# Meditations  ## Metadata - Author: [[Marcus Aurelius]] - Full Title: Meditations - Category: #books - Summary: We are mortal bodies with a rational mind that must be kept calm and clear. Welcome fate, live simply and justly, and resist false desires and beliefs. Treat others as fellow rational beings and do your duty with humility and kindness. ## Highlights - When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own—not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kef7tesmq4svwhqrchypgjfe)) - 5. How to act: > Never under compulsion, out of selfishness, without forethought, with misgivings. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kef7vq34n24dnyqggjv88ds9)) - Let the spirit in you represent a man, an adult, a citizen, a Roman, a ruler. Taking up his post like a soldier and patiently awaiting his recall from life. Needing no oath or witness. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kef7w4bz4a0gky30vv3j2ez9)) - To stand up straight—not straightened. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kef7yggnka5daynt78d7ks6z)) - 19. People who are excited by posthumous fame forget that the people who remember them will soon die too. And those after them in turn. Until their memory, passed from one to another like a candle flame, gutters and goes out. But suppose that those who remembered you were immortal and your memory undying. What good would it do you? And I don’t just mean when you’re dead, but in your own lifetime. What use is praise, except to make your lifestyle a little more comfortable? “ You’re out of step—neglecting the gifts of nature to hand on someone’s words in the future. “ ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kef8075m7tmmjb23qfa4m73n)) - 20. Beautiful things of any kind are beautiful in themselves and sufficient to themselves. Praise is extraneous. The object of praise remains what it was—no better and no worse. This applies, I think, even to “beautiful” things in ordinary life—physical objects, artworks. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kef8c4eesmhdfv1s63s86a9x)) - Does anything genuinely beautiful need supplementing? No more than justice does—or truth, or kindness, or humility. Are any of those improved by being praised? Or damaged by contempt? Is an emerald suddenly flawed if no one admires it? Or gold, or ivory, or purple? Lyres? Knives? Flowers? Bushes? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kef8ccscjz70wc6zh9dhzrr8)) - 22. Not to be driven this way and that, but always to behave with justice and see things as they are. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kef8fty9xvthf377cy4nqbbf)) - 1. Evil: the same old thing. No matter what happens, keep this in mind: It’s the same old thing, from one end of the world to the other. It fills the history books, ancient and modern, and the cities, and the houses too. Nothing new at all. Familiar, transient. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kef834hag2xtg1cgxgj652c3)) - speak the truth as you see it. But with kindness. With humility. Without hypocrisy. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kef8e38vxqmwrybrzpxg8azb)) - 9. Don’t be overheard complaining about life at court. Not even to yourself. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kef84ha6ak8f1hredahcx8en)) - 26. Joy for humans lies in human actions. Human actions: kindness to others, contempt for the senses, the interrogation of appearances, observation of nature and of events in nature. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kef8ejgx9bx7g1fsrhqbqhrj)) - 6. Objective judgment, now, at this very moment. > Unselfish action, now, at this very moment. > Willing acceptance—now, at this very moment—of all external events. > That’s all you need. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kef85crpgytqnwwsajazjff5)) - 30. To see them from above: the thousands of animal herds, the rituals, the voyages on calm or stormy seas, the different ways we come into the world, share it with one another, and leave it. Consider the lives led once by others, long ago, the lives to be led by others after you, the lives led even now, in foreign lands. How many people don’t even know your name. How many will soon have forgotten it. How many offer you praise now—and tomorrow, perhaps, contempt. That to be remembered is worthless. Like fame. Like everything. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kef86gfxqj1f4vmyj3wae2nc)) - A hundred years or three. . . . No difference. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kef8780xdyxmqm6r0dganef9)) - He pours food down his throat. And then a force not his takes it and creates sensations, desires, daily life, physical strength and so much else besides. To look at these things going on silently and see the force that drives them. As we see the force that pushes things and pulls them. Not with our eyes, but just as clearly. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kef88mm7dmqzjecepq8mdgm9))