The Best Quotes from Marcus Aurelius’s “Meditations”

When he was Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius kept a journal. He didn’t intend for it to be published, but it was later discovered and published as a book called Meditations.

That little book has now been read by thousands of people and has become one of the three foundational texts of Stoic philosophy (alongside Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic and Epictetus’s Discourses & Enchiridion).

Here are my favorite quotes from Marcus’s journal of Stoic wisdom…

Self-Discipline

• “Be tolerant with others and strict with yourself.”
• “Ambition is tying your well-being to what other people do and say. Sanity is tying it to your own actions.”
• “Those obsessed with glory attach their well-being to the regard of others, those who love pleasure tie it to feelings, but the one with true understanding seeks it only in their own actions.”
• “If anyone can prove and show to me that I think and act in error, I will gladly change it—for I seek the truth, by which no one has ever been harmed. The one who is harmed is the one who abides in deceit and ignorance.”
• “I’m constantly amazed by how easily we love ourselves above all others, yet we put more stock in the opinions of others than in our own estimation of self...How much credence we give to the opinions our peers have of us and how little to our very own.”

Equanimity

• “Never let the future disturb you.”
• “If you seek tranquility, do less.”
• “Sanity is tying happiness to your own actions.”
• “Our life is dyed by the color of our thoughts.”
• “The nearer a man comes to a calm mind, the closer he is to strength.”
• “You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life?”
• “For nowhere can you find a more peaceful and less busy retreat than in your own soul. Treat yourself often to this retreat and be renewed.”
• “The tranquility that comes when you stop caring what they say. Or think, or do. Only what you do. (Is this fair? Is this the right thing to do?)”
• “Do less, better. Because most of what we say and do is not essential. If you can eliminate it, you’ll have more time, and more tranquility. Ask yourself at every moment, ‘Is this necessary?’”
• “Your mind will take the shape of what you frequently hold in thought, for the human spirit is colored by such impressions.”

Overcoming Difficulty

• “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”
• “A blazing fire makes flame and brightness out of everything that is thrown into it.”
• “Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been.”
• “Not to assume it’s impossible because you find it hard. But to recognize that if it’s humanly possible, you can do it too.”
• “What if someone despises me? Let them see to it. But I will see to it that I won’t be found doing or saying anything contemptible. What if someone hates me? Let them see to that. But I will see to it that I’m kind and good-natured to all, and prepared to show even the hater where they went wrong. Not in a critical way, or to show off my patience, but genuinely and usefully.”
• “If you find something very difficult to achieve yourself, don’t imagine it impossible—for anything possible and proper for another person can be achieved as easily by you.”

Justice

• “Just that you do the right thing. The rest doesn’t matter.”
• “Often injustice lies in what you aren’t doing, not only in what you are doing.”
• “Imagine that you have died. Now take what’s left of your life and live it properly.”