- Properties of the rational mind:
- Self-perception, Self-examination
- It can make of itself whatever it wants
- It has a will. It benefits from its own actions.
- It can die feeling fulfilled.
- Affection
- Truthfulness
- Humility
- For physical things and sensations: Look at the individual parts and components. Analyze—are you really powerless against them? Then, move from analysis to indifference.
- A resolute soul is resolute in the face of death of its own accord.
What is thy profession? To be good. And how should this be well brought to pass, but by certain theorems and doctrines; some Concerning the nature of the Universe and some Concerning the proper and particular constitution of man.
- Tragedy teaches us what can happen, and that it happens inevitability, and that we have to endure them. Comedy teaches us to keep our ego in check. 1
A branch cut away from the branch beside it is simultaneously cut away from the whole tree. So too a human being separated from another is cut loose from the whole community. […]
We can reattach ourselves and become once more components of the whole.
But if the rupture is too often repeated, it makes the severed part hard to reconnect, and to restore.
- Don’t let people stop you from living a virtuous life, but also don’t hold them in contempt.
Because anger, too, is weakness, as much as breaking down and giving up the struggle. Both are deserters: the man who breaks and runs, and the one who lets himself be alienated from his fellow humans.
It’s the pursuit of these things, and your attempts to avoid them, that leave you in such turmoil. And yet they aren’t seeking you out; you are the one seeking them.
Suspend judgment about them. And at once they will lie still, and you will be freed from fleeing and pursuing.
For what hurt can it be unto thee whatsoever any man else doth, as long as thou mayest do that which is proper and suitable to thine own nature?
- And that means to live a genuine life. To not be apologetic of one’s authentic disposition and nature.
They contemn one another, and yet they seek to please one another: and whilest they seek to surpass one another in worldly pomp and greatness, they must debase and prostitute themselves in their better part one to another.
False friendship is the worst. Avoid it at all costs. If you’re honest and straightforward and mean well, it should show in your eyes. It should be unmistakable.
- And to do that is to alter our perceptions.
It is we who generate the judgments—inscribing them on ourselves. And we don’t have to. We could leave the page blank—and if a mark slips through, erase it instantly. […] None of us is forbidden to pursue our own good.
A lot of things are means to some other end. You have to know an awful lot before you can judge other people’s actions with real understanding.
How much more damage anger and grief do than the things that cause them […] There’s nothing manly about rage. It’s courtesy and kindness that define a human being—and a man
That to expect bad people not to injure others is crazy. It’s to ask the impossible. And to let them behave like that to other people but expect them to exempt you is arrogant—the act of a tyrant.
- Avoid the following kinds of thoughts: Unnecessary thoughts, Destructive thoughts, Disingenuous thoughts, and Self-Indulgent thoughts
“If you don’t have a consistent goal in life, you can’t live it in a consistent way.”
Unhelpful, unless you specify a goal. There is no common benchmark for all the things that people think are good—except for a few, the ones that affect us all.
So the goal should be a common one—a civic one. If you direct all your energies toward that, your actions will be consistent. And so will you.
Links
Footnotes
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Aurelius laments that new comedy focuses on realism instead which leads to the value of the Comedy as a play being lost. ↩