Famous Quotes

Quotes by Marcus Aurelius

• A man's worth is no greater than his ambitions.
• Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart.
• Adapt yourself to the things among which your lot has been cast and love sincerely the fellow creatures with whom destiny has ordained that you shall live.
• Anger cannot be dishonest.
• Anything in any way beautiful derives its beauty from itself and asks nothing beyond itself. Praise is no part of it, for nothing is made worse or better by praise.
• Aptitude found in the understanding and is often inherited. Genius coming from reason and imagination, rarely.
• Be content with what you are, and wish not change nor dread your last day, nor long for it.
• Because your own strength is unequal to the task, do not assume that it is beyond the powers of man but if anything is within the powers and province of man, believe that it is within your own compass also.
• Begin - to begin is half the work, let half still remain again begin this, and thou wilt have finished.
• Death is a release from the impressions of the senses, and from desires that make us their puppets, and from the vagaries of the mind, and from the hard service of the flesh.
• Death, like birth, is a secret of Nature.
• Despise not death, but welcome it, for nature wills it like all else.
• Dig within. Within is the wellspring of Good and it is always ready to bubble up, if you just dig.
• Do every act of your life as if it were your last.
• Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.
• Forward, as occasion offers. Never look round to see whether any shall note it... Be satisfied with success in even the smallest matter, and think that even such a result is no trifle.
• Here is the rule to remember in the future, When anything tempts you to be bitter: not, 'This is a misfortune' but 'To bear this worthily is good fortune.'
• How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.
• How much time he saves who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks.
• I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinions of himself than on the opinions of others.
• It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.
• Let it be your constant method to look into the design of people's actions, and see what they would be at, as often as it is practicable and to make this custom the more significant, practice it first upon yourself.
• Let men see, let them know, a real man, who lives as he was meant to live.
• Life is neither good or evil, but only a place for good and evil.
• Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too.
• Look within. Within is the fountain of good, and it will ever bubble up, if thou wilt ever dig.
• Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature's delight.
• Men exist for the sake of one another.
• Natural ability without education has more often raised a man to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.
• Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.
• Nothing happens to any man that he is not formed by nature to bear.
• Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life.
• Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the Universe loves nothing so much as to change the things which are, and to make new things like them.
• Our life is what our thoughts make it.
• That which is not good for the bee-hive cannot be good for the bees.
• The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing.
• The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.
• The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.