Meditations,
rebuilt.

Book OneDebts

1. From my grandfather: gentleness. Hold the temper.
2. From my father: modesty and firmness.
3. From my mother: reverence, generosity, restraint, plain living, and no appetite for evil.
4. From my great-grandfather: spend freely on good teachers.
5. From the man who raised me: ignore factions. Need little. Do your own work. Refuse slander.
6. From Diognetus: do not chase tricks. Do not believe every marvel. Let philosophy take hold.
7. From Rusticus: stop performing wisdom. Read carefully. Accept correction. Write plainly.
8. From Apollonius: freedom is steadiness. Pain and loss do not excuse collapse.
9. From Sextus: be serious without hardness. Bear with the ignorant. Govern a home with affection.
10. From Alexander: correct speech without humiliating the speaker.
11. From Fronto: power breeds envy, fraud, and hypocrisy. Do not admire rank.
12. From Alexander the Platonist: do not hide neglect behind busyness.
13. From Catulus: receive a friend's complaint without contempt. Return quickly to affection.
14. From Severus: love justice, equality, plain dealing, and the common good.
15. From Maximus: be master of yourself. Do the work without complaint. Let word and intent match.
16. From my father by adoption: decide slowly, stand firmly, reject vanity, listen patiently, reward merit, and serve the office, not the glory.
17. From the gods: teachers, family, warnings, delays, escapes, and enough time to learn. Receive the debt and live worthy of it.

Book TwoAt Dawn

1. At dawn, say it first: today I will meet the meddler, the ingrate, the arrogant, the liar, the envious, the cold. They are like this because they cannot tell good from evil. None of them can harm me, for no one can fasten what is base onto me. And I cannot hate my own kind. We were made to work together, like hands, like eyelids, like the upper and lower teeth. To turn against each other is against nature. Resentment is turning away.
2. You have delayed enough. The day appointed for correction has already been missed. Use the one still here.
3. Do the work in front of you as a Roman and a human being: serious, affectionate, free, and just.
4. Stop placing your happiness inside other people's minds. Their praise is not your good.
5. Do not be dragged around by outside things. Learn something good. Stop wandering.
6. A man without an aim is busy and lost.
7. Know the world, know your nature, and know your part in the whole. Then speak and act from there.
8. Lust is worse than anger when it enjoys its own surrender. Watch what pleasure makes you approve.
9. Act as one who may leave life now. Death is not evil. Vice is evil.
10. Everything dissolves. Bodies return to matter. Names return to time.
11. Do not fear death like a child. Death is a work of nature.
12. Stop investigating everyone else's soul while neglecting the mind that rules you.
13. You only lose the present. That is all you ever had.
14. All is opinion. Test the appearance before you obey it.
15. The soul defects when it fights reality, plots harm, surrenders to pleasure or pain, lies, or acts without aim.
16. Life is a blink. The body never holds still. Fame is smoke. Fortune turns without warning. Guard the mind that rules you.

Book ThreeThe Present Work

1. You are spending life daily. Do not merely count age. Count the use of your mind while it remains clear.
2. See beauty in what nature makes in passing: bread cracked open, figs split, olives wrinkled. The trained eye finds order without decoration.
3. Great names died. Physicians died. Conquerors died. Philosophers died. Death is not impressed by usefulness.
4. Stop wasting life by guessing what others think. Go straight to your own work.
5. Do nothing unwillingly, selfishly, carelessly, falsely, or for show. Let the act be complete.
6. Stand without needing rescue, applause, or escape. Let your own mind keep you cheerful.
7. If you find something better than justice, truth, temperance, courage, and a mind at peace with itself, take it. You will not.
8. Call nothing profitable if it costs you trust, self-respect, truth, modesty, or the common good.
9. A disciplined mind has no rot hidden inside it. It is ready to leave life without complaint.
10. Honor the judging faculty. If it stays straight, you stay straight.
11. When something appears, strip it: substance, cause, purpose, duration. Then it loses its spell.
12. Ask of every craving: what is it, and what will obeying it make of me?
13. Hold the present by reason, justice, courage, and truth. Let the rest go.
14. Keep your principles ready like a surgeon keeps instruments ready.
15. Do not postpone life until your notes are perfect. Practice what you already know.
16. Buying, selling, planting, resting, seeing what must be done: all require judgment. Train judgment.
17. Perception and impulse belong to animals. The human task is reason joined to the common good.

Book FourThe Inner Citadel

1. Your mind can be enough if it stays with nature.
2. Do nothing at random. Let every act answer a human purpose.
3. Men seek retreats in country, coast, and mountain. Retreat into your own soul. Keep it orderly and you can return there at once.
4. If reason is common, law is common. If law is common, we are citizens of one city.
5. Birth and death are both works of nature. Receive both without theatrics.
6. Things follow from causes. To resent what follows is to resent the chain.
7. Remove the opinion of injury and the injury is removed.
8. What happens is woven into the whole. Look closely and you will see relation, not chaos.
9. Do not take on the mind of the offender.
10. Use two rules: act only for human good, and change your mind when reason corrects you.
11. You have reason. Use it. If it does its work, want nothing more.
12. You were a part. You will return to the whole. Do not resist reunion.
13. In ten days they may call you a god if you return to principle. Reputation is that cheap.
14. Do not live as if you had endless years. Death is at your shoulder. Be good now.
15. Much time is saved by not studying the souls of others. Attend to your own mind.
16. Posthumous fame is another crowd's breath. The dead cannot use it.
17. If souls remain, nature has room for them. If they dissolve, nature has room for that too.
18. Keep each impulse on the road: justice in action, truth in speech, acceptance in event.
19. What serves the whole serves me. I am not separate from the world that carries me.
20. Do fewer things if you want quiet. Do only what reason and duty require.
21. Test the good man's life: content with assignment, obedient to reason, affectionate toward men.
22. Either the world is ordered or it is atoms. In either case, why be disturbed?
23. Throw out cowardice, luxury, malice, vanity, and servility. They are not forced on you.
24. The fugitive is not the man who leaves the city. It is the man who abandons reason.
25. One man lives bare, another sick, another exiled. Each can still act well.
26. Whatever craft you have, love it. The human craft is reason and action for others.
27. Look at former courts and crowds. Same meals, plots, births, deaths, ambitions. All gone.
28. Old words vanish. So do the names once praised by those words.
29. The present is always the same material: change, relation, duty, death.
30. You are ready to die but not yet simple, modest, free, and kind. Correct that.
31. Study what kind of minds people have, especially those whose praise you want.
32. Your evil cannot live in another man's mind. It lives in your own judgment and action.
33. See the world as one living being, one substance, one soul, one law.
34. Without a mind in command, what are you? Flesh, breath, and a little warm blood.
35. Change is not harm. It is the method by which nature works.
36. Nothing natural is strange. What happens has always happened under other names.
37. Fire becomes air, air becomes water, water becomes earth. You are in the same procession.
38. If told you would die tomorrow or years from now, the work is unchanged.
39. Physicians, astrologers, philosophers, tyrants, and cities vanish. Let this sober you.
40. Be the headland. Waves hit it. It stands. Around it the sea falls quiet.
41. Do not say, I am unlucky this happened. Say, I am fortunate I can meet it without being broken.
42. People keep repeating the same coarse drama. Let the repetition teach contempt for applause.
43. The shortest road is nature's road: sound judgment, action for others, no lies.

Book FiveGet Up

1. At dawn, when the bed argues, answer it: I was made for human work, not warmth alone.
2. You can dismiss disturbing impressions at once. Peace is nearer than the story says.
3. If the act is right, do it. Do not wait for permission from timid observers.
4. Follow nature until breath returns to air and body returns to earth.
5. You may lack eloquence. You do not lack sincerity, restraint, labor, kindness, freedom, or courage.
6. Do good like the vine bears fruit: without scorekeeping, announcement, or memory.
7. Ask simply for what serves nature. Let desire be clean.
8. What happens is prescribed like medicine. Take the dose assigned by nature.
9. When you fail, return without drama. The art is practiced by returning.
10. Nature uses the unwilling too. Better to be used willingly.
11. Ask often: what am I doing with my soul right now?
12. Look at what crowds admire: meat, fluids, breath, reputation, robes, houses. Strip the glamour.
13. You are a shape and the stuff it is made of. Neither is ruined by changing.
14. Reason needs no applause. It completes itself by right action.
15. Your mind becomes the color of its repeated thoughts. Dye it deliberately.
16. Do not desire the impossible. It is impossible for bad men never to do bad things.
17. Men are near to us as kin, but outside us as causes. Help them. Do not surrender your mind.
18. Honor the highest thing in the world and the highest thing in yourself: reason serving the whole.
19. What does not harm the city cannot harm the citizen.
20. Keep your mind in command. Let the body report. Do not let it rule.
21. To live with the gods is to show them a soul content with its assignment.
22. Do not be angry at bad breath or bad character. Teach if possible. Endure if not.
23. Where there are people, there is noise, appetite, and disorder. Do your work anyway.
24. The world's reason turns all material to its use. Do the same.
25. Review your conduct toward gods, parents, brothers, wife, children, teachers, friends, servants, and enemies. Put it right.
26. Do not let untrained minds disturb the trained one.
27. Soon you will be ash or bones or a name. Most likely not even a name.
28. You can move well now if you choose the path of nature and justice.
29. If the wrong is not mine, it cannot corrupt me. If it is mine, correct it.
30. Let death find you alive in your post: free, social, obedient to nature.

Book SixThe Common City

1. The universe is pliable material in the hands of reason. Become the same.
2. Cold or warm, praised or blamed, dying or acting: keep the same mind.
3. Look inside. Do not let the surface quality hide the thing itself.
4. All substances hurry toward change. Either they disperse or are taken up again.
5. The best revenge is not to become like the offender.
6. Let this be your joy: move from one social act to the next with the gods in mind.
7. Your mind turns itself and makes events appear as it judges them.
8. Either a plan orders all, or atoms scatter all. Neither case justifies panic.
9. When pressure surrounds you, return quickly to yourself and recover rhythm.
10. You have a body, but you are not its servant. You have things outside you, but they are not your law.
11. Represent things nakedly: roasted meat is dead flesh, wine is grape juice, purple is dyed wool.
12. Crowds admire the lowest things. Raise your love to reason and justice.
13. Things hurry into being and out of being. The observer also hurries.
14. Plants live, animals perceive, men reason. Do not sink below your rank.
15. Elements move by nature. The rational soul moves by choice.
16. They seek praise from people they do not respect, and fear blame from minds they have not examined.
17. If a thing is humanly possible and right, believe it is possible for you.
18. If someone tears you in the contest, do not hate him. Keep fighting by the rules.
19. If correction is true, accept it. The man who changes toward truth is not harmed.
20. I will do my part. The rest belongs to causes outside me.
21. Alexander and his mule driver are equal in death. Rank stops at the grave.
22. Break the spell of your own name. Letters and reputation are not the man.
23. Do not forbid people to seek what they think is good. Teach them what good is.
24. Death ends sense impression, impulse, service to flesh, and the tug of passion.
25. If the body can endure this life, let it endure. If not, depart without resentment.
26. Live as a student of Antoninus: mild, firm, sober, careful, and public-spirited.
27. Wake the mind from its natural sleep. See again what you are and where you stand.
28. For the body, all is indifferent. For the mind, only its own acts matter.
29. A foot is good by acting as a foot. A human is good by acting as human.
30. Even tradesmen honor their craft. Will you honor humanity less than they honor tools?
31. Asia and Europe are corners. The sea is a drop. Athos is a clod. Time is a point.
32. Fit yourself to your lot and love the people assigned to you.
33. What is outside choice is not good or evil. Do not hand it the throne.
34. All work toward one result, willingly or unwillingly. Choose willingness.
35. If gods plan for me, it is good. If atoms, still I can be just.
36. What happens to each thing is useful to the whole. The thread was spun with it.
37. The theater, the arena, and public entertainments repeat the same stale forms. Do not be captured.
38. Review every kind of death. All roads end in the same silence.
39. Comfort yourself by recalling the virtues you have seen in others. Imitate them.
40. Do not complain that you are not larger, richer, or longer-lived. Use the measure given.
41. Persuade if you can. If not, act justly even among the unpersuaded.
42. The ambitious depend on another's act. The pleasure-seeker depends on sensation. The wise depend on their own action.
43. Exclude the opinion and the complaint loses its root.
44. Listen fully when someone speaks. Enter the speaker's mind without vanity.
45. What is not good for the hive is not good for the bee.
46. If sailors obey the pilot and patients obey the physician, obey nature.
47. Many born with you are already gone. Your turn is not strange.
48. The sick misread honey, the bitten fear water, children chase toys. Judgment colors the world.
49. No one can prevent you from living according to nature. Nothing can happen against the nature of the whole.
50. Examine the people you want to please, what they chase, what they avoid, and what judges them.

Book SevenStraightness

1. Wickedness is old. You have seen it before. Do not be amazed.
2. Your principles can live if you keep feeding them. Neglect starves them.
3. What crowds call happiness is fragile: bodies, houses, fame, food, sex, power. Look lower and the spell breaks.
4. Take things word by word, piece by piece. The whole frightens; the part does not.
5. If reason is enough for the task, use it. If not, ask help without shame.
6. Do not let the future trouble you. You will meet it with the same reason you have now.
7. Matter vanishes into the whole. Memory vanishes into time.
8. For a rational being, action according to nature is action according to reason.
9. Be straight, not straightened.
10. Rational beings are made for one another like limbs of one body.
11. External events touch what can be touched. Your mind decides the rest.
12. Whatever anyone does or says, remain good. Gold, emerald, and purple keep their color.
13. The mind cannot be harmed unless it makes harm for itself.
14. Happiness is a good spirit. A good spirit is a soul ordered by virtue.
15. Do not fear change. Nothing can live without it.
16. All things pass through the universe like a torrent. You saw yesterday. You will see tomorrow.
17. The whole changes all things into itself. Do not call the workshop evil.
18. An angry face is against nature and, repeated, can become permanent.
19. When someone wrongs you, ask what he thinks good and evil are. His error will explain him.
20. Do not suffer future pain in advance. Meet the present fact only.
21. Erase opinion. Stop impulse. Quench desire. Keep your mind in its own power.
22. All is ordered, or all is atoms. Neither case earns a complaint.
23. The true philosopher looks at all time and all substance, then judges human life small.
24. It is royal to do good and be spoken against.
25. Poets and crowds may mock virtue. Their noise does not alter the act.
26. If public life requires compromise with vice, leave it. If it permits justice, serve.
27. Review former ages. Marriages, births, deaths, wars, feasts, griefs. Same play, new actors.
28. Another is stronger, richer, or more fluent. Is he more just, modest, truthful, and free?
29. Where reason allows the act, do it without fear. Where reason forbids, stop.
30. Do not stare into other minds. Look where nature points: your present duty.
31. Live as if already complete and departing. The leftover years are extra.
32. Train the body to be composed: no twitching, no slackness, no theatrical posture.
33. Life is wrestling, not dancing. Stand ready for sudden blows.
34. Always ask what a thing is, what it is made of, and how long it lasts.
35. Pain is bearable if brief, bearable if long, and not a moral evil in either case.
36. Do not become toward misanthropes what misanthropes are toward mankind.
37. Socrates was not great because of stories. He was great because he mastered desire, fear, and public insult.
38. You can live unknown and still live well.
39. Go freely with what happens, since it was woven for you.
40. Perfection is this: spend each day as if it were the last, without frenzy, sloth, or pretense.
41. If the gods endure the wicked, can you not endure one day with them?
42. The rational and social faculty turns every obstacle into material for its work.
43. When you have done good and another has benefited, do not demand a third thing: praise.
44. The universe has long known how to use all things. Trust the craft that made you.

Book EightTest Every Action

1. Let this humble you: your life is almost spent and you are still not simple.
2. Before each act ask: what is this, why am I doing it, and what kind of person will it make me?
3. Alexander, Caesar, and Pompey are nothing beside a man who understands nature and obeys it.
4. People will keep doing what they do. Do not expect the fig tree to bear olives.
5. Nature makes and remakes. Her work is transformation.
6. Each nature is content when it moves rightly. Your nature moves rightly through reason and action for others.
7. You have no time to read everything. You have time not to be arrogant, false, envious, or ruled by appetite.
8. Stop complaining about court life. You carry your principles there or nowhere.
9. Repentance means you neglected something useful. Virtue never gives reason for regret.
10. Ask of every thing: what is it by itself? What is its substance? What is its cause?
11. When sleep grips you, remember that even this resistance belongs to a body, not to the mind in command.
12. Meet every impression with analysis: this is a thought, not yet a truth.
13. At first meeting, tell yourself: this person is kin, even if confused about good and evil.
14. Change your mind when corrected. That is freedom, not defeat.
15. If it were fully in your power, would you choose this event? If nature chose it, receive it.
16. Whatever falls returns to the source from which it came.
17. Everything exists for a function. Ask your own function and stop evading it.
18. Nature reaches her end in decay as much as in growth.
19. A ball thrown up or down is not better in either place. Status is the same kind of illusion.
20. Consider either the thing itself, the duty it asks, or the person involved. Then act justly.
21. Say: this happened justly. If you cannot see it, keep looking.
22. If the action serves the common good, do it. If not, leave it.
23. Bathing, eating, sex, sleep, office, power: ordinary matter under fancy names.
24. Lucilla buried Verus. Others buried Lucilla. The chain keeps moving.
25. The human good is to do the work proper to a human: justice, truth, temperance, courage.
26. If pain is evil, it is evil to the body. Let the body report without ruling.
27. Erase fantasy. Say: I can keep this soul honest, sober, and free right now.
28. Speak in Senate or street with the same intention: truth without ornament.
29. Courts die. Families die. Advisers die. Servants die. The whole household of power empties out.
30. Contract life to this one act. If it is right, you have enough.
31. Receive blessings without arrogance. Release them without grief.
32. A severed hand is ugly because cut from the body. A selfish man is the same.
33. The mind can turn obstacles into practice. Fire uses what is thrown into it.
34. Do not be overwhelmed by the whole pain. Divide it. The present piece is bearable.
35. Where are yesterday's famous servants and lovers? Dust, story, or nothing.
36. If you are sharp, be sharp in judgment, not in vanity.
37. No virtue opposes justice. Temperance opposes only pleasure.
38. Withdraw opinion and the complaint loses force.
39. What obstructs sense is bad for sense. What obstructs action for others can become material for that same action.
40. If your soul is round and solid, events cannot knock corners off it.
41. Why grieve? You have not willingly grieved others. Keep that freedom.
42. Give this present time to yourself. Those who chase later fame hand their life to strangers.
43. Throw me where you will. There I can keep my mind aligned with nature.
44. Is this worth corrupting the soul? If not, step over it.
45. Nothing happens to a human that is not human to bear.
46. The mind is free when it refuses to judge events as injuries.
47. Keep to first impressions: he insulted me, not he harmed me.
48. If the cucumber is bitter, throw it away. If thorns are in the path, go around. Do not add philosophy.
49. Be neither slack nor theatrical. Be steady, clean, and ready.
50. They may cut the body. They cannot cut your mind unless it joins them.
51. Who does not know the world does not know where he lives. Who does not know its purpose does not know himself.
52. Do not merely breathe with the world. Think and act with it.
53. One man's wickedness does not harm mankind. It harms his own soul first.
54. The sun pours itself out without exhaustion. Do the same with good action.
55. Fear of death is fear of no sensation or fear of different sensation. Neither is worthy of slavery.
56. Men exist for one another. Teach them or endure them.
57. The mind does not fly like a dart. It can pause, turn, and examine itself.
58. Enter another person's mind only to understand and help, not to flatter, fear, or envy.

Book NineJustice

1. Injustice is impiety. The universe made rational beings for one another.
2. A man would leave life more cleanly if he had not first been stained by lies, lust, luxury, anger, and cowardice.
3. Do not despise death. Receive it as one more natural act.
4. The sinner sins against himself. The unjust man wounds himself first.
5. If judgment is right, action is social, and disposition accepts events, you are well.
6. Wipe away fantasy. Stop impulse. Quench appetite. Keep your mind in command.
7. The universe has one soul. Rational creatures share one reason.
8. Man, god, and world bear fruit. The fruit of man is action for the common good.
9. Teach them if you can. If not, remember you were given patience for this.
10. Do not work like a condemned man. Work like a citizen.
11. Do not say: I escaped trouble. Say: I cast out the judgment that made it trouble.
12. What happens is ordinary: familiar in substance, brief in duration, cheap in matter.
13. Things do not enter the soul. They stand outside. Disturbance comes from judgment.
14. Virtue and vice are not feelings. They are acts.
15. A stone thrown upward is not wronged when it falls. Nature is not insult.
16. Look into the minds of those whose praise or blame you fear. Then be free.
17. All things are changing: cause into effect, substance into substance.
18. Another man's sin is another man's wound. Do not make it yours.
19. Every action and purpose has an end. Let yours be rational and social.
20. For the self: understand. For others: serve. For gods: trust.
21. You were made for the whole as the hand was made for the body.
22. Children's quarrels, dead bodies carried by busy souls: much human drama is this.
23. Go to the cause. Name it plainly. The event shrinks.
24. You have survived many imagined miseries. Survive this one by seeing it.
25. When accused falsely, examine the accuser's mind and your own conduct. Then continue.
26. All ages repeat the same things: weddings, wars, feasts, markets, sickness, death.
27. Earth covers us. Then earth changes too. No monument stands outside change.
28. The true statesman is not the talker of policy, but the servant of justice.
29. Look down from above: herds, armies, farms, storms, ships, births, funerals. The whole swarm is small.
30. Much that confines you is made by opinion. Drop opinion and space returns.
31. Hold all time and substance together in mind. Your grievance will not look large.
32. What are the minds of those who judge you? What are the things they chase? Let that answer ambition.
33. Loss is change. Nature loves change. Therefore do not call loss an enemy.
34. Common matter is low: water, dust, bone, blood, smell. Let this cure enchantment.
35. Complaining does not improve the event. It degrades the complainer.
36. To see the same things for a hundred years adds nothing. The pattern is already visible.
37. If he sinned, the harm is his. If he did not, why be angry?
38. If a plan rules, accept it. If atoms rule, still be upright.
39. Say to your mind: you are not dead, corrupted, or enslaved unless you choose it.
40. If the gods can help, trust them. If they cannot, do not waste life in accusation.
41. Even in illness, keep philosophy alive. The body may suffer while the mind remains in office.
42. Every craft minds its proper end. The craft of living joins reason to action for others.
43. When offended by shamelessness, ask whether the world can exist without shameless people. It cannot. Then meet the fact.

Book TenBecome What You Claim

1. Soul, when will you be good, simple, one, naked, and content with your own nature?
2. Live as nature's student. Desire what she brings. Do what she asks.
3. What happens fits you by nature. It was woven for your thread.
4. Correct the offender gently. Show him the error without hatred.
5. Whatever happens has always been preparing to happen. The causes are old.
6. Atoms or a plan: either way, be rational, act for others, and stand firm.
7. All parts of the whole move toward change. The universe remains young by remaking itself.
8. You call yourself good, modest, truthful, prudent, and magnanimous. Now be those names.
9. Home has trifles, abroad has wars. The wise man keeps one law in both places.
10. The spider exults over a fly, the hunter over a hare, the tyrant over a captive. Watch what victory makes you.
11. Set a method: examine things by substance, cause, and relation to the whole.
12. The soul released from the body sees how much of life was smoke.
13. Suspicion is usually useless. If you can ask, ask. If you cannot, do not invent.
14. The good man is both slow and quick, merry and grave, free and orderly.
15. Morning judgment is clean. Use it before appetite and fear crowd the room.
16. Give and take, nature says. The disciplined soul answers: as you will.
17. Live indifferent to what you cannot control, but not indifferent to justice.
18. Stop arguing what a good man is. Be one.
19. Keep before you both the whole and your tiny share in it.
20. Watch people through their day: eating, sleeping, plotting, flattering, fearing. Learn proportion.
21. What nature sends is best for the creature assigned to it.
22. The earth longs for rain. The whole longs to produce what follows. Desire with it, not against it.
23. Either continue here and serve, or depart. In both, accept the law.
24. The fugitive runs from law. The law is reason. Whoever abandons reason runs from his master.
25. Conception, birth, breath, appetite, decay: see the body without romance.
26. Everything now praised will soon be forgotten. The praisers too.
27. Like a sacrificial animal that squeals, the soul protests what nature is already doing. Stop squealing.
28. Before acting, ask: what is this action, and what will it make of me?
29. When someone offends, remember your own faults first.
30. Names from the past are only smoke. Their loves, wars, and reputations are gone.
31. What life are you choosing? If it is not disciplined, modest, and free, choose again.
32. Let no one truthfully say you are not simple, good, sincere, serious, and affectionate.
33. The infected fear everything. Do not let another's madness infect your judgment.
34. A good eye sees all visible things. A good mind accepts all assigned events.
35. No death is so fortunate that nobody is pleased by it. Do not live for mourners.
36. When someone acts, look at the inner motive. You will often pity instead of rage.
37. The mover within you is opinion. Rule that and you rule the life.

Book ElevenThe Reasonable Soul

1. The rational soul sees itself, shapes itself, harvests itself, and reaches its own end.
2. Music, dance, sport, and spectacle lose their spell when divided into parts. Do the same with life.
3. Keep the soul ready to depart, needing no oath, witness, or audience.
4. Have I done something for the common good? Then I have benefited. Keep this before you.
5. Tragedy teaches that human events are old. Comedy teaches that our vanities are ridiculous.
6. No life fits philosophy better than the one you are already in, if you use it.
7. A branch cut from its neighbor is cut from the whole tree. A man cut from mankind is the same.
8. If someone cuts himself off, remain ready to graft him back through patience and justice.
9. Nature is not worse than art. If art adapts material, nature adapts all.
10. The things you fear or desire are outside. The judging thing is inside.
11. The soul is a sphere when it neither reaches out in craving nor collapses inward in fear.
12. If someone despises me, that is his work. Mine is to remain worthy of respect.
13. Men despise one another and still seek one another's applause. See the absurdity.
14. Do not announce your sincerity. Be sincere.
15. Happiness is the inward power of a soul ordered by nature.
16. Examine every thing: source, material, change, purpose, and duration.
17. Four faults of the mind: aimless thought, unsocial thought, words spoken from passion, and handing the mind to the body's pleasure. Catch each and wipe it out.
18. The elements in you want to return upward or downward. Let them. You keep the mind upright.
19. A life without one ruling aim is scattered, even if energetic.
20. Remember the country mouse and city mouse. Much luxury is only frightened commotion.
21. Socrates called common opinions monsters. Treat them as such until reason tests them.
22. The Spartans gave strangers shade and sat in the sun. Honor can choose discomfort.
23. Socrates refused invitations that would cost him freedom. Learn the price before accepting.
24. Keep sacred words ready in the morning: simplicity, justice, courage, restraint.
25. Look at the stars at dawn. Remember order before men begin making noise.
26. Remember Socrates under hardship: composed in cold, hunger, danger, and insult.
27. Learn before you claim to know. Obey before you claim mastery.
28. Even virtue will be accused. Do not let accusation govern virtue.
29. Longing for what the season cannot give is childish. Receive the season.
30. When kissing your child, remember: mortal.
31. No thief can steal the will. Only the will can surrender itself.

Book TwelvePresent Judgment

1. What you chase later can be yours now: leave the past, trust the future to the order of things, and make the present just.
2. The gods see your mind bare. Stop hiding behind flesh, clothes, rank, and reputation.
3. Everyone loves himself more than others, yet values others' opinions more than his own. Correct this.
4. The gods arranged even death well. Trust that what they assigned the good was just.
5. Practice what seems impossible. Capacity grows under use.
6. Meditate on the relation between yourself and the whole, on death, on change, and on the smallness of fame.
7. Divide things into matter, cause, and judgment. Much fear cannot survive division.
8. Happy is the man who can leave life now with his soul clean.
9. What happens follows nature. What follows nature is not strange.
10. How ridiculous to be surprised by the world's fruits. Fig trees bear figs. The world bears events.
11. Fate, a plan, or atoms: in each case, the work remains yours.
12. When insulted, think of the insulter's judgment. He is acting from what he thinks good.
13. If it is not right, do not do it. If it is not true, do not say it.
14. At every appearance, look at the thing itself and at the part of you it touches.
15. Understand that something stronger than pleasure, pain, fame, and death lives within you.
16. All is opinion, and opinion is yours. Guard the source.
17. An action paused is not harmed by pausing. Return to the work without resentment.
18. Keep three things ready: justice in action, truth in speech, and acceptance of what is assigned.
19. Cast away opinion and you are safe. Who stops you? The one who gave the opinion.
20. Think of those consumed by one passion: anger, fame, wealth, lust, power. Where are they now?
21. If asked where you have seen the gods, answer: in the order of things and in the mind that can honor it.
22. Happiness is knowing the nature of the whole, your own nature, and the relation between them.
23. One sunlight, though broken by walls. One substance, though divided into bodies. One reason, though carried by many minds.
24. Do you want long life, sensation, appetite, growth, speech, thought? For what? Use life, do not hoard it.
25. Your share of eternity is tiny. Your share of earth is tiny. Your fame lives in passing minds. Be free.
26. Ask: what is my mind doing now? Is it fear, suspicion, appetite, justice, or reason?
27. To despise death, remember what life is made of: an olive falls ripe from the tree, blessing the earth that bore it.
28. You played your part in the great state. Three acts or five, the length was never yours to fix. When you are dismissed, leave the stage without complaint. The one who releases you is satisfied. Go satisfied.

Working RuleHow To Read It

This is a laconic translation, not a critical edition.

The rule is simple: keep the argument, cut the ornament, sharpen the command.

No self-help fog. No fake antiquity. No borrowed modern translator's music.

Marcus wrote to govern himself. Read it that way.