Marcus Aurelius quotes, with citations

We chose sections that the site’s other quote pages don’t show, so the famous ones, such as the morning passage in 2.1, are linked further down instead of repeated here. Under each passage is a short note in our own words. Long’s English is Victorian, with thou and thee, so a line you know from a modern translation will read differently; which translation to read explains why.

On life and how to live it

Marcus wrote to himself, so his thoughts about life arrive as short instructions rather than as theory.

The shortest rule in the book covers the two things you do all day: act and speak. It is easy to agree with and hard to keep through a single afternoon, because it bites on small things: the expense report rounded up, the “almost there” text sent from the couch, the compliment you don’t mean. Long prints a few more words after it in brackets, with a note that something is wrong or missing there, so we stop where the text is sound.

It is tempting to stop at “passing every day as the last” (Meditations 7.69) and hear an order to cram the day with experiences. The sentence goes on. A good last day, for Marcus, is neither frantic nor sluggish, and nothing in it is put on for show. It sounds less like a bucket list than an ordinary Tuesday done with full attention and no pretending.

A dancer performs steps worked out in advance. A wrestler has to answer whatever comes at him, without warning. Marcus limits the comparison with care, “in respect of this” (Meditations 7.61): living well isn’t like a fight in every way, but it does call for a wrestler’s readiness. The canceled flight and the call from school on the morning of your presentation come with no choreography. What you can have is footing.

A stranger, in Long’s English, is someone who doesn’t know the place he lives in. Delays, rudeness, illness and loss are not interruptions of life but ordinary parts of it, and anyone who has lived a few decades has met them all before. The target is the surprise. Being sorry about what happened, or busy repairing it, is another matter; being astonished that it happened at all is what Marcus calls ridiculous.

On the mind and its judgments

One of Marcus’s most frequent themes is that events don’t disturb us by themselves; our judgments about them do. These three passages put it three ways.

This reads like a list of headings for a review session, and each item gets fuller treatment elsewhere in the book. Use it as a checklist for anything you badly want or dread: what is it with the packaging removed, what is it for, and who is really causing your unease? Marcus’s phrasing gives the answer: the uneasy person is the cause. The last item, “everything is opinion” (Meditations 12.8), doesn’t mean nothing is true. It means that the weight a thing has for you comes from your judgment of it.

Long’s “indifferent” is a technical term. For the Stoics, things like money, health and reputation are neither good nor bad in themselves; only virtue and vice are (more on this in preferred indifferents). The image that follows is the useful part. Things don’t arrive carrying opinions about themselves. We “write them in ourselves” (Meditations 11.16), and what we wrote we can wipe out. I’m bad at this job, composed after one rough review, is a sentence you wrote. Marcus adds an odd but real comfort: the effort is only needed for a short time, because life will soon be over.

Two sentences, three steps: the opinion, the complaint, the harm. It can sound like denial, as if a scratched car or a cutting remark were nothing. Marcus’s point is about what counts as harm. In the next section, 4.8, he gives his test, which in our paraphrase runs: whatever doesn’t make you a worse person doesn’t make your life worse or harm you. The paint is damaged. Whether you are is a judgment you add.

On work and duty

Marcus was emperor, and many of his notes are about doing the day’s work properly whatever the conditions.

A two-step method. First, don’t be thrown: what happens is part of nature, and soon, like Hadrian and Augustus before him, you will be “nobody and nowhere” (Meditations 8.5). Second, look straight at the task, keep in mind that what is asked of you is goodness, and get on with it without veering off. The last clause is good advice for any meeting: say what seems most just, but with good will and modesty, and without pretending.

The conditions change; the job doesn’t. Cold or warm, rested or tired, praised or criticized: if you are doing what you should, none of it changes what doing it well means. The report written on four hours’ sleep still has to be a good report. Then Marcus adds the hardest condition of all, dying, and treats it as one more act of life, to be done well like the rest.

Plato’s Republic describes an ideal city, and here an emperor tells himself not to expect one. Do what is in front of you without checking whether anyone is watching, and count it as no small matter when “the smallest thing goes on well” (Meditations 9.29). It is a corrective for anyone trying to improve a team, a school or a family: change comes in small pieces, and other people’s opinions aren’t yours to rewrite.

On other people

Other people come up again and again in the Meditations: as colleagues, as irritations, and as the reason for the work.

Two options, and no third. When someone keeps getting it wrong, you can show them a better way or you can put up with them. Contempt, gossip and the silent treatment aren’t on the list. The first sentence explains why: if people exist for one another, the coworker who keeps making the same mistake is part of your work, not an interruption of it.

Long before group chats, Marcus listed the questions that can eat an afternoon: what is she doing, why did he say that, what are they planning. His exception matters. Thinking about others is fine when it serves “some object of common utility” (Meditations 3.4), that is, when you are trying to help them or work with them. Later in the same section he proposes a test, which in our paraphrase is this: think only what you could say aloud at once if someone asked what was on your mind.

Marcus spots a contradiction: we love ourselves more than anyone, yet trust other people’s opinion of us more than our own. His thought experiment shows it. Told to think nothing we wouldn’t say aloud the moment we thought it, we couldn’t last a day, and the reason is the neighbors. It is the test from 3.4 again, this time used to expose the habit, and worth rereading the next time a few comments online outweigh your own considered view of your work.

On character

The last three are about the kind of person Marcus wanted to be, and two of them share an image: a spring that never runs dry.

Read the word truly carefully. Marcus doesn’t ask that nobody ever call him bad; anyone can say anything, and what people say is not in your power. He asks that nobody be able to say it truthfully, and that is in your power. If someone calls you careless or unkind, the useful question isn’t how to make them stop but whether they are right.

The passage opens with a list of faults that hasn’t dated: sluggishness in what you do, muddle in how you talk, drift in how you think, a quarrel inside yourself, and days so full that no leisure is left. Then the image. Someone curses a clear spring or throws mud into it, and the spring keeps sending up water and carries the mud away. Long’s bracketed words, “not a mere well”, sharpen the point: Marcus wants a source that keeps renewing itself, not a store of water that can run low. Becoming one is a practice repeated “hourly” (Meditations 8.51), not a single decision.

The same spring, seen from the other side. In 8.51 the water clears what others throw in; here it has to be dug for. The condition at the end carries the weight: the good keeps coming up “if thou wilt ever dig” (Meditations 7.59), which makes it work, and work you keep doing.

His best-known passages, and where to read them

The sections you are most likely to have seen quoted are shown on other pages of this site, each with a fuller note. Here is where to find them.

For a way into the whole book, start with how to read the Meditations.

Famous lines he didn’t write

A good share of what circulates under Marcus’s name is film dialogue, a modern summary of a real passage, or a sentence nobody can trace. There is a quick test: ask for the book and section. A genuine line from the Meditations has one, and you can look it up in any translation. The pages below give some of the most-shared lines a verdict and set each beside what he actually wrote.

To check a line that isn’t listed, use the quote checker: it searches the whole of Long’s Meditations.

How to cite the Meditations

Cite the Meditations by book and section. The notes are divided into twelve books and nearly 500 numbered sections, and nearly every edition and translation keeps the same numbers, so Meditations 8.59 finds the same two sentences in Long’s English, in a modern translation or in the Greek. A page number works only for readers holding your printing.

Finding a section in Long. In Long’s translation, including the free text on Project Gutenberg (opens in a new tab), each book opens with a Roman numeral and the sections are numbered from 2. The first section of every book carries no number: 6.1 is the unnumbered paragraph under the heading VI. Older books and notes often write the book number in Roman numerals as well, so when Long’s biographical sketch of Marcus cites i. 17, it means 1.17.

When the numbers don’t match. The numbering is old and nearly, but not perfectly, fixed. Long notes that the first printed edition and other older editions put the first three sections of Book 2 at the end of Book 1, and translators occasionally split or join a section. If a reference seems off, check the sections on either side.

Name the translator. Marcus wrote in Greek, so the English words belong to whoever translated them. Every passage on this page is George Long’s, from 1862. If you quote a modern translation instead, cite that one by translator and year, because its wording will differ.

Three forms that work:

• In running text: “If it is not right, do not do it” (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 12.17, trans. George Long, 1862).
• After the first citation: (Meditations 12.17), or simply (12.17) when it is clear whose book you mean.
• In a bibliography: Marcus Aurelius. The Thoughts of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. Translated by George Long, 1862. Project Gutenberg, eBook #15877.

If you are asked for a page. Most style guides accept the traditional numbers for ancient texts, but a teacher or editor may still want a page. Give the page of the edition you used alongside the book and section, and list that edition in your bibliography. Online texts, Long’s on Project Gutenberg among them, have no page numbers to give.

The Copy with citation button under every passage on this page copies the words with the author, work, section, translator and year, ready to paste.

Read Marcus one passage at a time

The Meditations rewards rereading more than finishing. How to read the Meditations suggests where to start and how to take a few sections a day, and the page on Marcus Aurelius covers his life and the teachers he thanks in Book 1.

Today’s teaching shows the passage the Stoic Practice app sets for today’s date, with its plain-English explanation and practice. Of the app’s 365 daily teachings, 117 come from the Meditations, seven of the passages on this page among them.