Not to dress up just to stroll around the house, or things like that. To write straightforward letters. And to behave in a conciliatory way when people who have angered or annoyed us want to make up.
To read attentively — not to be satisfied with “just getting the gist of it.” And not to fall for every smooth talker.
And to have learned how to accept favors from friends without losing your self-respect or appearing ungrateful.
An example of fatherly authority in the home. And what it means to live as nature requires.
Gravity without airs.
To show intuitive sympathy for friends, tolerance to amateurs and sloppy thinkers. His ability to get along with everyone: sharing his company was the highest of compliments, and the opportunity and honor for those around him.
Not to display anger or other emotions. To be free of passion and yet full of love.
To praise without bombast; to display expertise without pretension.
Not to be constantly correcting people, and in particular not to jump on them whenever they make an error of usage or a grammatical mistake or mispronounce something, but just answer their question or add another example, or debate the issue itself (not their phrasing), or make some other contribution to the discussion — and insert the right expression, unobtrusively.
Not to be constantly telling people that I’m too busy, unless I really am. Similarly, not to be always ducking my responsibilities to the people around me because of “pressing business.”
Not to shrug off a friend’s resentment — even unjustified resentment — but try to put things right.
To show your teachers ungrudging respect, and your children unfeigned love.
Optimism in adversity — especially in illness.
Do your job without whining.
The way he handled the material comforts that fortune had supplied him in such abundance — without arrogance and without apology. If they were there, he took advantage of them. If not, he didn’t miss them.
The way he could have one of his migraines and then go right back to what he was doing — fresh and at the top of his game.
That he had so few secrets — only state secrets, in fact, and not all that many of those.
He never exhibited rudeness, lost control of himself, or turned violent. No one ever saw him sweat. Everything was to be approached logically and with due consideration, in a calm and orderly fashion but decisively, and with no loose ends.
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.
Remember how long you’ve been putting this off, how many extensions the gods gave you, and you didn’t use them. At some point you have to recognize what world it is that you belong to; what power rules it and from what source you spring; that 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.
Concentrate every minute like a Roman — like a man — on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions. Yes, you can — if you do everything as if it were the las thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what you 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? If you can manage this, that’s all even the gods can ask of you.
The angry man seems to turn his back on reason out of a kind of pain and inner convulsion. But the man motivated by desire, who is mastered by pleasure, seems somehow more self-indulgent, less manly in his sins. The sin committed out of pleasure deserves a harsher rebuke than the one committed out of pain. The angry man is more like a victim of wrongdoing, provoked by pain to anger. The other man rushes into wrongdoing on his own, moved to action by desire.
Even if you’re going to live three thousand more years, or ten times that, remember: you cannot lose another life than the one you’re living now, or live another one than the one you’re losing. The longest amounts to the same as the shortest. The present is the same for everyone; its loss is the same for everyone; and it should clear that a brief instant is all that is lost. For you can’t lose either the past or the future, how can you lose what you don’t have?
Remember two things:
i. that everything has always been the same, and keeps recurring, and it makes no difference whether you see the same things recur in a hundred years or two hundred, or in an infinite period.
ii. that the longest-lived and those who will die soonest lose the same thing. The present is all that they can give up, since that is all you have, and what you do not have, you cannot lose.
Human life.
Duration: momentary. Nature: changeable. Perception: dim. Condition of Body: decaying. Soul: spinning around. Fortune: unpredictable. Lasting Fame: uncertain. Sum Up: The body and its parts are a river, the soul a dream and mist, life is warfare and a journey far from home, lasting reputation is oblivion.
Nothing natural is evil.
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 so-and-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.
You need to avoid certain things in your train of thought: everything random, everything irrelevant. And certainly everything self-important or malicious. You need to get used to winnowing your thoughts, so that if someone says, “What are you thinking about?” you can respond at once (and truthfully) that you are thinking this or thinking that. And it would be obvious at once from your answer that your thoughts were straightforward and considerate ones — the thoughts of an unselfish person, one unconcerned with pleasure and with sensual indulgence generally, with squabbling, with slander and envy, or anything else you’d be ashamed to be caught thinking.
We should listen only to those whose lives conform to nature. And the others? He bears in mind what sort of people they are — both at home and abroad, by night as well as day — and who they spend their time with. And he cares nothing for their praise — men who can’t even meet their own standards.
It would be wrong for anything to stand between you and attaining goodness — as a rational being and a citizen. Anything at all: the applause of the crowd, high office, wealth, or self-indulgence. All of them might seem to be compatible with it — for a while. But suddenly they control us and sweep us away.
So make your choice straightforwardly, once and for all, and stick to it. Choose what’s best.
Best is what benefits me.
Never regard something as doing you good if it makes you betray a trust, or lose your sense of shame, or makes you show hatred, suspicion, ill will, or hypocrisy, or a desire for things best done behind closed doors.
Above all, you’ll be free of fear and desire.
Forget everything else. Keep hold of this alone and remember: Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see.
Doctors keep their scalpels and other instruments handy, for emergencies. Keep your philosophy ready too — ready to understand heaven and earth.
Sensations: the body.
Desires: the soul.
Reasoning: the mind.
No random actions, none not based on underlying principles.
People try to get away from it all — to the country, to the beach, to the mountains. You always wish that you could too. Which is idiotic: you can get away from it anytime you like.
By going within.
Nowhere you can go is more peaceful — more free of interruptions — than your own soul.
That sort of person is bound to do that. You might as well resent a fig tree for secreting juice.
Choose not to be harmed — and you won’t feel harmed.
It can ruin your life only if it ruins your character. Otherwise it cannot harm you — inside and out.
People who are excited by posthumous fame forget that the people who remember them will soon die too.
If you seek tranquility, do less. Or more accurately, do what’s essential. Which brings a double satisfaction: to 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.
And then you might see what the life of the good man is like — someone content with what nature assigns him, and satisfied with being just and kind himself.
Alien: one who doesn’t know what the world contains. Or how it operates.
Fugitive: one who evades his obligations to others.
Blind: one who keeps the eyes of his mind shut tight.
Poor: requiring others; not having the necessities of life in one’s own possession.
Rebel: one who is rebellious, one who withdraws from the logos of Nature because he resents its working.
Love the discipline you know, and let it support you.
Words once in common use now sound archaic. And the names of the famous dead as well.
Everything fades so quickly, turns into legend, and soon oblivion covers it.
What is “eternal” fame? Emptiness.
Then what should we work for?
Only this: proper understanding; unselfish action; truthful speech. A resolve to accept whatever happens as necessary and familiar, flowing like water from that same source and spring.
It’s unfortunate that this has happened.
No. It’s fortunate that this has happened and I’ve remained unharmed by it — not shattered by the present or frightened of the future. It could have happened to anyone. But not everyone could have remained unharmed by it.
But it’s nicer here…
So you were born to feel “nice”? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands?
Don’t you see how much you have to offer — beyond excuses like “can’t”? And yet you still settle for less.
Because the whole is damaged if you cut away anything — anything at all — from its continuity and its coherence. Not only its parts, but its purposes. And that’s what you’re doing when you complain: hacking and destroying.
The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts.
It is crazy to want what is impossible.
In a sense, people are our proper occupation. Our job is to do them good and put up with them. But when they obstruct our proper tasks, they become irrelevant to us — like sun, wind, animals.
Remember:
Matter. How tiny your share of it.
Time. How brief and fleeting your allotment of it.
Fate. How small a role you play in it.
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.
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.
Just that you do the right thing. The rest doesn’t matter.
The best revenge is not to be like that.
Pride is a master of deception: when you think you’re occupied in the weightiest business, that’s when he has you in his spell.
So we throw out other people’s recognition. What’s left for us to prize?
I think it’s this: to do (and not do) what we were designed for. That’s the goal of all trades, all arts, and what each of them aims at: that the thing they create should do what it was designed to do.
Not to assume it’s impossible because you find it hard.
Thieves, perverts, parricides, dictators: the kind of pleasures they enjoy.
If you’ve seen the present then you’ve seen everything — as it’s been since the beginning, as it will be forever. The same substance, the same form. All of it.
You take things you don’t control and define them as “good” or “bad.” And of course when the “bad” things happen, or the “good” ones don’t, you blame the gods and feel hatred for the people responsible — or those you decide to make responsible. Much of our bad behavior stems from trying to apply those criteria. If we limited “good” and “bad” to our own actions, we’d have no call to challenge God, or to treat other people as enemies.
Ambition means tying your well-being to what other say or do.
Self-indulgence means tying it to the things that happen to you.
Sanity means tying it to your own actions.
Practice really hearing what people say. Do your best to get inside their minds.
Frightened of change? But what can exist without it? What’s closer to nature’s heart? Can you take a hot bath and leave the firewood as it was? Eat food without transforming it? Can any vital process take place without something being changed?
My only fear is doing something contrary to human nature — the wrong thing, the wrong way, or at the wrong time.
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.
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?
Treat what you don’t have as nonexistent. Look at what you have, the things you value the 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.
Self-contraction: the mind’s requirements are satisfied by doing what we should, and by the calm it brings us.
And why should we feel anger at the world? As if the world would notice!
Then the only proper response for me to make is this: “You are much mistaken, my friend, if you think that any man worth his salt cares about the risk of death and doesn’t concentrate on this alone: whether he’s doing is right or wrong, and his behavior a good man’s or a bad one’s.”
Look at the past — empire succeeding empire — and from that, extrapolate the future: the same thing. No escape from the rhythm of events.
Which is why observing life for forty years is as good as a thousand. Would you really see anything new?
A better wrestler. But not a better citizen, a better person, a better resource in tight places, a better forgiver of faults.
Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what’s left and live it properly.
Alexander and Caesar and Pompey. Compared with Diogenes, Heraclitus, Socrates? The philosophers knew the what, the why, the how. Their minds were their own.
The others? Nothing but anxiety and enslavement.
The first step: Don’t be anxious. Nature controls it all. And before long you’ll be no one, nowhere — like Hadrian, like Augustus.
The second step: Concentrate on what you have to do. Fix your eyes on it. Remind yourself that your task is to be a good human being; remind yourself what nature demands of people. Then do it, without hesitation, and speak the truth as you see it. But with kindness. With humility. Without hypocrisy.
Don’t be overheard complaining about life at court. Not even to yourself.
Remorse is annoyance at yourself for having passed up something that’s to your benefit. But if it’s to your benefit it must be good — something a truly good person would be concerned about.
But no truly good person would feel remorse at passing up pleasure.
So it cannot be to your benefit, or good.
A good doctor isn’t surprised when his patients have fevers, or a helmsman when the wind blows against him.
This is what you deserve. You could be good today. But instead you choose tomorrow.
You have to assemble your life yourself — action by action. And be satisfied if each one achieves its goal, as far as it can.
The stench of decay. Rotting meat in a bag.
Looking at it clearly. If you can.
No carelessness in your actions. No confusion in your words. No imprecision in your thoughts. No retreating into your own soul, or trying to escape it. No overactivity.
How? By working to win your freedom. Hour by hour. Through patience, honesty, humility.
You want praise from people who kick themselves every fifteen minutes, the approval of people who despise themselves.
What doesn’t transmit light creates its own darkness.
Fear of death is fear of what we may experience. Nothing at all, or something quite new. But if we experience nothing, we can experience nothing bad. And if our experience changes, then our existence will change with it — change, but not cease.
To do harm is to do yourself harm. To do an injustice is to do yourself an injustice — it degrades you.
Work: Not to rouse pity, not to win sympathy or admiration. Only this:
Activity.
Stillness.
As the logos of the state requires.
Enter their minds, and you’ll find the judges you’re so afraid of — and how judiciously they judge themselves.
Endless suffering — all from not allowing the mind to do its job. Enough.
You can discard most of the junk that clutters your mind — things that exist only there — and clear out space for yourself:
… by comprehending the scale of the world
…. by contemplating infinite time
… by thinking of the speed with which things change
Disgust at what things are made of: Liquid, dust, bones, filth. Or marble as hardened dirt, gold and silver as residues, clothes as hair, purple die as shellfish blood. And all the rest.
And the same with our living breath — transformed from one thing to another.
Either the gods have power or they don’t. If they don’t, why pray? If they do, then why not pray for something else instead of for things to happen or not to happen? Pray not to feel fear. Or desire, or grief. If the gods can do anything, they can surely do that for us.
— But those are things the gods left up to me.
But isn’t it better to do what’s up to you — like a free man — than to be passively controlled by what isn’t, like a slave or beggar? And what makes you think the gods don’t care about what’s up to us?
Not “some way to sleep with her” — but a way to stop wanting to.
Not “some way to get rid of him” — but a way to stop trying.
Not “some way to save my child” — but a way to lose your fear.
When you run up against someone else’s shamelessness, ask yourself this: Is a world without shamelessness possible?
No.
Then don’t ask impossible. There have to be shameless people in the world. This is one of them.
The same for someone vicious or untrustworthy, or with any other defect. Remembering that the whole class has to exist will make you more tolerant of its members.
And don’t imagine either that those elements — the solid ones and the ethereal — are with us from our birth. Their influx took place yesterday, or the day before — from the food we ate, the air we breathed.
And that’s what changes — not the person your mother gave birth to.
Keep in mind that “sanity” means understanding things — each individual thing — for what they are. And not losing the thread.
Does it make any difference to you if other people blame you for doing what’s right?
It makes no difference.
Only a short time left. Live as if you were alone — out in the wilderness. No difference between here and there: the city that you live in is the world.
To stop talking about what a good man is like, and just be one.
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. Produce them in your mind, as you know them from experience or from history. All just the same. Only the people different.
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?
When faced with people’s bad behavior, turn around and ask when you have acted like that. When you saw money as a good, or pleasure, or social position. Your anger will subside as soon as you recognize that they acted under compulsion (what else could they do?).
Learn to ask of all actions, “Why are they doing that?”
Starting with your own.
It reaches its intended goal, no matter where the limit of its life is set.
“I have what I came for.”
Also characteristic of the rational soul:
Affection for its neighbors. Truthfulness. Humility. Not to place anything above itself — which is characteristic of law as well. No difference here between the logos of rationality and that of justice.
First, tragedies. To remind us of what can happen, and that it happens inevitably. You realize that these are things we all have to go through.
The natural can never be inferior to the artificial; art imitates nature, not the reverse.
Hence justice. Which is the source of all the other virtues. For how could we do what justice requires if we are distracted by things that don’t matter, if we are naive, gullible, inconstant?
When you start to lose your temper, remember: There’s nothing manly about rage. It’s courtesy and kindness that define a human being — and a man. That’s who possesses strength and nerves and guts, not the angry whiners. To react like that brings you closer to impassivity — and so to strength. Pain is the opposite of strength, and so is anger.
If you can cut yourself — your mind — free of what other people do and say, of what you’ve said or done, of the things that you’re afraid will happen, the imposition of the body that contains you and the breath within, and what the whirling chaos sweeps in from outside, so that the mind is freed from fate, brought to clarity, and lives life on its own recognizance — doing what’s right, accepting what happens, and speaking the truth.
It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own.
The left hand is useless at almost everything, for lack of practice. But it guides the reins better than the right. From practice.
The fencer’s weapon is picked up and put down again.
The boxer’s is part of him. All he has to do is clench his fist.
It’s time you realized that you have something in you more powerful and miraculous than the things that affect you and make you dance like a puppet.
What’s in my thoughts at this moment? Fear? Jealousy? Desire? Feelings like that?
There’s nothing more insufferable than people who boast about their own humility.
Salvation: to see each thing for what it is — its nature and its purpose.
To do only what is right, say only what is true, without holding back.
What is it you want? To keep on breathing? What about feeling? desiring? growing? ceasing to grow? using your voice? thinking? Which of them seems worth having?
How the mind conducts itself. It all depends on that. All the rest is within its power, or beyond its control — corpses and smoke.
“But I’ve only gotten through three acts…!”
Yes. This will be a drama in three acts, the length fixed by the power that directed your creation, and now directs your dissolution. Neither was yours to determine.
So make your exit with grace — the same grace shown to you.