# Meditations (Readwise) ## Metadata - Author: [[Marcus Aurelius]] - Full Title: Meditations - Category: #source/books ## Highlights - 2.1 When you 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. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions. (Page 17) - 2.2 Stop allowing your mind to be a slave, to be jerked about by selfish impulses, to kick against fate and the present, and to mistrust the future. (Page 17) - 2.4 There is a limit to the time assigned you, and if you don't use it to free yourself it will be gone and will never return. (Page 18) - 2.5 If you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable. You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life (Page 18) - 2.6 Yes, keep degrading yourself, soul (Page 18) - 2.6 Instead of treating yourself with respect, you have entrusted your own happiness to the souls of others. (Page 19) - 2.7 Do external things distract you? Then make time for yourself to learn something worthwhile; stop letting yourself be pulled in all directions. But make sure you guard against the other kind of confusion. People who labor all their lives but have no purpose to direct every thought and impulse toward are wasting their timeeven when hard at work. (Page 19) - 2.11 You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think. (Page 20) - 2.16 To be disgruntled at anything that happens is a kind of secession from Nature, which comprises the nature of all things. (Page 22) - 2.17 Nothing natural is evil (Page 23) - 3.4 Don't waste the rest of your time here worrying about other people unless it affects the common good. It will keep you from doing anything useful. You'll be too preoccupied with what soand so is doing, and why, and what they're saying, and what they're thinking, and what they're up to, and all the other things that throw you off and keep you from focusing on your own mind. (Page 28) - 3.6 If, at some point in your life, you should come across anything better than justice, honesty, self-control, courage-than a mind satisfied that it has succeeded in enabling you to act rationally, and satisfied to accept what's beyond its control-if you find anything better than that, embrace it without reservationsit must be an extraordinary thing indeed-and enjoy it to the full. (Page 30) - 3.9 Your ability to control your thoughts-treat it with respect. It's all that protects your mind from false perceptions-false to your nature, and that of all rational beings. It's what makes thoughtfulness possible, and affection for other people, and submission to the divine. (Page 32) - 4.7 Choose not to be harmed-and you won't feel harmed. Don't feel harmed-and you haven't been. (Page 39) - 5.11 What am I doing with my soul? (Page 58) - 5.16 The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts. (Page 59) - 5.19 Things have no hold on the soul. They have no access to it, cannot move or direct it. It is moved and directed by itself alone. It takes the things before it and interprets them as it sees fit. (Page 60) - 5.20 Our actions may be impeded by them, but there can be no impeding our intentions or our dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting. (Page 60) - 5.20 The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. (Page 60) - 5.25 So other people hurt me? That's their problem. Their character and actions are not mine. What is done to me is ordained by nature, what I do by my own. (Page 61) - 5.33 …be tolerant with others and strict with yourself. Remember, nothing belongs to you but your flesh and blood and nothing else is under your control (Page 64) - 5.37 I was once a fortunate man but at some point fortune abandoned me. But true good fortune is what you make for yourself. Good fortune: good character, good intentions, and good actions. (Page 65) - 6.16 And if you can't stop prizing a lot of other things? Then you'll never be free – free, independent, imperturbable. (Page 72) - 6.19 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. (Page 73) - 6.47 The only thing that isn't worthless: to live this life out truthfully and rightly. And be patient with those who don't. (Page 80) - 6.52 You don't have to turn this into something. It doesn't have to upset you. Things can't shape our decisions by themselves. (Page 81) - 6.53 Practice really hearing what people say. Do your best to get inside their minds. (Page 81) - 6.59 The people they want to ingratiate themselves with, and the results, and the things they do in the process. How quickly it will all be erased by time. How much has been erased already. (Page 82) - 7.4 Focus on what is said when you speak and on what results from each action. Know what the one aims at, and what the other means. (Page 85) - 7.6 So many who were remembered already forgotten, and those who remembered them long gone. (Page 86) - 7.18 Frightened of change? But what can exist without it? (Page 88) - 7.22 To feel affection for people even when they make mistakes is uniquely human. You can do it, if you simply recognize: that they're human too, that they act out of ignorance, against their will, and that you'll both be dead before long. And, above all, that they haven't really hurt you. They haven't diminished your ability to choose (Page 88) - 7.26 When people injure you, ask yourself what good or harm they thought would come of it. If you understand that, you'll feel sympathy rather than outrage or anger. Your sense of good and evil may be the same as theirs, or near it, in which case you have to excuse them. Or your sense of good and evil may differ from theirs. In which case they're misguided and deserve your compassion. Is that so hard? (Page 89) - 7.27 Treat what you don't have as nonexistent. Look at what you have, the things you value most, and think of how much you'd crave them if you didn't have them. But be careful. Don't feel such satisfaction that you start to overvalue them – that it would upset you to lose them. (Page 89) - Note: Overlap with 6.16. To want nothing is to have everything. - 7.38 “And why should we feel anger at the world? As if the world would notice!" (Page 91) - 7.49 …observing life for forty years is as good as a thousand. Would you really see anything new? (Page 93) - Note: Human nature is a constant - 7.54 Everywhere, at each moment, you have the option: • to accept this event with humility • to treat this person as he should be treated • to approach this thought with care, so that nothing irrational creeps in. (Page 93) - 7.57 To love only what happens, what was destined. No greater harmony. (Page 94) - Note: Amor Fati - 7.62 Look at who they really are, the people whose approval you long for, and what their minds are really like. Then you won't blame the ones who make mistakes they can't help, and you won't feel a need for their approval. You will have seen the sources of both – their judgments and their actions. (Page 95) - 7.67 It's quite possible to be a good man without anyone realizing it. Remember that. And this too: you don't need much to live happily. And just because you've abandoned your hopes of becoming a great thinker or scientist, don't give up on attaining freedom, achieving humility, serving others, obeying God. (Page 96) - Note: Success in life is much simpler than we convince (maybe even lie to) ourselves. - 7.68 …treat whatever happens as wholly natural; not novel or hard to deal with, but familiar and easily handled. (Page 97) - Note: See 5.20; the obstacle is the way - 7.73 You've given aid and they've received it. And yet, like an idiot, you keep holding out for more: to be credited with a Good Deed, to be repaid in kind. Why? (Page 97) - 8.15 Remember: you shouldn't be surprised that a fig tree produces figs, nor the world what it produces. (Page 104) - 8.22a You could be good today. But instead you choose tomorrow. (Page 105) - Tags: [[favorite]] - 8.33 To accept it without arrogance, to let it go with indifference (Page 107) - Tags: [[favorite]] - 8.47 External things are not the problem. It's your assessment of them. Which you can erase right now. If the problem is something in your own character, who's stopping you from setting your mind straight? And if it's that you're not doing something you think you should be, why not just do it? (Page 110) - 8.48 The mind without passions is a fortress. No place is more secure. Once we take refuge there we are safe forever. Not to see this is ignorance. To see it and not seek safety means misery. (Page 111) - Note: Inner citadel - 8.51 A man standing by a spring of clear, sweet water and cursing it. While the fresh water keeps on bubbling up. He can shovel mud into it, or dung, and the stream will carry it away, wash itself clean, remain unstained. To have that. Not a cistern but a perpetual spring. How? By working to win your freedom. Hour by hour. Through patience, honesty, humility. (Page 112) - 8.52 …what are we to make of anyone who cares about the applause of such people, who don't know where or who they are? (Page 112) - 8.53 You want praise from people who kick themselves every fifteen minutes, the approval of people who despise themselves. (Is it a sign of self-respect to regret nearly everything you do?) (Page 112) - 8.55 The existence of evil does not harm the world. And an individual act of evil does not harm the victim. Only one person is harmed by it – and he can stop being harmed as soon as he decides to. (Page 113) - 8.56 Other people's wills are as independent of mine as their breath and bodies. We may exist for the sake of one another, but our will rules its own domain. Otherwise the harm they do would cause harm to me. Which is not what God intended-for my happiness to rest with someone else. (Page 113) - 9.6 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. (Page 119) - Note: Concise summary of Stoicism - 9.13 Today I escaped from anxiety. Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions – not outside. (Page 121) - Note: I control everything within me - 9.39 Say to your mind: Are you dead? damaged? brutal? dishonest? Are you one of the herd? or grazing like one? (Page 126) - 10.3 Everything that happens is either endurable or not. If it's endurable, then endure it. Stop complaining. If it's unendurable... then stop complaining. Your destruction will mean its end as well. Just remember: you can endure anything your mind can make endurable, by treating it as in your interest to do so. In your interest, or in your nature. (Page 132) - 10.4 If they've made a mistake, correct them gently and show them where they went wrong. If you can't do that, then the blame lies with you. Or no one. (Page 132) - Note: It is your responsibility, 5.20 - 10.14 Nature gives and nature takes away. Anyone with sense and humility will tell her, "Give and take as you please," not out of defiance, but out of obedience and goodwill. (Page 136) - 10.16 To stop talking about what the good man is like, and just be one. (Page 137) - Tags: [[favorite]] - 10.27 To bear in mind constantly that all of this has happened before. And will happen again – the same plot from beginning to end, the identical staging. All just the same. Only the people different. (Page 139) - Tags: [[favorite]] - Note: Yet we’re willfully ignorant. History repeats itself. - 10.29 Stop whatever you're doing for a moment and ask yourself: Am I afraid of death because I won't be able to do THIS anymore? (Page 139) - Tags: [[favorite]] - 10.31 (Lists names of dead famous people…) Then let it hit you: Where are they now? And Nowhere... or wherever. That way you'll see human life for what it is. Smoke. Nothing. Especially when you recall that once things alter they cease to exist through all the endless years to come. Then why such turmoil? To live your brief life rightly, isn't that enough? The raw material you're missing, the opportunities...! What is any of this but training-training for your logos, in life observed accurately, scientifically. So keep at it, until it's fully digested. As a strong stomach digests whatever it eats. As a blazing fire takes whatever you throw on it, and makes it light and flame. (Page 140) - Note: Momento Mori - 10.36 It doesn't matter how good a life you've led. There'll still be people standing around the bed who will welcome the sad event… How many traits do you have that would make a lot of people glad to be rid of you? (Page 142) - 10.37 Learn to ask of all actions, "Why are they doing that?" Starting with your own. (Page 143) - 11.7 It stares you in the face. No role is so well suited to philosophy as the one you happen to be in right now (Page 149) - Note: Philosophy is practical application; daily; for life; for a lifetime - 11.13 Someone despises me. That's their problem. Mine: not to do or say anything despicable. Someone hates me. Their problem. Mine: to be patient and cheerful with everyone, including them. Ready to show them their mistake. Not spitefully, or to show off my own self-control, but in an honest, upright way. Like Phocion (if he wasn't just pretending). That's what we should be like inside, and never let the gods catch us feeling anger or resentment. As long as you do what's proper to your nature, and accept what the world's nature has in store-as long as you work for others' good, by any and all means-what is there that can harm you? (Page 151) - 11.16. To live a good life: We have the potential for it. If we can learn to be indifferent to what makes no difference. This is how we learn: by looking at each thing, both the parts and the whole. Keeping in mind that none of them can dictate how we perceive it. They don't impose themselves on us. They hover before us, unmoving. It is we who generate the judgments-inscribing them on ourselves. And we don't have to. (Page 151) - Note: Indifference is the path to happiness. Don’t lose the forest for the trees. - 12.4 …we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own. (Page 162) - 12.27 And how trivial the things we want so passionately are. 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