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Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.
Marcus Aurelius -
To change your mind and to follow him who sets you right is to be nonetheless the free agent that you were before.
Marcus Aurelius
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Nature which governs the whole will soon change all things which thou seest, and out of there substance will make other things, and again other things from the substance of them, in order that the world may ever be new.
Marcus Aurelius -
What is divine is full of Providence. Even chance is not divorced from nature, from the inweaving and enfolding of things governed by Providence. Everything proceeds from it. (Hays translation)
Marcus Aurelius -
Where any work can be done conformably to the reason which is common to gods and men, there we have nothing to fear; for where we are able to get profit by means of the activity which is successful and proceeds according to our constitution, there no harm is to be suspected.
Marcus Aurelius -
What means all this?
Marcus Aurelius -
Be thou erect, or be made erect.
Marcus Aurelius -
The things... which are proper to the understanding no other man is used to impede, for neither fire, nor iron, nor tyrant, nor abuse, touches it in any way. When it has been made a sphere, it continues a sphere.
Marcus Aurelius
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Yes, you can-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. (Hays translation)
Marcus Aurelius -
Respect the faculty that forms thy judgments.
Marcus Aurelius -
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?) (Hays translation)
Marcus Aurelius -
Constantly contemplate the whole of time and the whole of substance, and consider that all individual things as to substance are a grain of a fig, and as to time the turning of a gimlet.
Marcus Aurelius -
Think not disdainfully of death, but look on it with favor; for even death is one of the things that Nature wills.
Marcus Aurelius -
Whatever this is that I am, it is flesh and a little spirit and an intelligence. (Hays translation)
Marcus Aurelius
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The longest-lived and the shortest-lived man, when they come to die, lose one and the same thing.
Marcus Aurelius -
Look to the essence of a thing, whether it be a point of doctrine, of practice, or of interpretation.
Marcus Aurelius -
If...it be a thing external that causes thy grief, know, that it is not that properly that doth cause it, but thine own conceit and opinion concerning the thing: which thou mayest rid thyself of, when thou wilt.
Marcus Aurelius -
The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.
Marcus Aurelius -
To a rational being it is the same thing to act according to nature and according to reason.
Marcus Aurelius -
Reverence the gods, and help men. Short is life.
Marcus Aurelius
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Yet living and dying, honour and dishonour, pain and pleasure, riches and poverty, and so forth are equally the lot of good men and bad. Things like these neither elevate nor degrade; and therefore they are no more good than they are evil.
Marcus Aurelius -
The intelligence of the universe is social.
Marcus Aurelius -
At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: ‘I have to go to work – as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for – the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?’ (Hays translation)
Marcus Aurelius -
Adorn thyself with simplicity and with indifference towards the things which lie between virtue and vice. Love mankind. Follow God. The poet says that Law rules all. And it is enough to remember that law rules all.
Marcus Aurelius