Taken from "The Meditations"
Book 8. 5.
The first step: don't be anxious. Nature controls it all. And before long you'll be no one, nowhere, like Hadrian, like Augustus. The second step: Concentrate on what you have to do. Fix your eyes on it. Remind yourself that your task is to be a good human being, remind yourself what nature demands of people. Then do it, without hesitation, and speak the truth as you see it. But with kindness. With humility. Without hipocrisy.
Book 8. 6.
Nature' job: to shift things else where, to transform them, to pick them up and move them here and there. Constant alteration. But not to worry: there's nothing new here. Everything is familiar. Even the proportions are unchanged.
Book 8. 10.
Remorse is annoyance at yourself for having passed up something that's to your benefit. But if it's to your benefit it must be good - something truly good person would be concerned about. But no truly good person would feel remorse at passing up pleasure. So it cannot be to your benefit, or good.
Book 8. 12.
When you have trouble getting out of bed in the morning, remember that your defining characteristic - what defines a human being - is to work with others. Even animals know how to sleep. And it's characteristic activity that's the more natural one - more innate and more satisfying.
Book 8. 19.
Everything is here for a purpose, from horses to vine shoots. What's surprising about that? Even the sun will tell you, "I have a purpose," and the other gods as well. And why were you born? For pleasure? See if that answer will stand up to questioning.
Book 8. 26.
Joy for humans lies in human actions. Human actions: kindness to others, contempt for the senses, the interrogation of appearances, observation of nature, and of events in nature.
Book 8. 27.
Three relationhips:
1. with the body you inhabit
2. with the divine, the cause of everything in all things
3. with the people around you.
Book 8. 28.
Either pain affects the body (which is the body's problem), or it affects the soul. But the soul can choose not to be affected, preserving its own serenity, its own tranquility. All our decisions, urges, desires, aversions lie within. No evil can touch them.
Book 8. 32.
You have to assemble your life yourself - action by action. And be satisfied if each one achieves its goal, as far as it can. No one can keep that from happening.
- But there are external obstacles...
Not to behaving with justice, self control, and good sense.
- Well, perhaps to some more concrete actions.
But if you accept the obstacle and work with what you're given, an alternative will present itself, another piece of what you're trying to assemble. Action by action.
33.
To accept it without arrogance, to let it go with indifference.
Book 8. 34.
Have you ever seen a severed hand or foot, or a decapitated head, jut lying somewhere far away from the body it belonged to? That's what we do to ourselves - or try to - when we rebel against what happens to us, when we segregate ourselves. Or when we do something selfish.
You have torn yourself away from unity, your natural state, one you were born to share in. Now you have cut yourself off from it.
But you have one advantage here, you can reattach yourself. A privilege God has granted to no other part of no other whole - to be separated, cut away, and reunited. Look how He's singled us out. He's allowed us not to be broken off in the first place, and when we are He's allowed us to return, to graft ourselves back on, and take up our old position once again: part of a whole.
Book 8. 36.
Don't let your imagination be crushed by life as a whole. Don't try to picture anything bad that could possibly happen. Stick with the situations at hand, and ask, why is this so unbearable? Why can't I endure it? You'll be embarrassed to answer.
Then remind yourself that the past and future have no power over you. Only the present- and even that can be minimised. Just mark off its limits. And if your mind tries to claim that it can't hold out against that - well then, heaps shame upon it.
Book 8. 39.
To the best of my judgment, when I look at the human character, I see no virtue placed there to counter justice. But I see one to counter pleasure: self-control.
Book 8. 40.
Stop perceiving the pain you imagine and you'll remain completely unaffected.
- "You?"
Your logos.
- But I am not just my logos.
Fine, just don't let the logos be injured. If everything else is, let it decide that for itself.
Book 8. 46.
What humans experience i part of human experience. Nothing that can happen is unusual or unnatural, and there's no sense in complaining. Nature does not make us endure the unendurable.
Book 8. 47.
External things are not the problem. It's your assessment of them. Which you can erase right now. If the problem is something in your own character, who's stopping you from setting your mind straight? And if it's that you're not doing something you think you should be, why not just do it?
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