceited thinkers? I mean people such as Charax, Demetrius the Platonist, Eudaemon, and anyone else like them. All were here for a day and have long been dead. Some were not remembered even for a short time; some became legends; and some have already faded from the legends themselves. So remember that your little collection of matter must either be scattered, your little breath must go out, or it must move away and be given a place somewhere else.

26. A person’s joy is to do what is proper to a human being. What is proper to a human being is goodwill toward others of the same kind, rising above the impulses of the senses, examining plausible impressions, and observing the nature of the universe and what happens according to it.

27. There are three relationships: with what surrounds and affects us; with the divine cause from which everything happens to everyone; and with the people who live alongside us.

28. Pain is bad either for the body—in which case let the body say so—or for the mind. But the mind can preserve its own clarity and calm and not judge pain to be bad. Every judgment, impulse, desire, and avoidance is inside us, and nothing bad can rise into that inner place.

29. Keep wiping away your impressions by telling yourself: Right now I can make sure there is no vice in this mind, no craving, and no disturbance at all. I can see everything as it is and deal with each thing according to its value. Remember that nature has given you this power.

30. Whether in the Senate or speaking to anyone at all, speak properly, not showily. Use sound language.

31. Think of Augustus’s court: his wife, daughter, grandchildren, ancestors, sister, Agrippa, relatives, household, friends, Areius, Maecenas, doctors, and priests. A whole court dead. Then move on to the others... not the death of one person, but of families such as the Pompeys. Think also of the words written on tombs: “The last of his family.” Consider how hard earlier generations tried to leave an heir, though someone still had to be the last. Here too, an entire family dies.

32. You must build your life one action at a time. If each action accomplishes its own purpose as far as possible, be satisfied. No one can stop it from accomplishing that purpose.“But something outside me will interfere.”Nothing can stop you from acting justly, with self-control, and reasonably.“But perhaps it will stop some other activity.”Then accept the obstacle and sensibly turn to what is now possible. Another action will immediately take its place, one that fits the life you are building.

33. Accept without pride, and let go without difficulty.

34. If you have ever seen a severed hand, foot, or head lying apart from the rest of the body, that is what someone makes himself, as far as he can, when he rejects what happens and separates himself from the whole, or when he acts against the community. You have thrown yourself out of the natural unity. You were born to be a part of it, but now you have cut yourself off. Yet the remarkable thing is that you can join yourself to it again. God has not allowed any other part, once separated and cut off, to reunite. Consider the kindness with which he has honored humanity: he has put it in your power not to break away from the Whole in the first place, and, if you do break away, to return, grow back into it, and recover your place as a part.

35. We have received this ability from the nature of the universe, just as each rational being has received its other abilities from her. The nature of the universe takes everything that blocks and resists her, turns it to her purpose, puts it into the order of fate, and makes it part of herself. In the same way, a rational being can make any obstacle into material for its own use and employ it toward whatever goal it set out to reach.

36. Do not let the thought of your whole life overwhelm you. Do not think all at once about every painful thing that has probably happened or will happen. With each present difficulty, ask yourself: What is so unbearable about this task that I cannot endure it? You will be ashamed to answer. Then remind yourself that neither the future nor the past is weighing on you, but only the present. And the present becomes very small if you limit your attention to it alone and challenge your mind if it says it cannot bear even that by itself.

37. Are Panthea or Pergamus now sitting beside Verus’s coffin? Are Chabrias or Diotimus beside Hadrian’s? That is ridiculous. Even if they were sitting there, would the dead men notice? If they noticed, would they enjoy it? If they enjoyed it, would the mourners therefore be immortal? Were those mourners not also destined to grow old and then die? And after they died, what would the dead men do then? All of this is fat and blood in a sack.

38. He says, “If you can see clearly, look and judge with the wisest judgment.”

39. In the nature of a rational being, I see no virtue that opposes justice. But I do see self-control opposing pleasure.

40. If you take away your judgment about what seems to be causing you pain, you yourself remain completely safe.“What do you mean by ‘you yourself’?”Your reason.“But I am not reason.”Very well. Then do not let your reason distress itself. If some other part of you is suffering, let that part judge its own condition.

41. Something that blocks perception is bad for a living creature. Something that blocks its drive to act is likewise bad for a living creature. There is also something that obstructs and harms the constitution of a plant. In the same way, something that blocks the mind is bad for a thinking being. Apply all this to yourself. Are pain and pleasure affecting you? Your senses will deal with that. Has something blocked an action you set out to take? If you began without allowing for obstacles, this is already bad for you as a rational being. But if you take the common good into account, you have not yet been harmed or hindered. No one else can normally obstruct what belongs to the mind itself. Fire cannot touch it, nor iron, nor a tyrant, nor abuse, nor anything at all, once it has become “a sphere, round and firm.”

42. I should not make myself unhappy, since I have never intentionally made anyone else unhappy.

43. Different things make different people glad. What makes me glad is having a healthy ruling mind that rejects no person and nothing that happens to people, but looks at and accepts everything with goodwill and makes proper use of each thing.

44. Give this present time to yourself. People who are especially eager for fame after death do not consider that future generations will be the same kind of people as those who annoy them now. And those future people will also die. What does it matter to you at all whether they make such remarks or have such an opinion of you?

45. Pick me up and put me wherever you want. Wherever I am, I will keep my inner spirit at peace—that is, content so long as its state and its actions conform to its own nature. Is anything worth letting my mind become unhealthy and worse than it was: humiliated, full of desire, enslaved, and frightened? What could you find that is worth that?

46. Nothing can happen to a human being unless it is something that can happen to humans. Nothing can happen to an ox unless it belongs to the life of an ox, to a vine unless it belongs to a vine, or to a stone unless it is proper to a stone. So if what happens to each thing is usual and natural for it, why resent it? Universal nature has not brought you anything unbearable.

47. If something outside you upsets you, the thing itself is not troubling you; your judgment about it is. You can remove that judgment right now. But if something in your own state of mind upsets you, who is stopping you from correcting your belief? Similarly, if you are upset because you are not doing something that seems right to you, why not do it instead of being upset?“But a stronger force prevents me.”Then do not be upset, because it is not your fault that the action is not being done.“But life is not worth living if it is not done.”Then leave life with goodwill, just as a person who does accomplish it must also die, while remaining well-disposed toward those who obstruct you.

48. Remember that the ruling mind becomes impossible to defeat when it draws inward, is satisfied with itself, and does nothing it does not choose to do—even if its refusal is unreasonable. How much stronger is it, then, when it makes a reasoned and careful judgment? This is why a mind free from passions is a fortress. A person has no stronger place of safety; once there, no one can capture him. Anyone who has not recognized this is ignorant. Anyone who has recognized it but does not take refuge there is miserable.

49. Do not tell yourself anything beyond what your initial impressions report. You have been told that someone is speaking badly of you. That is what you were told. You were not told that you had been harmed. I see that the child is sick. I see that, but I do not see that the child is in danger. So always stay with your first impressions. Add no judgment of your own from within, and nothing will happen to you. Better still, add only what a person who understands everything that happens in the universe would add.

50. Is a cucumber bitter? Throw it away.Are there thorn bushes in the road? Walk around them.That is enough. Do not go on to ask, “Why did these things come to exist in the universe?” Someone who studies nature will laugh at you, just as a carpenter or shoemaker would laugh if you complained because you saw wood shavings or scraps from their work lying in the workshop. They have somewhere to throw their waste, but the nature of the whole has nothing outside itself. The amazing thing about its skill is that, because it is self-contained, it changes into itself everything inside it that seems to decay, grow old, and become useless. Then it makes new and young things out of that same material. It therefore needs no matter from outside and no place to dump what has rotted. Its own space, its own material, and its own skill are enough for it.

51. Do not delay in your actions, be confused in your conversations, wander among your impressions, let your mind contract completely or burst outward, or be too busy in your life.“They kill us, cut us to pieces, and chase us with curses.”What does any of that have to do with keeping the mind pure, sensible, self-controlled, and just? Imagine someone standing beside a clear, sweet spring and insulting it. The spring does not stop producing drinkable water. Even if he throws mud or manure into it, the spring will quickly disperse and wash it away, and it will not be stained. How can you have an ever-flowing spring rather than a mere well? By keeping yourself free at every moment, with goodwill, honesty, and a sense of honor.

52. Someone who does not know that there is a universe does not know where he is. Someone who does not know what the universe is naturally for knows neither who he is nor what the universe is. And if he leaves out any one of these facts, he cannot say what he himself was born for. What do you think, then, of a person who avoids or seeks the praise of applauding crowds who know neither where they are nor who they are?

53. Do you want praise from someone who curses himself three times an hour? Do you want to please someone who is not pleased with himself? Can a person be pleased with himself when he regrets nearly everything he does?

54. Do not merely share your breath with the air around you. From now on, also bring your thought into harmony with the intelligence surrounding everything. The power of intelligence is spread and flows everywhere for anyone willing to draw it in, just as air is available to anyone able to breathe.

55. Vice as a whole does not harm the universe, and any one person’s vice does not harm another person. It harms only the person who has it—and that person is free of it as soon as he chooses to be.

56. Another person’s power of choice is no more relevant to my own power of choice than his small breath or his bit of flesh. Even though we were made especially for one another, each person’s ruling mind has authority over itself. Otherwise another person’s wrongdoing would be bad for me. God did not allow that, so that my failure to live well would not depend on someone else.

57. The sun seems to pour itself out, and its light does spread everywhere, but it is not emptied out. This spreading is really an extension. That is why its beams are called rays: they reach outward. You can see what a ray is like if you watch sunlight enter a darkened house through a narrow opening. It extends in a straight line and seems to press against any solid object it meets, which blocks off the air beyond. There it stops; it does not slide down or fall. The mind should spread and extend in the same way. It should not spill itself away, but reach outward. It should not press violently or rush against the obstacles it meets, nor should it collapse. It should stand firm and shine on whatever receives it. Anything that does not let the light pass through will deprive itself of that light.

58. Anyone who fears death is afraid either of feeling nothing or of feeling in a different way. If you no longer have any sensation, you will not feel anything bad. If you gain a different kind of sensation, you will be a different kind of living creature, and you will not stop living.

59. People exist for one another. So either teach them or put up with them.

60. An arrow travels in one way and the mind in another. But even when the mind is being cautious or turning things over as it examines them, it still moves straight ahead toward its purpose.

61. Look into the directing mind of each person, and allow every other person to look into yours.

1. A person who does wrong acts irreverently toward the divine. The nature of the universe made rational beings for one another, so that they would help one another as each deserves and never cause harm. Anyone who violates her purpose is therefore acting irreverently toward the oldest of the gods. The nature of the universe is the nature of everything that exists, and everything that exists is naturally related to all other existing things.

A person who lies also acts irreverently toward this same goddess. She is called Truth and is the primary cause of everything true. Someone who lies deliberately acts irreverently because deception is wrongdoing. Someone who lies unintentionally does so because he is out of tune with the nature of the universe and creates disorder by opposing the nature of the world. A person who moves on his own toward views contrary to the truth is fighting against it. Nature had already given him the basic means of recognizing truth, but because he neglected them, he can no longer tell what is false from what is true.

Anyone who pursues pleasure as good and avoids pain as evil also acts irreverently. Such a person will often have to blame universal nature for giving things unfairly to bad and good people, since bad people are often surrounded by pleasures and possess the things that produce them, while good people meet with pain and the things that produce it. Also, a person who fears pain will eventually fear something that is going to happen in the universe, and that is already irreverent. A person who pursues pleasure will not keep from doing wrong, and that is clearly irreverent.

Universal nature treats certain things equally; if she did not, she would not produce both of each pair. People who want to follow nature and share her judgment must therefore treat those things equally too. So anyone who does not regard pain and pleasure, death and life, fame and lack of fame equally, though the nature of the universe uses them equally, is plainly acting irreverently.

When I say that universal nature uses these things equally, I mean that, in the course of events, they happen equally to the things that come into being and to those that arise afterward, through a primal impulse of providence. Following that impulse, providence advanced from an original beginning toward the present arrangement of the world, forming certain principles of what would come to be and assigning generative powers for substances, changes, and successions of this kind.

2. A better man would have left this world without ever experiencing lies, hypocrisy, self-indulgence, or vanity. Still, dying after becoming thoroughly sick of them is the next-best course. Or have you decided to remain with vice? Hasn’t your experience yet convinced you to escape this plague? The corruption of the mind is much more a plague than an unhealthy disturbance and change in the air around us. The second is a plague for living beings as living beings; the first is a plague for human beings as human beings.

3. Do not look down on death; accept it willingly, because it too is one of the things nature wants. Dissolving is like being young and becoming old, growing and reaching maturity, developing teeth, a beard, and grey hair, fathering a child, carrying a child, giving birth, and all the other natural processes brought by the stages of life.

So the reasonable human attitude is not to face death carelessly, impulsively, or arrogantly, but to wait for it as one of nature’s processes. Just as you now wait for the baby to come out of your wife’s womb, wait in the same way for the hour when your little soul will drop out of this casing.

If you also want a simple encouragement that speaks to the heart, consider carefully the things you are going to leave and the kinds of people among whom your soul will no longer be mixed up. You should not be irritated with them at all, but should care for them and put up with them gently. Still, remember that you will not be leaving people who share your beliefs. This alone, if anything, could have pulled you back and kept you alive: being allowed to live with people who had adopted the same beliefs. But as things are, you see how tiring the disagreements of life together are—enough to say:

“Come quickly, Death,before I too forget who I am.”

4. A person who does wrong harms himself. A person who acts unjustly is unjust to himself, because he makes himself a bad person.

5. We often do wrong by failing to do something, not only by doing something.

6. All that is needed is an accurate judgment now, an action now that serves others, and an attitude now that accepts whatever happens from an external cause.

7. Wipe away the impression.Stop the impulse.Put out the desire.Keep your directing mind under its own control.

8. One soul is divided among non-rational animals, and one thinking soul is shared among rational beings. In the same way, there is one earth for everything made of earth, and all living things that can see use one light to see and breathe one air.

9. Everything that shares something in common moves toward others of the same kind. Everything made of earth is drawn toward the earth. All liquid runs together. Air does the same, so barriers and force are needed to separate it. Fire moves upward because of elemental fire, but every fire here is so ready to catch together with another fire that any material which is even a little drier burns easily, since it contains less of what prevents ignition.

In the same way, everything that shares a common rational nature moves toward what is related to it—and does so even more strongly. The better it is than other things, the more ready it is to mix and unite with its own kind. So among non-rational animals we immediately find swarms, herds, care for offspring, and things like love. Souls were now present, and in the superior kind the force that draws things together was stronger than it was in plants, stones, or wood.

Among rational animals there are states, friendships, families, and associations, and in wartime there are treaties and truces. Among still higher beings, even though they are in some sense far apart, a unity exists, as it does among the stars. Rising to a higher level can therefore produce a shared bond even between things separated by distance.

Look, then, at what happens now. Rational beings alone have forgotten their concern for one another and their tendency to come together, and only here is no flowing together seen. Yet even when they try to escape, they are surrounded and held, because nature is stronger. Watch carefully and you will see what I mean: you would sooner find something made of earth that touches nothing earthly than a human being completely cut off from another human being.

10. A person, a god, and the universe all produce fruit; each does so at the proper time. It does not matter that ordinary usage has applied the word mainly to vines and similar things. Reason also produces both shared and particular fruit, and from it come other things like reason itself.

11. If you can, teach them better. If you cannot, remember that you have kindness for this purpose. The gods too are kind to people like them, and even help them in some things—with health, wealth, and reputation. That is how good the gods are. You can be the same. Who is stopping you?

12. Make the effort, but not as if you were miserable or wanted people to pity or admire you. Want only this: to act or hold back as reason directed toward the common good demands.

13. Today I got out of every difficulty—or rather, I threw every difficulty out. It was not outside me but inside, in my judgments.

14. Everything is the same: familiar from experience, short-lived in time, and dirty in its material. Everything now is just as it was for those we buried.

15. Things remain outside us, simply as they are. They know nothing about themselves and make no judgments. What judges them, then? The mind that governs us.

16. For a rational and social being, good and bad are not found in what happens to it but in what it does. In the same way, its virtue and vice are found not in what it undergoes but in its actions.

17. A stone thrown upward is not harmed by coming down or benefited by going up.

18. Look inside their minds, and you will see what kind of judges you are afraid of and how poorly they judge even themselves.

19. Everything is changing. You too are constantly being altered and, in some respect, destroyed. The whole universe is as well.

20. Leave another person's wrongdoing with that person.

21. When an action ends, or an impulse or judgment stops, that is a kind of death, but it is not bad. Now think of the stages of life: childhood, adolescence, youth, and old age. Every change from one to another is a death too. Is that frightening? Think next of your life with your grandfather, then with your mother, then with your father. As you find many other endings, changes, and losses, ask yourself whether any of them was frightening. In the same way, the ending, stopping, and changing of your entire life is not frightening either.

22. Turn quickly to your own governing mind, to the mind of the universe, and to the other person's mind. Turn to your own so that you can make it just; to the universe's so that you remember what you are part of; and to the other person's so that you can tell whether he acts from ignorance or deliberate intent, while also considering that his mind is related to yours.

23. Just as you are a part that helps complete a community, every action you take should help complete a life in community. Any action that is not directed, either closely or remotely, toward the common goal breaks your life apart and keeps it from being unified. It is rebellious, like a person in a community who separates his own part from its shared harmony.

24. Children's tantrums and games, and “little breaths carrying dead bodies”—which makes the scene of the Journey to the Dead come vividly to mind.

25. Examine the quality of the cause by separating it in thought from the material, and look at it. Then set a limit to the longest time this particular kind of thing can naturally last.

26. You have suffered countless troubles because you were not satisfied with your governing mind doing what it was made to do. But that is enough.

27. When someone criticizes or hates you, or people say things like that about you, look into their small souls and see what kind of people they are. You will see that you do not need to be upset about what they think of you. Still, you must wish them well, because they are your friends by nature. The gods also help them in every way, through dreams and prophecies, at least to gain the things they care about.

28. The universe goes through the same cycles, up and down, from one age to another. Either the mind of the universe directs every single event; if so, accept what it directs. Or it gave one original impulse, and everything else follows as a result. So why resist? If the whole is God, everything is well. If it is chance—atoms or indivisible particles in some sense—do not you also behave at random.

The earth will soon cover all of us. Then the earth itself will change, and what it becomes will go on changing without end, and those later things will change without end as well. Anyone who thinks about the waves of change and alteration and the speed of everything mortal will look down on it all.

29. The cause of everything is a rushing torrent; it carries everything along. Human being, what are you doing? Do what nature requires now. Begin, if you have the opportunity, and do not look around to see whether anyone will notice. Do not expect Plato's ideal state. Be content if even the smallest thing moves forward, and do not think that this small result is unimportant.

How trivial these political figures are, though they imagine that they practice philosophy in public affairs. They are full of mucus. Who will change their beliefs? Without a change in beliefs, what can there be except the slavery of people who groan and pretend to obey?

Now go ahead and tell me about Alexander, Philip, and Demetrius of Phalerum. I will follow them if they understood what universal nature wanted and trained themselves accordingly. But if they merely acted like tragic heroes, no one has condemned me to imitate them. The work of philosophy is simple and modest. Do not draw me toward pompous self-importance.

30. “Look from above” at countless crowds and countless ceremonies, every kind of voyage in storms and calm weather, and the differences among people being born, living together, and dying. Think also of the lives other people lived long ago, the lives that will be lived after you, and the lives now being lived in foreign nations. Think how many people do not even know your name, how many will soon forget it, and how many who may praise you now will soon criticize you. Neither being remembered nor having fame nor anything else at all is of much value.

31. Remain calm about events caused by things outside you, and act justly in what comes from you. In other words, let your intentions and actions aim at acting for the common good, since that is natural for you.

32. You can remove many unnecessary things that bother you, since they depend entirely on your judgment, and immediately make a great deal of room for yourself. Hold the whole universe in your mind, think about endless time, and consider how quickly each individual thing changes: how short the time is from birth to dissolution, how vast the time before birth, and how equally endless the time after dissolution is.

33. Everything you see will soon perish. The people who see it perishing will soon perish too. And someone who dies at a very old age will end up no different from someone who dies young.

34. What are these people’s minds like? What do they care about, and what makes them love and honor things? Picture their petty souls naked. When they think they can hurt someone by criticizing him or help him by praising him, how conceited they are.

35. Loss is simply change. The nature of the universe takes pleasure in change, and by it everything happens as it should. Things have happened in the same way from eternity, and similar things will continue without end. So what are you saying? That everything has always gone badly and always will? That among so many gods there has never been any power able to put things right, and that the universe is condemned to remain trapped in endless evils?

36. Look at the decaying material each thing is made from: water, dust, small bones, fat. Marble is hardened earth, gold and silver are its deposits, clothes are hairs, and purple dye is blood. Everything else is like this too. The substance of breath is likewise material of this kind, changing from one of these forms into another.

37. Enough of this miserable life, this complaining and playacting. Why are you upset? What is new here? What throws you off balance? Is it the cause? Examine it. Is it the material? Examine that. There is nothing besides these two. And from now on, be more straightforward and gracious toward the gods.

38. It makes no difference whether you examine the history of these things for a hundred years or for three hundred.

39. If he did wrong, the harm is in him. But perhaps he did nothing wrong.

40. Either everything comes from one intelligent source and happens to the parts of a single body, in which case no part should complain about what happens for the good of the whole; or there are atoms, and nothing exists but a confused mixture and dispersion. So why are you upset? Say to your mind: “You are dead, ruined, and turned into an animal. You are pretending, joining the herd, and feeding with it.”

41. Either the gods can do nothing, or they can. If they can do nothing, why pray? If they can, why not ask them to help you stop fearing, wanting, or grieving over any of these things, rather than asking them to make some particular thing happen or not happen? If the gods can help human beings at all, they can certainly help them with this. But perhaps you will say, “The gods have put these matters in my own hands.” Then isn’t it better to use what is in your control freely than to struggle like a slave, humbly and helplessly, with what is not in your control? And who told you that the gods do not help us even with what is in our control? Start praying for these things and you will see.

One person prays, “How can I sleep with that woman?”You should pray, “How can I stop wanting to sleep with her?”

Another prays, “How can I get free of that man?”You should pray, “How can I stop needing to get free of him?”

Another prays, “How can I avoid losing my child?”You should pray, “How can I stop being afraid of losing my child?”

Change all your prayers in this way, and see what happens.

42. Epicurus says: “When I was ill, I did not talk about the pains of my poor body, and I did not chatter about such things with my visitors. I kept discussing the basic questions of nature, concentrating on how the mind can share in these disturbances of the flesh yet remain calm and preserve its own good. And I did not give the doctors a chance to boast over me as if they were achieving something. My life continued well and honorably.”

If you become ill, or find yourself in any other difficult situation, do as he did. Every philosophical school agrees that, whatever happens, we should not abandon philosophy or join in the idle talk of an uneducated person who knows nothing of nature. Focus only on what you are doing now and on the faculty with which you are doing it.

43. Whenever someone’s shameless behavior offends you, immediately ask yourself, “Is it possible for there to be no shameless people in the world?” No, it is not. So do not ask for the impossible. This person is one of the shameless people who must exist in the world. Keep the same thought ready when you meet a dishonest person, someone you cannot trust, or anyone else who does wrong. As soon as you remember that people of this kind cannot fail to exist, you will feel kinder toward each individual.

It also helps to consider immediately what strength nature has given human beings to deal with this particular fault. Nature has given gentleness as an antidote to the insensitive person, and some other ability to meet each different fault. In every case, you can teach someone who has gone astray. Everyone who does wrong misses the goal he was aiming at and loses his way.

Besides, how have you been harmed? You will find that none of the people you are angry with has done anything that had to make your mind worse. But that is where everything bad and harmful to you exists. What is bad or surprising about an uneducated person behaving like an uneducated person? Consider whether you should blame yourself instead, because you did not expect him to do this wrong. Your reason gave you grounds for thinking that he was likely to do it, but you forgot, and now you are surprised that he did.

Most of all, when you accuse someone of being untrustworthy or ungrateful, turn your attention back to yourself. The mistake is clearly yours: either you trusted that a person with such a character would keep his word, or you did him a favor without giving it completely and without receiving the full benefit from the act of doing it itself.

What more do you want after doing someone good? Isn’t it enough that you have acted according to your own nature? Do you also want a reward for it? That would be like the eye asking to be paid for seeing, or the feet for walking. Eyes and feet were made for particular functions, and by acting according to their own design they receive what belongs to them. In the same way, a human being is naturally made to help others. Whenever he does something helpful, or contributes in some other way to shared purposes, he has done what he was made to do and has received what belongs to him.

1. Will you ever, soul, be good, sincere, whole, and bare—more clearly visible than the body surrounding you? Will you ever experience a loving and affectionate state of mind? Will you ever be full and need nothing, with no longing or desire for anything, living or lifeless, to give you pleasure? Will you need no extra time in which to enjoy it, no particular place or country or favorable climate, and no harmonious company? Instead, will you be satisfied with your present situation and pleased with everything you now have? Will you convince yourself that everything you have comes from the gods, that all is well with you and will remain well—whatever pleases them and whatever they choose to give for the preservation of the perfect living creature, which is good, just, and beautiful, which produces everything, holds everything together, surrounds everything, and takes dissolved things back into itself so that other things like them may come into being? Will you ever become fit to live as a fellow citizen with gods and human beings, neither blaming them for anything nor giving them cause to condemn you?

2. Pay attention to what your physical nature asks of you, and then do and accept it, provided that this will not harm your nature as a living being. Next, pay attention to what your nature as a living being asks of you, and accept all of it, provided that this will not harm your nature as a rational living being. Whatever is rational is also social. Follow these rules and do not concern yourself with anything else.

3. Anything that happens is either something you are naturally able to endure or something you are not. If you are naturally able to endure it, do not resent it; endure it as your nature enables you to do. If you are not able to endure it, do not resent it then either, because after it has used you up, it too will end. But remember that you are naturally able to endure anything that your own judgment can make bearable and tolerable by deciding that enduring it benefits you or is the right thing for you to do.

4. If someone is wrong, correct him kindly and point out what he has overlooked. If you cannot do that, blame yourself—or do not blame even yourself.

5. Whatever happens to you was prepared for you from eternity. From all eternity, the chain of causes wove together both your existence and the occurrence of this event.

6. Whether reality consists of atoms or is governed by Nature, begin with these facts: I am part of a whole governed by Nature, and I am closely related to the other parts of the same kind as me. If I remember this, then because I am a part of the whole, I will not be dissatisfied with anything the whole assigns me. Nothing that benefits the whole can harm a part. Every natural system contains nothing that is against its own good; and the cosmos has the further advantage that no external cause can force it to produce anything harmful to itself.

So, by remembering that I am part of a whole like this, I will be content with everything that happens. And because I am related to the other parts of my kind, I will do nothing that works against the community. Instead, I will care for those akin to me, direct every impulse toward the common good, and turn it away from the opposite. If I carry this out, my life must go smoothly, just as the life of a citizen would go smoothly if he moved from one action beneficial to his fellow citizens to another and gladly accepted whatever his city assigned him.

7. The parts of the whole—everything naturally contained in the cosmos—must decay. Here, however, “decay” means “change.” If this process is naturally both bad and unavoidable for the parts, then the whole could not be well governed, since its parts are made in various ways to change and be destroyed. Did Nature deliberately set out to harm her own parts, making them vulnerable to evil and certain to fall into it? Or did Nature fail to notice that this was happening? Neither possibility is believable.

Even if someone ignored Nature and explained these events by saying that things are simply made this way, it would be absurd to say both that the parts of the whole naturally change and that we should be surprised or upset when something supposedly contrary to nature happens. This is especially so because each thing dissolves back into the materials from which it was formed. Either the elements from which it was combined are scattered, or its solid matter changes into earth and its breathlike matter into air. In this way they too are taken back into the ordering reason of the whole, whether the cosmos is periodically consumed by fire or continually renewed through endless exchanges.

Do not imagine that the solid and breathlike matter in you is the same matter you had when you were first born. All of it came flowing into you yesterday or the day before from food and from the air you breathed. So what changes is what your body has taken in, not what your mother gave birth to. But even if you suppose that the original matter is what closely binds you to your individual identity, I do not think that this is actually relevant to the present point.

8. Choose these names for yourself: good, honorable, truthful, clear-minded, accepting, above-minded. Be careful not to acquire different names; and if you lose these, return to them quickly. Remember what they mean. “Clear-minded” means having the knowledge to distinguish each individual thing and allowing no irrelevant thought to enter. “Accepting” means willingly receiving what universal Nature assigns. “Above-minded” means raising the thinking part of yourself above pleasant or painful movements of the body, petty reputation, death, and everything else of that kind.

If you keep yourself worthy of these names without wanting other people to call you by them, you will become a different person and enter a different life. To go on being the person you have been until now, torn apart and stained in a life like this, is the conduct of someone extremely insensitive and desperately attached to life. Such a person resembles a half-eaten fighter of wild beasts who, covered with wounds and blood, still begs to be kept alive until tomorrow, though he will be thrown in that condition to the same claws and teeth.

Commit yourself, then, to these few names. If you can remain true to them, stay there as if you had moved to the islands of the blessed. But if you realize that you are falling away and cannot remain in control, go confidently to some quiet corner where you can regain control. Or leave life altogether—not angrily, but simply, freely, and honorably—having at least done this one thing in life: leaving it in this manner.

To help yourself remember these names, remember the gods. They do not want flattery; they want every rational being to become like them. They want the fig tree to do what belongs to a fig tree, the dog what belongs to a dog, the bee what belongs to a bee, and the human being what belongs to a human being.

9. Playacting, war, alarm, numbness, slavery. Every day your sacred principles will be wiped away, to the extent that you form impressions without studying nature and then neglect them. You must view and do everything so that you deal with the situation at hand, keep your understanding active at the same time, and quietly maintain the confidence that comes from knowing each thing—not hiding it, but not displaying it either. When, then, will you have simplicity? When will you have dignity? When will you know each thing—what it essentially is, what place it has in the universe, how long it is naturally able to last, what it is made of, who can possess it, and who can give or remove it?

10. A spider is proud when it catches a fly; a person when he catches a young hare; someone else when he nets a small fish; another when he catches piglets; another, bears; another, Sarmatians. If you examine their beliefs, are they not all bandits?

11. Develop a way of observing how everything changes into everything else. Keep paying attention to this and train yourself in it, because nothing does more to make the mind great. Such a person has shed his body. He understands that very soon he will have to leave all these things behind and depart from humanity, so he gives himself entirely to justice in what he himself does, and to the nature of the whole in everything else that happens. He does not even think about what anyone may say or believe about him, or do to him. He is satisfied with two things: doing his present action justly and loving what is presently assigned to him. He has abandoned every distraction and anxious effort. He wants only to follow a straight path through the law and, by following it, to follow God.

12. Why be suspicious when you can consider what needs to be done? If you understand it, move toward it calmly and without changing course. If you do not understand it, stop and consult the best advisers. If other things get in the way, proceed thoughtfully with the means you have, holding to what seems just. Achieving justice is best, since missing it is the real failure. A person who follows reason in everything is unhurried but ready to act, cheerful but self-controlled.

13. As soon as you wake, ask yourself: Will it matter to you if someone else criticizes what is just and right? It will not. Have you forgotten what the people who make such a commotion praising and blaming others are like in bed and at meals? What they do, avoid, and chase after? What they steal and grab—not with their hands and feet, but with the most valuable part of themselves, the part that can produce trustworthiness, decency, truth, law, and a good inner spirit whenever it chooses?

14. A well-taught and respectful person says to nature, which gives everything and takes everything back: “Give whatever you want; take back whatever you want.” He says this not arrogantly, but simply because he obeys nature and wishes her well.

15. The time left is short. Live as if you were on a mountain. It makes no difference whether you are there or here, if you live everywhere as a citizen of the universe. Let people see and study a genuine human being who lives according to nature. If they cannot tolerate him, let them kill him. That is better than living the way they do.

16. Stop talking about what a good person should be like. Be one.

17. Continually picture all of time and all of matter, and remember that each individual thing is no more than a grain of millet compared with all matter, and one turn of a drill compared with all time.

18. Whenever you focus on something, imagine it already breaking apart and changing, beginning to rot or scatter, or dying in whatever way is natural to that kind of thing.

19. Think what they are like when they eat, sleep, have sex, defecate, and do everything else. Then think what they are like when they give orders, act proudly, lose their tempers, and scold people from a position of superiority. Not long ago they were slaves to so many people and things—and soon they will be in that condition again.

20. Whatever the nature of the universe brings to each person is good for that person, and it is good at the time nature brings it.

21. The earth longs for rain,and the solemn sky longs too;the universe longs to bring aboutwhatever is going to happen.

So I tell the universe, “I long for it with you.” Is that not also why people say, “This tends to happen”?

22. Either you stay here, and you are used to it by now; or you leave, which is what you wanted; or you die, and your duty is finished. There is no other possibility. So be cheerful.

23. Always keep it clear that the countryside is like this too, and that everything here is the same as it is on top of a mountain, on the seashore, or anywhere you choose. You will find exactly what Plato describes: “enclosing himself in a pen on a mountain,” he says, “and milking the bleating sheep.”

24. What is my ruling mind? What am I making it into now, and what am I using it for? Is it empty of reason? Is it cut off and separated from community? Is it stuck and mixed into this bit of flesh so that it changes whenever the body does?

25. Someone who runs away from his master is a fugitive. The law is our master, so anyone who breaks the law is a fugitive. In the same way, a person who is distressed, angry, or afraid does not want some past, present, or future event that has been ordered by the ruler of everything. That ruler is the law, which assigns to each person what is due to him. So anyone who is afraid, distressed, or angry is a fugitive.

26. A man releases seed into a womb and goes away. Then another cause takes over, works on it, and produces a baby. What a thing is made from such a thing! Again, he sends food down his throat. Then another cause takes over and produces perception, desire, life as a whole, strength, and many other remarkable things. So observe what happens under this covering, and see the power at work just as we see the forces that pull things down and carry them up—not with our eyes, but just as clearly.

27. Keep thinking how everything happening now also happened before, and how it will happen again. Picture entire dramas and similar scenes that you know from your own experience or from older history: the whole court of Hadrian, the whole court of Antoninus, and the whole courts of Philip, Alexander, and Croesus. All of them were the same kind of thing; only the people were different.

28. Think of anyone who is upset or unhappy about anything as a piglet being sacrificed, kicking and squealing. The person who lies alone on his bed and groans in silence is the same. Think of how we are bound, and of how only a rational living being is able to go willingly along with what happens, though everyone must go along with it in any case.

29. With each thing you do, stop and ask yourself: Is death frightening because I will no longer have this?

30. Whenever someone’s wrongdoing offends you, immediately turn to the similar ways in which you go wrong—for example, by thinking that money, pleasure, a little reputation, or something else of that kind is good. Focusing on this will quickly end your anger, especially when you also realize that the person is driven by something. What else can he do? Or, if you can, remove what is driving him.

31. When you see Satyrion, think of the earlier Socraticus, or of Eutyches or Hymen. When you see Euphrates, think of Eutychion or Silvanus; when you see Alciphron, think of Tropaeophorus; when you see Severus, think of Crito or Xenophon. When you look at yourself, think of one of the Caesars. Do the same with everyone by finding a comparable person from the past. Then ask yourself: Where are those people now? Nowhere—or wherever they may be. This will help you keep seeing human affairs as smoke and nothing, especially if you remember that once something has changed, it will never exist again in all of infinite time. So why strain yourself? Why is it not enough to pass through this short life decently?

32. What material and opportunity you are running away from! All these things are simply training for a mind that has examined life accurately and naturally. So remain until you can absorb even these things, just as a healthy stomach absorbs every kind of food and a bright fire turns whatever you throw into it into flame and light.

33. Do not let anyone truthfully say that you are dishonest or not good. Anyone who thinks this about you should be wrong. This is entirely up to you. Who is stopping you from being good and honest? Decide simply that you will not go on living unless you are that kind of person, since reason does not choose life without goodness and honesty.

34. What is the most reasonable thing you can do or say with the situation in front of you? Whatever it is, you are free to do or say it, so do not claim that something prevents you.

You will not stop complaining until acting as a human being should in every situation that comes your way feels as pleasant to you as luxury feels to people devoted to pleasure. You should consider every action you can perform in keeping with your own nature an enjoyment. You can do that everywhere.

A cylinder cannot follow its natural motion everywhere. Neither can water, fire, or anything else controlled by physical nature or an unreasoning soul, because many things block and resist them. But mind and reason can pass through everything that opposes them in the way their nature and will require. Keep before your eyes how easily reason can move through everything—like fire moving upward, a stone downward, or a cylinder down a slope—and ask for nothing more. Every other obstacle either affects the body, which is a little corpse, or else cannot crush, injure, or harm you at all unless you judge it harmful and reason itself gives way. Otherwise, anyone who suffered something would immediately become a bad person. With every other kind of thing, if something bad happens to it, the thing affected becomes worse because of it. But in this case, we might even say that a person becomes better and more worthy of praise by using well whatever happens.

In short, remember that nothing can harm a natural citizen unless it harms the city, and nothing can harm the city unless it harms the law. None of the events called misfortunes harms the law. Therefore, what does not harm the law harms neither the city nor its citizen.

35. For someone deeply affected by true principles, even a very short and familiar saying is enough to remind him not to grieve or be afraid. For example:

“The wind scatters some leaves on the ground;the generations of men are the same.”

Your children are little leaves too. So are the people who loudly and convincingly praise and celebrate you, and those who instead curse you or quietly criticize and ridicule you. The people who inherit your reputation after death are also little leaves. They all “appear in the season of spring”; then the wind knocks them down, and the forest grows others in their place. Everything lasts only a short time, but you avoid and chase things as if they would last forever. Soon you will close your eyes, and before long someone else will mourn the person who carried your body out.

36. A healthy eye should see everything that can be seen and not say, “I only want green things.” That is what a diseased eye does. Healthy hearing and smell should be ready for every sound and scent, and a healthy stomach should accept every kind of food, just as a mill accepts everything it was built to grind. In the same way, a healthy mind should be ready for everything that happens. A mind that says, “My children must stay safe,” or “Everyone must praise whatever I do,” is like an eye that wants only green things or teeth that want only soft food.

37. No one is so fortunate that, when he dies, some people standing nearby will not be glad about the bad thing that has happened to him. Even if he was a good and wise man, will there not be someone who finally says to himself, “At last we can breathe freely without this teacher. He was not hard on any of us, but I could tell that he silently disapproved of us”? That is true even of a good person. As for us, there are many more reasons why plenty of people will be eager to get rid of us.

Remember this when you are dying, and you will leave more easily if you think: “I am leaving a life in which my own companions—the people for whom I struggled, prayed, and cared so much—want me to go, perhaps hoping they will gain some other kind of relief from it.” So why would anyone cling to a longer stay here?

But do not leave them with any less goodwill because of this. Keep your own character and remain friendly, kind, and gracious to them. Do not leave as if you were being torn away. When someone dies peacefully, the small soul slips easily from the body; your departure from these people should be like that. Nature joined and united you with them, but now it is separating you. I am parting from people who are my own, but without resisting and without being forced. This too is natural.

38. Whenever someone does something, make a habit of asking yourself, as far as you can, “What is this person trying to achieve by doing this?” But start with yourself: examine yourself first.

39. Remember that what pulls the strings is what lies hidden inside. It is the active force, it is life, it is—if we must say so—the person. Never confuse it in your mind with the container-like body around it or with the organs formed around it. They are like an adze, except that they are naturally attached to us. Without the cause that moves and controls them, these parts are no more useful than a shuttle is to a weaver, a pen to a writer, or a whip to a charioteer.

1. These are the rational soul’s own qualities: it sees itself, examines and organizes itself, and makes itself whatever it chooses to be. It receives the fruit it produces itself, whereas other people receive the fruits of plants and the corresponding products of animals. It reaches its own proper completion wherever the end of life finds it. This is unlike a dance, a dramatic performance, or anything similar, where an interruption leaves the whole action unfinished. At every stage, and wherever it is stopped, the rational soul can make what it set out to do complete and sufficient in itself, so that it can say, “I have received everything that is mine.” It also travels in thought through the entire universe, the empty space around it, and its shape. It extends into the infinity of time, takes in and understands the periodic renewal of all things, and sees that our descendants will see nothing new and our ancestors saw nothing more remarkable. In a sense, a forty-year-old with even a little understanding has already seen everything that has happened and everything that will happen, because it all belongs to the same kinds. Other qualities proper to a rational soul are loving those near us, truthfulness, self-respect, and placing nothing above itself. This last quality also belongs to law. So right reason and the reason that governs justice are no different.

2. You will cease to admire a pleasing song, a dance, or a pancration contest if you break the musical voice down into its individual notes and ask yourself about each note, “Am I unable to resist this?” You will be ashamed to say so. Do the same with a dance by considering each movement or pose separately, and likewise with the pancration. In general, except in the case of virtue and what comes from virtue, remember to go straight to the individual parts of things. By analyzing them into parts, you will stop overvaluing them. Apply the same method to life as a whole.

3. Consider the kind of soul that is ready, if it must leave the body now, either to be extinguished, scattered, or to continue existing. Its readiness should come from its own considered judgment, not from mere defiance like that of the Christians. It should be rational and dignified, capable of convincing someone else, and free of dramatic display.

4. Have I done something that benefits the community? Then I have benefited myself. Always keep this thought available, and never stop acting on it.

5. What is your profession? Being a good person. How can you do that except through principles about the nature of the universe and about the particular way a human being is constituted?

6. Tragedies were originally produced to remind us of what happens in life: these events naturally occur as they do, and the things that entertain you on the stage should not upset you on the larger stage of life. You can see that these events must end this way and that even the people who cry,

“Oh, Cithaeron!”

endure them. Playwrights also say some useful things, especially this:

“If the gods have neglected me and my two children,even this has a reason.”

And again:

“We should not be angry with events.”

And:

“To harvest life like a ripe, fruitful ear of grain.”

And other sayings like these.

After tragedy came Old Comedy. It spoke freely like a teacher and, through its direct language, usefully reminded people not to be conceited. Diogenes also used it for a similar purpose. Next consider what Middle Comedy was, and then what purpose New Comedy came to serve as it gradually turned into an elaborate art of imitation. Everyone knows that these poets also say some useful things. But what was the overall aim of this kind of poetry and playwriting?

7. It is perfectly clear that no situation in life is better suited to practicing philosophy than the one you are in now.

8. When a branch is cut away from the branch connected to it, it is necessarily cut away from the whole tree as well. In the same way, a person who separates himself from another person has fallen away from the whole community. Someone else cuts off a branch, but a person separates himself from his neighbor by hating and rejecting him. He does not realize that he has also cut himself off from the entire human commonwealth. Still, Zeus, who formed the community, has given us this gift: we can grow together again with the person next to us and once more become parts that help complete the whole. But if this kind of separation happens repeatedly, it makes the separated part hard to reunite and restore. In general, a branch that grew together with the tree from the beginning and remained joined to it in one living breath is not the same as one grafted back after it was cut off, whatever gardeners may say.

Grow from the same stock, but do not hold the same beliefs.

9. People who obstruct you while you proceed according to right reason cannot turn you away from sound action. In the same way, do not let them knock you out of your goodwill toward them. Be equally careful in both respects: keep your judgment and action steady, and remain gentle toward people who try to stop you or otherwise make things difficult. Getting angry with them is also a weakness, just as it is weak to abandon what you are doing and give in because you are frightened. Both people are deserters: the person who retreats and the person who alienates himself from someone who is by nature his relative and friend.

10. Nature is never less capable than a craft, since crafts imitate nature. If that is true, then the nature that is the most complete and includes all others cannot lack the resourcefulness found in craftsmanship. Every craft makes inferior things for the sake of superior ones, and universal Nature must do the same. This is the source of justice, and the other virtues are founded on justice. Justice cannot be maintained if we treat indifferent things as though some truly matter more than others, or if we are easily deceived, rush into judgments, and keep changing our minds.

11. The things that disturb you because you want them or want to avoid them are not coming after you. In a sense, you are the one going toward them. So let your judgment about them become quiet. They will remain still, and you will no longer appear to be chasing them or running away from them.

12. The soul is a sphere that keeps its own shape when it does not stretch outward toward anything or contract inward, when it is neither twisted nor collapsed, but shines with the light by which it sees the truth of everything and the truth within itself.

13. Will someone despise me? That is his concern. My concern is not to be found doing or saying anything deserving contempt. Will he hate me? That is his concern. I will stay kind and friendly toward everyone, including him, and be ready to point out his mistake—not as a reproach, and not to show off how tolerant I am, but sincerely and helpfully, like the famous Phocion, if he was not merely pretending. This is how a person must be inwardly, so that the gods see someone who resents nothing and treats nothing as a calamity. What harm is there for you if you are now doing what suits your own nature and accepting what is now timely for the nature of the universe, as a human being determined to become, in whatever way possible, a means to the common good?

14. People despise one another while trying to please one another, and while wanting to be superior to one another, they grovel before one another.

15. How false and corrupt it is to say, “I have decided to be straightforward with you.” What are you doing? You do not need to announce this. It will show by itself; it should be written on your face. Your voice should immediately sound that way, and it should immediately be visible in your eyes, just as a loved person instantly recognizes everything in a lover’s look. A straightforward and good person should simply be like a strong smell: anyone nearby notices it as soon as he comes close, whether he wants to or not. Deliberately performing simplicity is a concealed weapon. Nothing is more shameful than a wolf pretending friendship. Avoid that above all. A good, straightforward, kind person has these qualities in his eyes, and they are obvious.

16. The ability to live the best possible life is in the soul, if a person treats indifferent things as indifferent. He will do this if he examines each thing both in its separate parts and as a whole, and remembers that none of these things gives us a judgment about itself or comes at us. The things themselves stay still. We are the ones who produce judgments about them and, so to speak, write those judgments inside ourselves. We do not have to write them; and if one gets in without our noticing, we can erase it immediately. Remember that you will need to keep up this attention for only a short time, and then life will end. Besides, what is so difficult about these things? If they are in accord with nature, welcome them, and they will be easy for you. If they are contrary to nature, look for what accords with your own nature and pursue it, even if it wins no approval. Everyone is allowed to seek his own good.

17. Where each thing came from, what materials it is made from, what it changes into, what it will be after it changes, and how it will suffer no harm.

18. First, consider how I am related to them. We were born for one another, and from another point of view I was born to lead them, as a ram leads a flock or a bull a herd. But start from the highest premise: if reality is not atoms, then it is Nature governing the universe. If so, lower things exist for the sake of higher things, and higher things exist for one another.

Second, consider what they are like at the dinner table, in bed, and everywhere else. Above all, consider how the beliefs they hold force them to act, and how much arrogance they bring even to those actions.

Third, if what they do is right, you should not be annoyed. If it is not right, they clearly act unwillingly and without understanding. Every soul is unwillingly deprived of truth, just as it is unwillingly deprived of the ability to treat each person as he deserves. That is why people are upset when they hear themselves called unjust, ungrateful, greedy, or generally guilty of doing wrong to their neighbors.

Fourth, you also do many things wrong and are the same kind of person. Even if you avoid some wrong actions, you still have a character capable of them, although cowardice, concern for what people think, or some similar fault may keep you from committing the same wrongs.

Fifth, you do not even know for certain that they are doing wrong. Many things are done as part of a larger plan. In general, you must learn a great deal before you can make a reliable judgment about someone else’s action.

Sixth, when you are extremely angry or distressed, remember that human life lasts only an instant, and before long all of us will be laid out dead.

Seventh, their actions do not trouble us, because those actions are in their own ruling minds. Our judgments trouble us. So remove your judgment that the act is something terrible—choose to let it go—and your anger disappears. How can you remove it? By realizing that it brings no shame on you. If moral disgrace is not the only evil, then you will inevitably have to do many wrongs yourself and become a robber or any other kind of criminal.

Eighth, the anger and grief we feel over such things cause far more pain than the things we are angry and grieved about.

Ninth, kindness cannot be defeated, if it is sincere and not a smirk or an act. What can even the most offensive person do to you if you keep treating him kindly and, when the opportunity comes, advise him gently and calmly correct him at the very time he is trying to harm you? “No, child. We were made for something else. I will not be harmed; you are harming yourself, child.” Show him tactfully and from a broad perspective that this is true, and that not even bees behave this way, nor do any animals naturally meant to live together. But do not do this sarcastically or reproachfully. Do it with affection and without resentment in your soul, not as though you were giving a lecture or trying to impress a bystander, but as if you were speaking to him alone, even if other people are standing nearby.

Remember these nine points as gifts from the Muses, and while you are still alive, begin at last to be a human being. But you must avoid flattering people just as carefully as you avoid getting angry with them. Both responses reject fellowship and cause harm. When you are angry, keep this thought at hand: being furious is not manly. Gentleness and calm are more human and therefore more masculine. The gentle person, not the angry and dissatisfied one, has strength, toughness, and courage. The closer gentleness is to freedom from passion, the closer it is to power. Grief is a weakness, and so is anger: both the grieving and the angry have been wounded and have given in.

If you wish, take a tenth gift from the Leader of the Muses: it is insane to expect bad people not to do wrong, since that demands the impossible. But to allow them to wrong other people while expecting them not to wrong you is callous and tyrannical.

19. There are four movements of the ruling mind that you must watch for constantly and erase whenever you detect them. In each case, tell yourself: “This impression is unnecessary”; “This breaks apart our fellowship”; “What you are about to say does not come from your own mind.” Consider it utterly wrong to say something that does not come from yourself. The fourth movement, for which you reproach yourself, occurs when the more divine part within you is defeated and submits to the lower, mortal part—the body and its crude pleasures.

20. Everything in you made of air and fire, though naturally inclined to rise, obeys the order of the universe and is kept here in the body. And everything in you made of earth and water, though naturally inclined to sink, has been lifted up and remains in a position that is not natural to it. In this way the elements obey the universe: once put in place, they stay bound there by force until the universe gives the signal that allows them to separate again.

So is it not terrible that your reasoning part alone should disobey and be angry at the place assigned to it? Nothing unnatural is required of it, but only what suits its own nature. Yet it refuses and moves in the opposite direction. For every movement toward injustice, lack of self-control, anger, sorrow, or fear is simply a departure from nature. And whenever the ruling mind is displeased with something that happens, it too abandons its proper place. It was made for holiness and respect for the divine just as much as for justice. These qualities are also forms of living well with others; in fact, they come before acts of justice.

21. “Anyone who does not always have the same purpose in life cannot remain the same person through the whole of life.” But that statement is not enough unless you add what this purpose should be. People do not agree in their judgment about everything that most people regard as good; they agree only about certain kinds of good, that is, goods shared by all. In the same way, the purpose one adopts must be social and concerned with the community. A person who directs all his own impulses toward this purpose will make all his actions consistent and will therefore always remain the same.

22. Remember the country mouse and the house mouse, and the house mouse’s panic and running about.

23. Socrates called popular beliefs “Lamias,” things used to frighten children.

24. At public events, the Spartans gave visitors seats in the shade and sat wherever they happened to find a place.

25. Socrates explained why he would not visit Perdiccas: “So that I do not die the worst kind of death,” meaning that he might be treated well and be unable to repay the favor.

26. The Epicurean writings contained this instruction: keep reminding yourself of someone from earlier times who lived virtuously.

27. The Pythagoreans taught that we should look at the sky at daybreak, so that we remember the heavenly bodies that always perform their task in the same course and the same way, and remember their order, purity, and openness. Nothing covers a star.

28. Remember how Socrates looked wearing only a sheepskin after Xanthippe took his cloak and went out, and what he said to his friends when they saw him dressed that way, felt embarrassed, and withdrew.

29. In learning to write and read, you do not become a teacher before you have been taught. This is even more true of life.

30. You were born a slave; you have no part in rational speech.

31. And my heart laughed with joy.

32. They will criticize virtue and speak harshly of it.

33. It is madness to look for a fig in winter. The same is true of someone who looks for his child when the child is no longer given to him.

34. Epictetus said that when you kiss your child, you should tell yourself: “Perhaps tomorrow he will die.”

“That is an ominous thing to say.”

“There is nothing ominous,” he replied, “about referring to a natural event. Otherwise it would also be ominous to say that the grain will be harvested.”

35. An unripe grape, a ripe bunch, a raisin: each is a change, not into nonexistence, but into something that does not exist now.

36. No one can steal your faculty of choice. The saying is Epictetus’.

37. He said: “We need to develop skill in deciding what to accept as true. Where our impulses are concerned, we must stay attentive, so that they include a reservation, benefit others, and match what each situation deserves. We must completely avoid desire, and feel aversion toward nothing outside our control.”

38. He said: “What is at stake is not something trivial, but whether or not we are insane.”

39. Socrates said:

“What do you want—to have rational souls or irrational ones?”

“Rational ones.”

“What kind of rational souls—healthy or defective?”

“Healthy ones.”

“Then why are you not looking for them?”

“Because we already have them.”

“Then why do you fight and disagree with one another?”

1. You can already possess everything you pray to reach by a long route, if you do not deny it to yourself. To do that, leave the whole past behind, entrust the future to providence, and guide the present alone toward reverence and justice. Be reverent by loving what is assigned to you, because nature brought it to you and brought you to it. Be just by speaking the truth freely and plainly, and by acting according to law and according to what each person deserves. Do not let another person’s wrongdoing, an opinion, a spoken word, or even a sensation in the small body surrounding you get in your way; the part that suffers will take care of that. So whenever you are about to leave life, abandon everything else and honor only your governing mind and the divine element within you. Do not fear that you will someday stop living; fear instead that you may never have begun to live according to nature. Then you will be a person worthy of the world that gave you birth. You will stop being a foreigner in your own country, being amazed at daily events as if they were unexpected, and depending on one thing after another.

2. God sees every governing mind naked, without its material containers, coverings, and waste. With his intelligence alone, he makes contact only with what has flowed from himself and been directed into those minds. If you train yourself to do this too, you will remove much of your distraction. Anyone who does not look at the pieces of flesh around a person will certainly not waste time looking at clothes, a house, reputation, and all the other outward display and stage setting.

3. You are made of three things: a small body, a small breath of life, and a mind. The first two are yours only in the sense that you must take care of them. Only the third is fully your own. So separate from yourself—that is, from your thinking—everything other people do or say; everything you have done or said; everything in the future that disturbs you; everything involuntary that belongs to the body around you or to the breath joined with it from birth; and everything swept about by the whirl of events outside you. Let your power of thought be detached from all that fate has bound to it, so that it can live on its own, pure and free, doing what is right, wanting what happens, and telling the truth. Separate, I mean, from your governing mind everything attached to it by emotional dependence, as well as everything in time that is still to come or has already passed. Make yourself like Empedocles’ sphere,

perfectly round, delighting in the solitude around it,

and practice living only the life you are living now—the present. Then you will be able to live the time left before death without disturbance, with goodwill, and at peace with your own inner divinity.

4. I have often wondered why every person loves himself more than anyone else, yet values his own opinion of himself less than other people’s opinion. If a god appeared beside him, or a wise teacher told him not to think anything privately that he would not immediately say out loud, he could not bear it for even one day. This is how much more we care about what those around us will think of us than about what we think of ourselves.

5. How could the gods have arranged everything well and kindly toward humanity, yet overlooked this one thing: that some people who were thoroughly good, who had formed more bonds with the divine than most, and who had long become close to it through holy deeds and sacred rites, should die once and never exist again, but be completely extinguished? But if that really is what happens, be sure that if things needed to be different, the gods would have made them different. If it were just, it would also be possible; and if it were natural, nature would have produced it. Since it is not so, if in fact it is not, take that as proof that it did not need to be so. You can see that by pushing this question further, you are arguing a case against God. But we would not argue this way with the gods unless they were perfectly good and just. And if they are, they would not have let anything in the order of the world be unfairly and unreasonably neglected.

6. Practice even the things you have given up hope of doing. The left hand is clumsy at other tasks because it lacks practice, but it holds the reins more firmly than the right hand, because it is used to doing that.

7. What your body and soul should be like when death overtakes you;how short life is;how endless the eternity is behind you and ahead of you;how weak all matter is.

8. See causes without their coverings;see what actions are aiming at;what pain is;what pleasure is;what death is;what reputation is;how each person causes his own lack of peace;how no one is blocked by someone else;how everything depends on judgment.

9. When using your principles, be like an unarmed all-in fighter, not a swordsman. A swordsman puts down the sword he uses, and it can be taken away. The fighter always has his hand with him and only needs to make a fist.

10. Look at the things themselves, separating each into its material, its cause, and its purpose.

11. A human being has great power: to do only what God will approve, and to accept whatever God assigns him as the next event in nature.

12. Do not blame the gods, because they never do wrong, either deliberately or accidentally. Do not blame people, because they do wrong only without understanding. So blame no one.

13. Anyone who is surprised at anything that happens in life is absurd and out of place in the world.

14. There is either the necessity of fate and an unbreakable order, or a providence that can answer prayer, or an uncontrolled mixture of chance. If necessity is unbreakable, why fight it? If there is providence that can be appealed to, make yourself worthy of divine help. If there is only a mixture with nothing in command, be glad that in such a storm you have a governing mind within you. And if the storm sweeps you away, let it sweep away the small body, the small breath,

15. and everything else; it will not sweep away your mind. A lamp keeps shining until it goes out and does not lose its light beforehand. So will the truth, justice, and self-control within you go out before you do?

16. When someone makes you think he has done wrong, ask: How do I know that this is wrong? And even if he did wrong, how do I know that he has not condemned himself? In that case, he is like someone scratching his own face.

Wanting a bad person not to do wrong is like wanting a fig tree not to produce sap in its figs, babies not to cry, a horse not to neigh, and other unavoidable things not to happen. What else can a person with that kind of character do? So if you are capable, cure that character.

17. If an action is not right, do not take it. If a statement is not true, do not make it. Always aim to see exactly what is causing your impression, and analyze it by separating its cause, its material, what it relates to, and the time by which it will have ceased.

18. Realize that there is something in you stronger and more divine than the things that produce your emotions and pull your strings. What occupies my mind now? Is it fear? Suspicion? Desire? Something else like these?

19. First, do nothing aimlessly or without a purpose. Second, direct your actions only toward the social end.

20. Soon you will exist nowhere, and neither will anything you now see or anyone now living. Everything naturally changes, is transformed, and passes away, so that other things can come after it.

21. Everything depends on judgment, and that judgment is under your control. Remove it whenever you wish. Then it is like sailing around a headland into calm water: everything is stable, and the bay is free of waves.

22. A particular activity that stops at the right time is not harmed simply because it has stopped. The person who performed it is likewise not harmed simply because it ended. In the same way, the whole series of actions that makes up a life is not harmed if it ends at the right time, just because it ends. Nor is a person put in a bad condition by bringing that sequence to an end at the proper time.

Nature determines the proper time and limit. Sometimes a person’s own nature does so, as in old age, but the nature of the universe always does. As its parts change, the whole cosmos remains forever young and vigorous. Whatever serves the whole is always beautiful and timely. So the ending of life is not bad for anyone, since it is not shameful: it is not a matter of choice, and it is not against our common bond. It is good if it comes at the right time for the whole, serves the whole, and moves in harmony with it. In this way, the person who follows the same course as God and deliberately moves toward the same ends is also carried by God.

23. Keep three points ready in your mind. First, in what you do, act neither aimlessly nor in any way other than Justice herself would act. As for events that come from outside, they happen either by chance or by providence. You should neither blame chance nor accuse providence.

Second, consider what each thing is like from its seed until it is given life, and from the time it is given life until it gives its soul back. Consider what it is made from and what it breaks down into.

Third, if you were suddenly raised high above the earth and looked down at human life in all its variety, you would look on it with contempt when you also saw the vast numbers of beings inhabiting the air and the heavens around it. Every time you rose, you would see the same things: all of one kind and all short-lived. And these are what inspire pride.

24. Get rid of the judgment, and you are safe. What is stopping you from getting rid of it?

25. When something upsets you, you have forgotten that everything happens in accordance with the nature of the universe; that the mistake is someone else’s; and that everything which happens has always happened this way, will happen this way, and is now happening everywhere. You have forgotten how closely every human being is related to the entire human race—not through a small amount of blood or semen, but through a shared mind.

You have also forgotten that every person’s mind is divine and has flowed from that source; that nothing is anyone’s private possession, since your child, your body, and your soul itself have come from there; that everything is judgment; and that each person lives only in the present and loses only the present.

26. Keep remembering people who became extremely angry about something, and people who rose to prominence through great fame, disasters, feuds, or any kind of fortune. Then stop and ask: Where is all of that now? It is smoke and ash and a story—or not even a story.

Think also of examples like Fabius Catullinus at his country estate, Lusius Lupus in his gardens, Stertinius at Baiae, Tiberius on Capri, and Velius Rufus—in short, all the importance attached to moving to one place rather than another. See how cheap everything is that people struggle so hard to obtain, and how much more philosophical it is simply to use the material you have been given to make yourself just, self-controlled, and obedient to the gods. The pride that boasts of having no pride is the hardest pride of all to bear.

27. For those who ask, “Where have you seen the gods? How did you learn that they exist, so that you worship them?” First, they can in fact be seen. Besides, I have never seen my own soul, yet I respect it. It is the same with the gods: I continually experience what their power does, and from this I understand that they exist and revere them.

28. To preserve your life, see every thing fully for what it is: what its material is and what causes it. Do what is right with all your soul, and say what is true. What remains except to enjoy living by adding one good action to the next, without leaving even the shortest gap?

29. The sun’s light is one, although walls, mountains, and countless other things divide it. The substance shared by all things is one, although it is divided among countless bodies with their own particular qualities. Soul is one, although it is divided among countless living natures, each with its own boundaries. Rational soul is one, even though it seems to be separated.

The other components just mentioned—such as vital breaths and material foundations without sensation—are unrelated and foreign to one another. Even so, the force that unifies them and their tendency to move in the same directions hold them together. But a mind naturally reaches toward and joins with minds of its own kind, and its social feeling is not blocked by separation.

30. What are you trying to keep? Your continued existence? Does that mean sensation, impulse, growth, then stopping again, using your voice, and thinking? Which of these seems worth desiring? If each one is easy to disregard, move on to the final task: following reason and God. But you cannot do that consistently while valuing those other things and resenting the thought that death will take them away.

31. Think how small a part of infinite and immeasurable time is assigned to each person; it quickly disappears into eternity. Think how small a part of all substance and of the universal soul is yours, and on what a small clump of the whole earth you crawl. With all this in mind, consider nothing important except acting as your own nature directs and accepting what universal nature brings.

32. What use does your governing mind make of itself? Everything depends on that. Everything else, whether chosen or not chosen, is lifeless and smoke.

33. The strongest reason not to fear death is that even people who regarded pleasure as good and pain as bad still treated death with contempt.

34. If a person sees only what is fitting for the occasion as good, regards doing more actions in line with right reason as no better than doing fewer, and sees no difference between observing the world for a longer or a shorter time, then death is not frightening to that person either.

35. You are human, and you have been a citizen in this great city. What difference does it make to you whether it was for five years or fifty? What follows the laws is equal for everyone. So what is so terrible if the one sending you away from the city is not a tyrant or an unjust judge, but the nature that brought you into it? It is like a magistrate releasing from the stage the comic actor he had engaged.

“But I performed only three acts, not five.”

“That is fine. In life, three acts can be the whole play.”

The one who caused you to be put together then, and causes you to be dissolved now, decides what counts as complete. You are responsible for neither. So leave peacefully, since the one releasing you is peaceful too.