Quotes from Meditations

Marcus Aurelius ·  304 pages

Rating: (64.7K votes)


“You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations


“Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations


“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations


“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations


“Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations



“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations


“When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love ...”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations


“Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together,but do so with all your heart.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations


“The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations


“The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations



“Our life is what our thoughts make it.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations


“If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed. It is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance who is harmed.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations


“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations


“If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations


“Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself in your way of thinking.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations



“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations


“I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations


“The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations


“Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations


“Whenever you are about to find fault with someone, ask yourself the following question: What fault of mine most nearly resembles the one I am about to criticize?”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations



“When another blames you or hates you, or people voice similar criticisms, go to their souls, penetrate inside and see what sort of people they are. You will realize that there is no need to be racked with anxiety that they should hold any particular opinion about you.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations


“The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations


“How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations


“Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations


“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 and 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 unnatural.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations



“Look well into thyself; there is a source of strength which will always spring up if thou wilt always look.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations


“Here is a rule to remember in future, when anything tempts you to feel bitter: not "This is misfortune," but "To bear this worthily is good fortune.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations


“How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbour says or does or thinks, but only at what he does himself, to make it just and holy.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations


“You are a little soul carrying about a corpse, as Epictetus used to say.”
― Marcus Aurelius, quote from Meditations


About the author

Marcus Aurelius
Born place: in Rome, Italy
Born date April 29, 0121
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Popular quotes

“Are you the new person drawn toward me?
To begin with, take warning - I am surely far different from what you suppose;
Do you suppose you will find in me your ideal?
Do you think it so easy to have me become your lover?
Do you think the friendship of me would be unalloy'd satisfaction?
Do you think I am trusty and faithful?
Do you see no further than this façade—this smooth and tolerant manner of me?
Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man?
Have you no thought, O dreamer, that it may be all maya, illusion?”
― Walt Whitman, quote from Leaves of Grass: The First (1855) Edition


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― Lewis Carroll, quote from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Other Stories


“These days I keep noticing how my feelings towards men - and the feelings of all the other women - are changing. We feel sorry for them; they seem so miserable and powerless. The weaker sex. Deep down we women are experiencing a kind of collective disappointment. The Nazi world - ruled by men, glorifying the strong man - is beginning to crumble, and with it the myth of "Man". In earlier wars men could claim that the privilege of killing and being killed for the fatherland was theirs and theirs alone. Today, we women, too, have a share. That has transformed us, emboldened us. Among the many defeats at the end of this war is the defeat of the male sex.”
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