Quotes from Marcus Aurelius

I am an old man and have had many worries, but most have never come to pass.

All men are made one for another: Either then teach them better or bear with them.

Soon you'll be ashes, or bones. A mere name, at most—and even that is just a sound, an echo. The things we want in life are empty, stale, and trivial. Dogs snarling at each other. Quarreling children—laughing and then bursting into tears a moment later. Trust, shame, justice, truth—"gone from the earth and only found in heaven." Why are you still here? Sensory objects are shifting and unstable; our senses dim and easily deceived

Just as the sand-dunes, heaped one upon another, hide each the first, so in life the former deeds are quickly hidden by those that follow after.

He is poor, who has need of another, and has not from himself all things that are useful for life.

This day I did come out of all my trouble. Nay I have cast out all my trouble; it should rather be for that which troubled thee, whatsoever it was, was not without anywhere that thou shouldest come out of it, but within in thine own opinions, from whence it must be cast out, before thou canst truly and constantly be at ease.

Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see.

He blind, who cannot see with the eyes of his understanding.

Time is like a river made up of the events which happen, and a violent stream; for as soon as a thing has been seen, it is carried away, and another comes in its place, and this will be carried away too.

How quickly all things disappear, in the universe the bodies themselves, but in time the remembrance of them;

Let it be your constant method to look into the design of people's actions, and see what they would be at, as often as it is practicable and to make this custom the more significant, practice it first upon yourself.

How very near us stand the two vast gulfs of time, the past and the future, in which all things disappear.