Meditations Quotes

“You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”

“Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.”

“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.”

“When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive — to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.”

“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

“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-centered, irritable. (Hays translation)”

“Search men's governing principles, and consider the wise, what they shun and what they cleave to.”

“Everywhere and at all times it is in thy power piously to acquiesce in thy present condition, and to behave justly to those who are about thee, and to exert thy skill upon thy present thoughts, that nothing shall steal into them without being well examined.”

“A wrongdoer is often a man who has left something undone, not always one who has done something.”

“Be not as one that hath ten thousand years to live; death is nigh at hand: while thou livest, while thou hast time, be good.”

“Of Fronto, to how much envy and fraud and hypocrisy the state of a tyrannous king is subject unto, and how they who are commonly called [Eupatridas Gk.], i.e. nobly born, are in some sort incapable, or void of natural affection.”

“Not to display anger or other emotions. To be free of passion and yet full of love. (Hays translation)”

“He was a man who looked at what ought to be done, not to the reputation which is got by a man's acts.”

“Whatever this is that I am, it is flesh and a little spirit and an intelligence. (Hays translation)”

“What is divine is full of Providence. Even chance is not divorced from nature, from the inweaving and enfolding of things governed by Providence. Everything proceeds from it. (Hays translation)”

“There is a limit to the time assigned you, and if you don't use it to free yourself it will be gone and never return. (Hays translation)”

“You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life? If you can manage this, that's all even the gods can ask of you. (Hays translation)”

“Give thyself time to learn something new and good, and cease to be whirled around.”

“This thou must always bear in mind, what is the nature of the whole...”

“You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think. (Hays translation)”

“Yet living and dying, honour and dishonour, pain and pleasure, riches and poverty, and so forth are equally the lot of good men and bad. Things like these neither elevate nor degrade; and therefore they are no more good than they are evil.”

“The longest-lived and the shortest-lived man, when they come to die, lose one and the same thing.”

“No state sorrier than that of the man who keeps up a continual round, and pries into "the secrets of the nether world," as saith the poet, and is curious in conjecture of what is in his neighbour's heart.”

“Though thou be destined to live three thousand years and as many myriads besides, yet remember that no man loseth other life than that which he liveth, nor liveth other than that which he loseth.”

“As for life, it is a battle and a sojourning in a strange land; but the fame that comes after is oblivion.”

“Waste not the remnant of thy life in those imaginations touching other folk, whereby thou contributest not to the common weal.”

“The lot assigned to every man is suited to him, and suits him to itself.”

“Be not unwilling in what thou doest, neither selfish nor unadvised nor obstinate; let not over-refinement deck out thy thought; be not wordy nor a busybody.”