Meditations

What kind of ruler did this philosopher-king prove to be? Not, perhaps, as different from his predecessors as one might have expected. Though an emperor was all-powerful in theory, his ability to control policy was in reality much more limited. Much of his time was spent fielding problems that had moved up the administrative ladder: receiving embassies from the large cities of the empire, trying appeals of criminal cases, answering queries from provincial governors and dealing with petitions from individuals. Even with a functional system of imperial couriers, news could take weeks to travel from the periphery of the empire to the center; imperial edicts took time to move down the chain of command. While the emperor’s decision had the force of law, enforcement was almost entirely in the hands of provincial governors, whose diligence might be affected by incompetence, corruption, or an understandable desire not to antagonize local elites.Read more at location 105 • Delete this highlight Add a note head of the Roman state religion, held by the reigning emperor alone, and for life. The gains of the Marcomannic Wars had not proved permanent, and in 178, Marcus and Commodus marched north again. Two years later Marcus died at age fifty-eight, the first emperor to pass on the throne to his son since Vespasian a century before. Sadly, Commodus’s performance did not bear out whatever promise Marcus had discerned in him. He was to be remembered as a dissolute tyrant, a second Caligula or Nero whose many defects were only emphasized by the contrast with his father.Read more at location 190 • Delete this highlight Add a note orientation. To understand the Meditations in context, we must familiarize ourselves not only with Stoicism, the philosophical system that underlies the work, but also with the role of philosophy in ancient life more generally.Read more at location 202 • Delete this highlight Add a note philosophy also had a more practical dimension. It was not merely a subject to write or argue about, but one that was expected to provide a “design for living”—a set of rules to live one’s life by. This was a need not met by ancient religion, which privileged ritual over doctrine and provided little in the way of moral and ethical guidelines. Nor did anyone expect it to. That was what philosophy was for.Read more at location 211 • Delete this highlight Add a note Of the doctrines central to the Stoic worldview, perhaps the most important is the unwavering conviction that the world is organized in a rational and coherent way. More specifically, it is controlled and directed by an all-pervading force that the Stoics designated by the term logos. The term (from which English “logic” and the suffix “-logy” derive) has a semantic range so broad as to be almost untranslatable. At a basic level it designates rational, connected thought—whether envisioned as a characteristic (rationality, the ability to reason) or as the product of that characteristic (an intelligible utterance or a connected discourse).Read more at location 225 • Delete this highlight Add a note Logos operates both in individuals and in the universe as a whole. In individuals it is the faculty of reason. On a cosmic level it is the rational principle that governs the organization of the universe.1 In this sense it is synonymous with “nature,” “Providence,” or “God.”Read more at location 229 • Delete this highlight Add a note responsibility. In reality the Stoics were reluctant to accept such an arrangement, and attempted to get around the difficulty by defining free will as a voluntary accommodation to what is in any case inevitable. According to this theory, man is like a dog tied to a moving wagon. If the dog refuses to run along with the wagon he will be dragged by it, yet the choice remains his: to run or be dragged.Read more at location 235 • Delete this highlight Add a note focus. Early and middle Stoicism was a holistic system. It aimed to embrace all knowledge, and its focus was speculative and theoretical. Roman Stoicism, by contrast, was a practical discipline—not an abstract system of thought, but an attitude to life. Partly for historical reasons, it is this Romanized Stoicism that has most influenced later generations. Indeed, the application of the adjective “stoic” to a person who shows strength and courage in misfortune probably owes more to the aristocratic Roman value system than it does to Greek philosophers.Read more at location 273 • Delete this highlight Add a note 86–160), who published an extensive record of the master’s discussions, a text conventionally referred to as the Discourses of Epictetus. He later produced an abridged version, the Encheiridion (“Manual” or “Handbook”).Read more at location 300 • Delete this highlight Add a note Chrysippus and his followers had divided knowledge into three areas: logic, physics and ethics, concerned, respectively, with the nature of knowledge, the structure of the physical world and the proper role of human beings in that world.Read more at location 310 • Delete this highlight Add a note Hadot. This is the doctrine of the three “disciplines”: the disciplines of perception, of action and of the will.Read more at location 327 • Delete this highlight Add a note Ideally this print will be an accurate and faithful representation of the original. But it may not be. It may be blurred, or it may include shadow images that distort or obscure the original. Chief among these are inappropriate value judgments: the designation as “good” or “evil” of things that in fact are neither good nor evil. For example, my impression that my house has just burned down is simply that—an impression or report conveyed to me by my senses about an event in the outside world. By contrast, my perception that my house has burned down and I have thereby suffered a terrible tragedy includes not only an impression, but also an interpretation imposed upon that initial impression by my powers of hypolepsis. It is by no means the only possible interpretation, and I am not obliged to accept it. I may be a good deal better off if I decline to do so. It is, in other words, not objects and events but the interpretations we place on them that are the problem. Our duty is therefore to exercise stringent control over the faculty of perception, with the aim of protecting our mind from error.Read more at location 335 • Delete this highlight Add a note Everywhere, at each moment, you have the option: • to accept this event with humility [will]; • to treat this person as he should be treated [action]; • to approach this thought with care, so that nothing irrational creeps in [perception].Read more at location 379 • Delete this highlight Add a note Not all the figures Marcus credits as influential on his own philosophical development were Stoics; Severus, for example, was a Peripatetic.Read more at location 403 • Delete this highlight Note: To Read? Edit To avoid the public schools, to hire good private teachers, and to accept the resulting costs as money well-spent.Read more at location 822 • Delete this highlight Add a note To hear unwelcome truths.Read more at location 829 • Delete this highlight Add a note Not to be sidetracked by my interest in rhetoric. Not to write treatises on abstract questions, or deliver moralizing little sermons, or compose imaginary descriptions of The Simple Life or The Man Who Lives Only for Others. To steer clear of oratory, poetry and belles lettres.Read more at location 834 • Delete this highlight Add a note 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.Read more at location 858 • Delete this highlight Add a note The sense he gave of staying on the path rather than being kept on it.Read more at location 888 • Delete this highlight Add a note They saw him for what he was: a man tested by life, accomplished, unswayed by flattery, qualified to govern both himself and them.Read more at location 911 • Delete this highlight Add a note The way he kept public actions within reasonable bounds—games, building projects, distributions of money and so on—because he looked to what needed doing and not the credit to be gained from doing it.Read more at location 925 • Delete this highlight Add a note You could have said of him (as they say of Socrates) that he knew how to enjoy and abstain from things that most people find it hard to abstain from and all too easy to enjoy. Strength, perseverance, self-control in both areas: the mark of a soul in readiness—indomitable.Read more at location 931 • Delete this highlight Add a note 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. 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.Read more at location 972 • Delete this highlight Add a note 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.Read more at location 990 • Delete this highlight Add a note 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.Read more at location 992 • Delete this highlight Add a note Ignoring what goes on in other people’s souls—no one ever came to grief that way. But if you won’t keep track of what your own soul’s doing, how can you not be unhappy?Read more at location 1002 • Delete this highlight Add a note Don’t ever forget these things: The nature of the world. My nature. How I relate to the world. What proportion of it I make up. That you are part of nature, and no one can prevent you from speaking and acting in harmony with it, always.Read more at location 1004 • Delete this highlight Add a note You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.Read more at location 1015 • Delete this highlight Add a note If it doesn’t harm your character, how can it harm your life?Read more at location 1019 • Delete this highlight Add a note What is divine deserves our respect because it is good; what is human deserves our affection because it is like us.Read more at location 1033 • Delete this highlight Add a note 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 be clear that a brief instant is all that is lost.Read more at location 1037 • Delete this highlight Add a note 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.Read more at location 1098 • Delete this highlight Add a note 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.Read more at location 1101 • Delete this highlight Add a note 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 reservations—it must be an extraordinary thing indeed—and enjoy it to the full. But if nothing presents itself that’s superior to the spirit that lives within—the one that has subordinated individual desires to itself, that discriminates among impressions, that has broken free of physical temptations (as Socrates used to say), and subordinated itself to the gods, and looks out for human beings’ welfare—if you find that there’s nothing more important or valuable than that . . . . . . then don’t make room for anything but it—for anything that might lead you astray, tempt you off the road, and leave you unable to devote yourself completely to achieving the goodness that is uniquely yours.Read more at location 1125 • Delete this highlight Add a note So make your choice straightforwardly, once and for all, and stick to it. Choose what’s best. —Best is what benefits me. As a rational being? Then follow through. Or just as an animal? Then say so and stand your ground without making a show of it. (Just make sure you’ve done your homework first.)Read more at location 1136 • Delete this highlight Add a note it: Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see. The span we live is small—small as the corner of the earth in which we live it. Small as even the greatest renown, passed from mouth to mouth by short-lived stick figures, ignorant alike of themselves and those long dead.Read more at location 1153 • Delete this highlight Add a note 12. If you do the job in a principled way, with diligence, energy and patience, if you keep yourself free of distractions, and keep the spirit inside you undamaged, as if you might have to give it back at any moment— If you can embrace this without fear or expectation—can find fulfillment in what you’re doing now, as Nature intended, and in superhuman truthfulness (every word, every utterance)—then your life will be happy. No one can prevent that.Read more at location 1169 • Delete this highlight Add a note 14. Stop drifting. You’re not going to re-read your Brief Comments, your Deeds of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, the commonplace books you saved for your old age. Sprint for the finish. Write off your hopes, and if your well-being matters to you, be your own savior while you can.Read more at location 1177 • Delete this highlight Add a note No random actions, none not based on underlying principles.Read more at location 1201 • Delete this highlight Add a note What’s there to complain about? People’s misbehavior? But take into consideration: • that rational beings exist for one another; • that doing what’s right sometimes requires patience; • that no one does the wrong thing deliberately; • and the number of people who have feuded and envied and hated and fought and died and been buried. . . . and keep your mouth shut.Read more at location 1208 • Delete this highlight Add a note That things have no hold on the soul. They stand there unmoving, outside it. Disturbance comes only from within—from our own perceptions. ii. That everything you see will soon alter and cease to exist. Think of how many changes you’ve already seen. “The world is nothing but change. Our life is only perception.Read more at location 1226 • Delete this highlight Note: Passage - Why We Have Nothing to Complain About Edit Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been.Read more at location 1244 • Delete this highlight Add a note People who are excited by posthumous fame forget that the people who remember them will soon die too. And those after them in turn. Until their memory, passed from one to another like a candle flame, gutters and goes out. But suppose that those who remembered you were immortal and your memory undying. What good would it do you? And I don’t just mean when you’re dead, but in your own lifetime. What use is praise, except to make your lifestyle a little more comfortable?Read more at location 1272 • Delete this highlight Add a note Does anything genuinely beautiful need supplementing? No more than justice does—or truth, or kindness, or humility. Are any of those improved by being praised? Or damaged by contempt? Is an emerald suddenly flawed if no one admires it? Or gold, or ivory, or purple? Lyres? Knives? Flowers? Bushes?Read more at location 1280 • Delete this highlight Add a note “If you seek tranquillity, do less.” Or (more accurately) do what’s essential—what the logos of a social being requires, and in the requisite way. 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 tranquillity. Ask yourself at every moment, “Is this necessary?”Read more at location 1299 • Delete this highlight Add a note Words once in common use now sound archaic. And the names of the famous dead as well: Camillus, Caeso, Volesus, Dentatus . . . Scipio and Cato . . . Augustus . . . Hadrian and Antoninus, and . . . Everything fades so quickly, turns into legend, and soon oblivion covers it. And those are the ones who shone. The rest—“unknown, unasked-for” a minute after death. 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.Read more at location 1337 • Delete this highlight Add a note is nothing nature loves more than to alter what exists and make new things like it. All that exists is the seed of what will emerge from it. You think the only seeds are the ones that make plants or children? Go deeper.Read more at location 1347 • Delete this highlight Add a note Suppose that a god announced that you were going to die tomorrow “or the day after.” Unless you were a complete coward you wouldn’t kick up a fuss about which day it was—what difference could it make? Now recognize that the difference between years from now and tomorrow is just as small.Read more at location 1376 • Delete this highlight Add a note To be like the rock that the waves keep crashing over. It stands unmoved and the raging of the sea falls still around it.Read more at location 1389 • Delete this highlight Add a note 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.Read more at location 1391 • Delete this highlight Add a note Does what’s happened keep you from acting with justice, generosity, self-control, sanity, prudence, honesty, humility, straightforwardness, and all the other qualities that allow a person’s nature to fulfill itself?Read more at location 1395 • Delete this highlight Add a note 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? —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? —But we have to sleep sometime. . . . Agreed. But nature set a limit on that—as it did on eating and drinking. And you’re over the limit. You’ve had more than enough of that. But not of working. There you’re still below your quota. You don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you. People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it, they even forget to wash or eat. Do you have less respect for your own nature than the engraver does for engraving, the dancer for the dance, the miser for money or the social climber for status? When they’re really possessed by what they do, they’d rather stop eating and sleeping than give up practicing their arts. Is helping others less valuable to you? Not worth your effort?Read more at location 1410 • Delete this highlight Add a note not to think of philosophy as your instructor, but as the sponge and egg white that relieve ophthalmia—as a soothing ointment, a warm lotion. Not showing off your obedience to the logos, but resting in it. Remember: philosophy requires only what your nature already demands. What you’ve been after is something else again—something unnatural.Read more at location 1481 • Delete this highlight Add a note Suppose you took certain things as touchstones of goodness: prudence, self-control, justice, and courage, say. If you understood “goods” as meaning those, you wouldn’t be able to follow that line about “so many goods. . . .” It wouldn’t make any sense to you. Whereas if you’d internalized the conventional meaning, you’d be able to follow it perfectly. You’d have no trouble seeing the author’s meaning and why it was funny. Which shows that most people do acknowledge a distinction. Otherwise we wouldn’t recognize the first sense as jarring and reject it automatically, whereas we accept the second—the one referring to wealth and the benefits of celebrity and high living—as amusing and apropos.Read more at location 1503 • Delete this highlight Add a note Anywhere you can lead your life, you can lead a good one. —Lives are led at court. . . . Then good ones can be.Read more at location 1526 • Delete this highlight Add a note What things gravitate toward is their goal. A thing’s goal is what benefits it—its good. A rational being’s good is unselfishness. What we were born for. That’s nothing new. Remember? Lower things for the sake of higher ones, and higher ones for one another. Things that have consciousness are higher than those that don’t. And those with the logos still higher.Read more at location 1530 • Delete this highlight Add a note It is crazy to want what is impossible. And impossible for the wicked not to do so.Read more at location 1534 • Delete this highlight Add a note But when they obstruct our proper tasks, they become irrelevant to us—like sun, wind, animals. 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. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.Read more at location 1541 • Delete this highlight Add a note 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.Read more at location 1557 • Delete this highlight Add a note Don’t be irritated at people’s smell or bad breath. What’s the point? With that mouth, with those armpits, they’re going to produce that odor. —But they have a brain! Can’t they figure it out? Can’t they recognize the problem? So you have a brain as well. Good for you. Then use your logic to awaken his. Show him. Make him realize it. If he’ll listen, then you’ll have solved the problem. Without anger.Read more at location 1568 • Delete this highlight Add a note When jarred, unavoidably, by circumstances, revert at once to yourself, and don’t lose the rhythm more than you can help. You’ll have a better grasp of the harmony if you keep on going back to it.Read more at location 1646 • Delete this highlight Add a note ordinary people are impressed by fall into the categories of things that are held together by simple physics (like stones or wood), or by natural growth (figs, vines, olives . . .). Those admired by more advanced minds are held together by a living soul (flocks of sheep, herds of cows). Still more sophisticated people admire what is guided by a rational mind—not the universal mind, but one admired for its technical knowledge, or for some other skill—or just because it happens to own a lot of slaves. But those who revere that other mind—the one we all share, as humans and as citizens—aren’t interested in other things. Their focus is on the state of their own minds—to avoid all selfishness and illogic, and to work with others to achieve that goal.Read more at location 1660 • Delete this highlight Add a note The way people behave. They refuse to admire their contemporaries, the people whose lives they share. No, but to be admired by Posterity—people they’ve never met and never will—that’s what they set their hearts on. You might as well be upset at not being a hero to your great-grandfather.Read more at location 1695 • Delete this highlight Add a note 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.Read more at location 1698 • Delete this highlight Add a note If anyone can refute me—show me I’m making a mistake or looking at things from the wrong perspective—I’ll gladly change. It’s the truth I’m after, and the truth never harmed anyone. What harms us is to persist in self-deceit and ignorance.Read more at location 1704 • Delete this highlight Add a note If someone asked you how to write your name, would you clench your teeth and spit out the letters one by one? If he lost his temper, would you lose yours as well? Or would you just spell out the individual letters? Remember—your responsibilities can be broken down into individual parts as well. Concentrate on those, and finish the job methodically—without getting stirred up or meeting anger with anger.Read more at location 1717 • Delete this highlight Add a note Death. The end of sense-perception, of being controlled by our emotions, of mental activity, of enslavement to our bodies.Read more at location 1725 • Delete this highlight Add a note 35. Have you noticed how professionals will meet the man on the street halfway but without compromising the logos of their trade? Should we as humans feel less responsibility to our logos than builders or pharmacists do? A logos we share with the divine?Read more at location 1751 • Delete this highlight Add a note Asia and Europe: distant recesses of the universe. The ocean: a drop of water. Mount Athos: a molehill. The present: a split second in eternity. Minuscule, transitory, insignificant.Read more at location 1754 • Delete this highlight Add a note 38. Keep reminding yourself of the way things are connected, of their relatedness. All things are implicated in one another and in sympathy with each other. This event is the consequence of some other one.Read more at location 1763 • Delete this highlight Add a note When you need encouragement, think of the qualities the people around you have: this one’s energy, that one’s modesty, another’s generosity, and so on. Nothing is as encouraging as when virtues are visibly embodied in the people around us, when we’re practically showered with them. It’s good to keep this in mind.Read more at location 1813 • Delete this highlight Add a note It doesn’t bother you that you weigh only x or y pounds and not three hundred. Why should it bother you that you have only x or y years to live and not more? You accept the limits placed on your body. Accept those placed on your time.Read more at location 1817 • Delete this highlight Add a note peaceability. Use the setback to practice other virtues. Remember that our efforts are subject to circumstances; you weren’t aiming to do the impossible. —Aiming to do what, then? To try. And you succeeded. What you set out to do is accomplished.Read more at location 1820 • Delete this highlight Add a note Pointless bustling of processions, opera arias, herds of sheep and cattle, military exercises. A bone flung to pet poodles, a little food in the fish tank. The miserable servitude of ants, scampering of frightened mice, puppets jerked on strings. Surrounded as we are by all of this, we need to practice acceptance. Without disdain. But remembering that our own worth is measured by what we devote our energy to.Read more at location 1852 • Delete this highlight Add a note 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.Read more at location 1856 • Delete this highlight Add a note Is my intellect up to this? If so, then I’ll put it to work, like a tool provided by nature. And if it isn’t, then I’ll turn the job over to someone who can do better—unless I have no choice.Read more at location 1858 • Delete this highlight Add a note and collaborate with whoever can make use of it, to doRead more at location 1860 Note: A good action is that which the world wants and I want to give. Keeping in mind both present and future. Edit why should we feel anger at the world? As if the world would notice!Read more at location 1949 • Delete this highlight Add a note Dig deep; the water—goodness—is down there. And as long as you keep digging, it will keep bubbling up.Read more at location 2009 • Delete this highlight Add a note It’s not enough to ask whether Socrates’ death was nobler, whether he debated with the sophists more adeptly, whether he showed greater endurance by spending the night out in the cold, and when he was ordered to arrest the man from Salamis decided it was preferable to refuse, and “swaggered about the streets” (which one could reasonably doubt). What matters is what kind of soul he had. Whether he was satisfied to treat men with justice and the gods with reverence and didn’t lose his temper unpredictably at evil done by others, didn’t make himself the slave of other people’s ignorance, didn’t treat anything that nature did as abnormal, or put up with it as an unbearable imposition, didn’t put his mind in his body’s keeping.Read more at location 2029 • Delete this highlight Add a note 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,Read more at location 2039 • Delete this highlight Add a note No one objects to what is useful to him. To be of use to others is natural. Then don’t object to what is useful to you—being of use.Read more at location 2057 • Delete this highlight Add a note 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.Read more at location 2086 • Delete this highlight Add a note Don’t be overheard complaining about life at court. Not even to yourself.Read more at location 2101 • Delete this highlight Add a note But no truly good person would feel remorse at passing up pleasure. So it cannot be to your benefit, or good.Read more at location 2104 • Delete this highlight Note: Why does he eschew pleasure? Edit When you have trouble getting out of bed in the morning, remember that your defining characteristic—what defines a human being—is to work with others. Even animals know how to sleep. And it’s the characteristic activity that’s the more natural one—more innate and more satisfying.Read more at location 2108 • Delete this highlight Add a note Apply them constantly, to everything that happens: Physics. Ethics. Logic.Read more at location 2110 • Delete this highlight Note: Body, Spirit, Mind... Again, he Eschews Heart. Edit Blame no one. Set people straight, if you can. If not, just repair the damage. And suppose you can’t do that either. Then where does blaming people get you?Read more at location 2121 • Delete this highlight Add a note Nature is like someone throwing a ball in the air, gauging its rise and arc—and where it will fall. And what does the ball gain as it flies upward? Or lose when it plummets to earth? What does the bubble gain from its existence? Or lose by bursting? And the same for a candle.Read more at location 2128 • Delete this highlight Add a note Three relationships: i. with the body you inhabit; ii. with the divine, the cause of everything in all things; iii. with the people around you.Read more at location 2153 • Delete this highlight Add a note You have to assemble your life yourself—action by action. And be satisfied if each one achieves its goal, as far as it can. No one can keep that from happening. —But there are external obstacles. . . . Not to behaving with justice, self-control, and good sense. —Well, but perhaps to some more concrete action. But if you accept the obstacle and work with what you’re given, an alternative will present itself—another piece of what you’re trying to assemble. Action by action.Read more at location 2169 • Delete this highlight Add a note The cucumber is bitter? Then throw it out. There are brambles in the path? Then go around them. That’s all you need to know. Nothing more. Don’t demand to know “why such things exist.” Anyone who understands the world will laugh at you, just as a carpenter would if you seemed shocked at finding sawdust in his workshop, or a shoemaker at scraps of leather left over from work. Of course, they have a place to dispose of these; nature has no door to sweep things out of. But the wonderful thing about its workmanship is how, faced with that limitation, it takes everything within it that seems broken, old and useless, transforms it into itself, and makes new things from it. So that it doesn’t need material from any outside source, or anywhere to dispose of what’s left over. It relies on itself for all it needs: space, material, and labor.Read more at location 2242 • Delete this highlight Add a note 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.Read more at location 2269 • Delete this highlight Add a note And to lie is to blaspheme against it too. Because “nature” means the nature of that which is. And that which is and that which is the case are closely linked, so that nature is synonymous with Truth—the source of all true things. To lie deliberately is to blaspheme—the liar commits deceit, and thus injustice. And likewise to lie without realizing it. Because the involuntary liar disrupts the harmony of nature—its order. He is in conflict with the way the world is structured. As anyone is who deviates toward what is opposed to the truth—even against his will.Read more at location 2292 • Delete this highlight Add a note Real good luck would be to abandon life without ever encountering dishonesty, or hypocrisy, or self-indulgence, or pride. But the “next best voyage” is to die when you’ve had enough. Or are you determined to lie down with evil? Hasn’t experience even taught you that—to avoid it like the plague? Because it is a plague—a mental cancer—worse than anything caused by tainted air or an unhealthy climate. Diseases like that can only threaten your life; this one attacks your humanity.Read more at location 2309 • Delete this highlight Add a note So this is how a thoughtful person should await death: not with indifference, not with impatience, not with disdain, but simply viewing it as one of the things that happen to us. Now you anticipate the child’s emergence from its mother’s womb; that’s how you should await the hour when your soul will emerge from its compartment.Read more at location 2316 • Delete this highlight Add a note To do harm is to do yourself harm. To do an injustice is to do yourself an injustice—it degrades you.Read more at location 2326 • Delete this highlight Add a note Blot out your imagination. Turn your desire to stone. Quench your appetites. Keep your mind centered on itself.Read more at location 2332 • Delete this highlight Note: Again, against those things which can be integrated instead of cast out. Edit Not being done to, but doing—the source of good and bad for rational and political beings. Where their own goodness and badness is found—not in being done to, but in doing.Read more at location 2368 • Delete this highlight Add a note 22. Go straight to the seat of intelligence—your own, the world’s, your neighbor’s. Your own—to ground it in justice. The world’s—to remind yourself what it is that you’re part of. Your neighbor’s—to distinguish ignorance from calculation. And recognize it as like yours.Read more at location 2381 • Delete this highlight Add a note participate in a society by your existence. Then participate in its life through your actions—all your actions. Any action not directed toward a social end (directly or indirectly) is a disturbance to your life, an obstacle to wholeness, a source of dissension. Like the man in the Assembly—a faction to himself, always out of step with the majority.Read more at location 2385 • Delete this highlight Note: Why equate society with purpose? Edit Do what nature demands. Get a move on—if you have it in you—and don’t worry whether anyone will give you credit for it. And don’t go expecting Plato’s Republic; be satisfied with even the smallest progress, and treat the outcome of it all as unimportant.Read more at location 2407 • Delete this highlight Add a note 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—each part of every thing; the narrow space between our birth and death; the infinite time before; the equally unbounded time that follows.Read more at location 2422 • Delete this highlight Add a note All that you see will soon have vanished, and those who see it vanish will vanish themselves, and the ones who reached old age have no advantage over the untimely dead.Read more at location 2428 • Delete this highlight Add a note all things spring from one intelligent source and form a single body (and the part should accept the actions of the whole) or there are only atoms, joining and splitting forever, and nothing else. So why feel anxiety?Read more at location 2449 • Delete this highlight Add a note 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. Redirect your prayers like that, and watch what happens.Read more at location 2460 • Delete this highlight Add a note my illness, my conversations were not about my physical state; I did not waste my visitors’ time with things of that sort, but went on discussing philosophy, and concentrated on one point in particular: how the mind can participate in the sensations of the body and yet maintain its serenity, and focus on its own well-being. Nor did I let my doctors strut about like grandees. I went on living my life the way it should be lived.” Like that. In illness—or any other situation. Not to let go of philosophy, no matter what happens; not to bandy words with crackpots and philistines—good rules for any philosopher. Concentrate on what you’re doing, and what you’re doing it with.Read more at location 2464 • Delete this highlight Add a note Another useful point to bear in mind: What qualities has nature given us to counter that defect? As an antidote to unkindness it gave us kindness. And other qualities to balance other flaws.Read more at location 2476 • Delete this highlight Add a note 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.Read more at location 2509 • Delete this highlight Add a note Does nature set out to cause its own components harm, and make them vulnerable to it—indeed, predestined to it? Or is it oblivious to what goes on? Neither one seems very plausible.Read more at location 2529 • Delete this highlight Note: Entropy... only possible if the universe doesn't care, and there is no grand plan. Edit And “disinterest” means that the intelligence should rise above the movements of the flesh—the rough and the smooth alike. Should rise above fame, above death, and everything like them.Read more at location 2547 • Delete this highlight Add a note actions and perceptions need to aim: • at accomplishing practical ends • at the exercise of thought • at maintaining a confidence founded on understanding. An unobtrusive confidence—hidden in plain sight.Read more at location 2561 • Delete this highlight Add a note stop talking about what the good man is like, and just be one.Read more at location 2593 • Delete this highlight Add a note Possibilities: i. To keep on living (you should be used to it by now) ii. To end it (it was your choice, after all) iii. To die (having met your obligations)Read more at location 2605 • Delete this highlight Add a note He deposits his sperm and leaves. And then a force not his takes it and goes to work, and creates a child. This . . . from that? Or: He pours food down his throat. And then a force not his takes it and creates sensations, desires, daily life, physical strength and so much else besides. To look at these things going on silently and see the force that drives them. As we see the force that pushes things and pulls them. Not with our eyes, but just as clearly.Read more at location 2621 • Delete this highlight Add a note 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?Read more at location 2634 • Delete this highlight Note: Even shorter reaity check, turns acceptance of death on its' head. Edit 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.Read more at location 2646 • Delete this highlight Add a note Given the material we’re made of, what’s the sanest thing that we can do or say? Whatever it may be, you can do or say it. Don’t pretend that anything’s stopping you.Read more at location 2655 • Delete this highlight Add a note None of us have much time. And yet you act as if things were eternal—the way you fear and long for them. . . .Read more at location 2679 • Delete this highlight Add a note So too a healthy mind should be prepared for anything. The one that keeps saying, “Are my children all right?” or “Everyone must approve of me” is like eyes that can only stand pale colors, or teeth that can handle only mush.Read more at location 2685 • Delete this highlight Add a note 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. Even with the intelligent and good. Won’t there be someone thinking “Finally! To be through with that old schoolteacher. Even though he never said anything, you could always feel him judging you.” And that’s for a good man. How many traits do you have that would make a lot of people glad to be rid of you? Remember that, when the time comes. You’ll be less reluctant to leave if you can tell yourself, “This is the sort of life I’m leaving. Even the people around me, the ones I spent so much time fighting for, praying over, caring about—even they want me gone, in hopes that it will make their own lives easier. How could anyone stand a longer stay here?”Read more at location 2687 • Delete this highlight Add a note It reaches its intended goal, no matter where the limit of its life is set. Not like dancing and theater and things like that, where the performance is incomplete if it’s broken off in the middle, but at any point—no matter which one you pick—it has fulfilled its mission, done its work completely. So that it can say, “I have what I came for.”Read more at location 2713 • Delete this highlight Add a note 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.Read more at location 2720 • Delete this highlight Add a note 2. To acquire indifference to pretty singing, to dancing, to the martial arts: Analyze the melody into the notes that form it, and as you hear each one, ask yourself whether you’re powerless against that. That should be enough to deter you. The same with dancing: individual movements and tableaux. And the same with the martial arts.Read more at location 2723 • Delete this highlight Note: Why acquire indifference... through explanation, you dappen enjoyment... again, why is he against emotions? Edit 5. “And your profession?” “Goodness.” (And how is that to be achieved, except by thought—about the world, about the nature of people?)Read more at location 2735 • Delete this highlight Add a note The soul as a sphere in equilibrium: Not grasping at things beyond it or retreating inward. Not fragmenting outward, not sinking back on itself, but ablaze with light and looking at the truth, without and within.Read more at location 2777 • Delete this highlight Add a note 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?Read more at location 2779 • Delete this highlight Add a note The despicable phoniness of people who say, “Listen, I’m going to level with you here.” What does that mean? It shouldn’t even need to be said. It should be obvious—written in block letters on your forehead. It should be audible in your voice, visible in your eyes, like a lover who looks into your face and takes in the whole story at a glance. A straightforward, honest person should be like someone who stinks: when you’re in the same room with him, you know it. But false straightforwardness is like a knife in the back.Read more at location 2788 • Delete this highlight Add a note That if they’re right to do this, then you have no right to complain. And if they aren’t, then they do it involuntarily, out of ignorance. Because all souls are prevented from treating others as they deserve, just as they are kept from truth: unwillingly. Which is why they resent being called unjust, or arrogant, or greedy—any suggestion that they aren’t good neighbors.Read more at location 2810 • Delete this highlight Add a note How much more damage anger and grief do than the things that cause them.Read more at location 2824 • Delete this highlight Add a note That kindness is invincible, provided it’s sincere—not ironic or an act. What can even the most vicious person do if you keep treating him with kindness and gently set him straight—if you get the chance—correcting him cheerfully at the exact moment that he’s trying to do you harm. “No, no, my friend. That isn’t what we’re here for. It isn’t me who’s harmed by that. It’s you.” And show him, gently and without pointing fingers, that it’s so. That bees don’t behave like this—or any other animals with a sense of community. Don’t do it sardonically or meanly, but affectionately—with no hatred in your heart. And not ex cathedra or to impress third parties, but speaking directly. Even if there are other people around.Read more at location 2825 • Delete this highlight Add a note . . . . then death shouldn’t scare you. 36. You’ve lived as a citizen in a great city. Five years or a hundred—what’s the difference? The laws make no distinction. And to be sent away from it, not by a tyrant or a dishonest judge, but by Nature, who first invited you in—why is that so terrible?Read more at location 3065 Note: Interesting metaphor for death. Edit