Meditations

To see them from above: the thousands of animal herds, the rituals, the voyages on calm or stormy seas, the different ways we come into the world, share it with one another, and leave it. Consider the lives led once by others, long ago, the lives to be led by others after you, the lives led even now, in foreign lands. How many people don’t even know your name. How many will soon have forgotten it. How many offer you praise now—and tomorrow, perhaps, contempt.

That to be remembered is worthless. Like fame. Like everything.

The present is all that they can give up, since that is all you have, and what you do not have, you cannot lose.

Whatever the nature of the whole does, and whatever serves to maintain it, is good for every part of nature. The world is maintained by change—in the elements and in the things they compose.

, 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.

instead of treating yourself with respect, you have entrusted your own happiness to the souls of others.

do exist, they do care what happens to us, and everything a person needs to avoid real harm they have placed within him.

feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly.

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.

the gods exist, then to abandon human beings is not frightening; the gods would never subject you to harm.