1,166 Quotes by Marcus Aurelius

Give your heart to the trade you have learnt, and draw refreshment from it. Let the rest of your days be spent as one who has whole-heartedly committed his all to the gods and is thenceforth no man’s master or slave.

If unwilling to rise in the morning, say to thyself, ‘I awake to do the work of a man.’

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

In man’s life, time is but a moment; being, a flux; sense is dim; the material frame corruptible; soul, an eddy of breath; fortune a thing inscrutable, and fame precarious.

It’s silly to try to escape other people’s faults. They are inescapable. Just try to escape your own.

We are born for cooperation.

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

It is not the body, nor the personality that is the true self. The true self is eternal. Even on the point of death we can say to ourselves, “my true self is free. I cannot be contained.”

Do not expect Plato’s ideal republic; be satisfied with even the smallest step forward, and consider this no small achievement.