Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
- Abhishek Rao
- Aug 25, 2023
- 7 min read
Updated: Mar 23, 2024
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Genre: Philosophy, Autobiography
Rating: 5/5
Date Read: 28/04/2023
Goodreads Profile: Abhishek Rao
Book Link: Meditations
Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.
Book 1
The recognition that I needed to train and discipline my character.
Not to be interested in Rhetoric, Not to write treatises and ask abstract questions.
Not to lecture.
Say whatever in a straightforward manner.
Be calm when someone who has angered or annoyed us wants to make up.
A man can show strength and flexibility
To show intuitive sympathy for friends, and tolerance to amateurs and sloppy thinkers.
To investigate and analyze, with understanding and logic, the principles we ought to live by.
Book 2
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 cannot tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good and the ugliness of evil and have recognised 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.
Stop allowing your mind to be a slave, to be jerked about by selfish impulses, to kick against fate and the present, and to mistrust the future.
The body and its parts are a river, the soul a dream and mist, life is warfare and a journey far from home, and lasting reputation is oblivion.
“Do external things distract you? Then make time for yourself to learn something worthwhile; stop letting yourself be pulled in all directions.”
Concentrate every minute like a Roman—like a man—on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, and with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions. Yes, 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-centred, irritable.
People who labour all their lives but have no purpose to direct every thought and impulse toward are wasting their time—even when hard at work.
“Don’t ever forget these things:
The nature of the world.
My nature.
How I relate to the world.
What proportion of it do I make up?
That you are part of nature, and no one can prevent you from speaking and acting in harmony with it, always.”
“Nothing is more pathetic than people who run around in circles, ‘elving into the things that lie beneath’ and conducting investigations into the souls of the people around them, never realizing that all you have to do is to be attentive to the power inside you and worship it sincerely.”
“The present is all that they can give up, since that is all you have, and what you do not have, you cannot lose.”
Book 3
We should listen only to those whose lives conform to nature.
“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.”
“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.”
“Nothing is so conducive to spiritual growth as this capacity for logical and accurate analysis of everything that happens to us.”
How to Act:
Never under compulsion, out of selfishness, without forethought, with misgivings.
Do not gussy up your thoughts.
No surplus words or unnecessary actions.
With cheerfulness. Without requiring people’s help, serenity supplied by them.
To stand up straight and not be straightened.
Book 4
“Nowhere you can go is more peaceful—more free of interruptions—than your own soul.”
To reconsider your position, when someone can set you straight or convert you to his. But your conversion should always rest on a conviction that it is right, or benefits others-nothing else. Not because it is more appealing or popular.
“Choose not to be harmed—and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed—and you haven’t been.”
“Your conversion should always rest on a conviction that it’s right, or benefits others—nothing else.”
While you are and able. Be good.
The tranquillity comes when you stop caring what they say, think, or do. Only what you do.
What use is praise, except to make your lifestyle a little more comfortable?
“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?"
In short, know this: Human lives are brief and trivial. Yesterday a blob of semen; tomorrow embalming fluid, ash.
Why treat one as fortunate and the other as unfortunate.
“The world is nothing but change. Our life is only perception.”
“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.”
“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. Why treat the one as a misfortune rather than the other as fortunate?”
Book 5
The things you think about determine the quality of your mind.
Interrogate yourself to discover what inhabits your so-called mind and what kind of soul you have now. A child’s soul, an adolescent’s, a woman’s? A tyrant’s soul? The soul of a predator or its prey?
Book 6
Whatever happens to you is for the good of the world.
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.
“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.”
Book 7
Don’t be ashamed to need help. Like a soldier storming a wall, you have a mission to accomplish. And if you’ve been wounded and you need a comrade to pull you up? So what?
You cannot quench understanding unless you put out the insights that compose it.
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.
Treat what you don’t have as non-existent. Look at what you have, the things you value 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.
It doesn’t hurt me unless I interpret it's happening as harmful to me. I can choose not to.
Book 8
For every action, ask: How does it affect me? Could I change my mind about it?
If it is in your control, why do you do it? If it’s in someone else’s, then who are you blaming? Atoms? The gods? Stupid either way.
Blame no one. Set people straight, if you can. If not, just repair the damage.
Don’t let your imagination be crushed by life as a whole. Don’t try to picture everything bad that could possibly happen. Stick with the situation at hand, and ask, ‘Why is this so unbearable? Why can’t I endure it?’ You’ll be embarrassed to answer.
Book 9
Leave other people’s mistakes where they live. (No grudges, No reminders)
Book 10
“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.
Just remember: you can endure anything your mind can make endurable, by treating it as in your interest to do so. In your interest, or in your nature.”
Epithets for yourself: Upright, Modest, Straightforward, Sane, Cooperative, Disinterested.
Sanity means understanding each individual thing for what they are.
Cooperation means accepting what nature assigns you and accepting it willingly.
Disinterested means that intelligence should rise above the movements of the flesh - the rough and smooth alike. Should rise above fame, above death and above everything like them.
Book 11
“Characteristics of the rational soul: Self-perception, self-examination, and the power to make of itself whatever it wants.”
Four habits of thought to watch for, and erase from your mind when you catch them. Tell yourself:
This thought is unnecessary.
This one is destructive to the people around you.
This wouldn’t be what you really think (to say what you don’t think —the definition of absurdity).
And the fourth reason for self-reproach: that the more divine part of you has been beaten and subdued by the degraded mortal part—the body and its stupid self-indulgence.
Book 12
Everything you’re trying to reach—by taking a long way round—you could have right now, this moment. If you’d only stop thwarting your own attempts. If you’d only let go of the past, entrust the future to Providence, and guide the present toward reverence and justice.
Don’t let anything deter you: other people’s misbehaviour, your own misperceptions, What People Will Say, or the feelings of the body that covers you (let the affected part take care of those). And if, when it’s time to depart, you shunt everything aside except your mind and the divinity within … if it isn’t ceasing to live that you’re afraid of but never beginning to live properly … then you’ll be worthy of the world that made you.
If it is not right, do not do it. If it is not true, do not say it. Let your intentions be…
Book Link: Meditations
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