Marcus Aurelius

"The memory of everything is very soon overwhelmed in time."

"Perfection of character is this: to live each day as if it were your last, without frenzy, without apathy, without pretence."

"It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live."

"The things you think about determine the quality of your mind."

"Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future too."

"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."

"Our life is what our thoughts make it."

"When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love ..."

"Every living organism is fulfilled when it follows the right path for its own nature."

"Don’t let yourself forget how many doctors have died, furrowing their brows over how many deathbeds. How many astrologers, after pompous forecasts about others’ ends. How many philosophers, after endless disquisitions on death and immortality. How many warriors, after inflicting thousands of casualties themselves. How many tyrants, after abusing the power of life and death atrociously, as if they were themselves immortal. How many whole cities have met their end: Helike, Pompeii, Herculaneum, and countless others. And all the ones you know yourself, one after another. One who laid out another for burial, and was buried himself, and then the man who buried him - all in the same short space of time. In short, know this: Human lives are brief and trivial. Yesterday a blob of semen; tomorrow embalming fluid, ash. To pass through this brief life as nature demands. To give it up without complaint. Like an olive that ripens and falls. Praising its mother, thanking the tree it grew on."

"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."

"Casting aside other things, hold to the precious few; and besides bear in mind that every man lives only the present, which is an indivisible point, and that all the rest of his life is either past or is uncertain. Brief is man's life and small the nook of the earth where he lives; brief, too, is the longest posthumous fame, buoyed only by a succession of poor human beings who will very soon die and who know little of themselves, much less of someone who died long ago."

"“When people injure you, ask yourself what good or harm they thought would come of it. If you understand that, you'll feel sympathy rather than outrage or anger. Your sense of good and evil may be the same as theirs, or near it, in which case you have to excuse them. Or your sense of good and evil may differ from theirs. In which case they're misguided and deserve your compassion. Is that so hard?”"

"“What we cannot bear removes us from life; what remains can be borne.”"

"“Think of your many years of procrastination; how the gods have repeatedly granted you further periods of grace, of which you have taken no advantage. It is time now to realise the nature of the universe to which you belong, and of that controlling Power whose offspring you are; and to understand that your time has a limit set to it. Use it, then, to advance your enlightenment; or it will be gone, and never in your power again.”"

"“The things you think about determine the quality of your mind.”"

"“Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future too.”"

"Think of your many years of procrastination; how the gods have repeatedly granted you further periods of grace, of which you have taken no advantage. It is time now to realise the nature of the universe to which you belong, and of that controlling Power whose offspring you are; and to understand that your time has a limit set to it. Use it, then, to advance your enlightenment; or it will be gone, and never in your power again."

"Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too."

"The universe is change our life is what our thoughts make it."