Just as the nature of rational things has given to each person their rational powers, so it also gives us this power – Just as nature turns to its own purpose any obstacle or any opposition, sets its place in the destined order, and co-ops it, so every rational person can convert any obstacle into the raw material for their own purpose.
Indeed, if you find anything in human life better than justice, truth, self-control, courage – in shrot, anything better than the sufficiency of your own mind, which keeps you acting according to the demands of true reason and accepting what fate gives you outside of your own power of choice – I tell you, if you can see anything better than this, turn to it heart and soul and take full advantage of this greater good you’ve found.
Ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say or do.
Self-indulgence means tying it to the things that happen to you.
Sanity means tying it to your own actions.~ Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
In the morning, when you rise unwillingly, let this thought be present: I am rising to the work of a human being.
~ Marcus Aurelius
Begin the morning by saying to yourself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. … I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him.
~ Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, II.1
Today I escaped from the crush of circumstances, or better put, I threw them out, for the crush wasn’t from outside me but in my own assumptions.
~ Marcus Aurelius
Death smiles at us all. All a man can do is smile back.
Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.
A man must stand erect, not be kept erect by others.