“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts” is Marcus, freely translated

The verdict

The line often turns up on lists of fake Stoic quotes, but it isn’t invented: it has a translator, a date and a section number. The wording, though, is more Collier’s than Marcus’s.

Where the line comes from

The sentence comes from The Emperor Marcus Antoninus His Conversation with Himself (1701), a translation of the Meditations by the English clergyman Jeremy Collier (Britannica (opens in a new tab)). In Book 3, section 9, in modern spelling and punctuation, Collier writes: “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.” His next sentence says that to manage this you must be wary in your assent, obedient to the gods and benevolent to mankind. The version that circulates today keeps the first clause and drops the rest.

George Long, whose 1862 translation this site quotes, called Collier’s version coarse and vulgar in his preface. Here is the same section in Long’s English:

Clause by clause:

Marcus’s subject is narrower than “your thoughts.” It is the power to form opinions: to judge what a thing is and whether it is good or bad. What depends on that power, in Long’s English, is whether your mind admits opinions at odds with nature and reason. Collier’s happiness lets a modern reader hear a feeling where Marcus was talking about judgment.

Some sites give 5.16 as the source instead. The mix-up is understandable: Collier’s own 5.16 also turns on the quality of what you think about, and so does Gregory Hays’s popular 2002 translation of it. And 5.16 is the closer match for what most people mean by the line.

Meditations 5.16 in Long’s words

Take it a clause at a time.

“Such as are thy habitual thoughts.” The key word is habitual. One bitter thought after a bad meeting doesn’t make anyone bitter. The thought you return to every day does. What it shapes is “the character of thy mind” (Meditations 5.16): a settled way of seeing and acting, not a passing mood.

“The soul is dyed by the thoughts.” Dye doesn’t sit on the surface of cloth; it gets into the fibers and stays there. The image carries a warning. The mind is always taking on some color, whether or not you pick it.

“Dye it then with a continuous series of such thoughts.” Here the observation becomes an instruction, and series is the word to notice: not one good thought, but the same kind of thought again and again.

“Where a man can live, there he can also live well.” The sample thought Marcus picks isn’t cheerful. It is an argument: living well depends on how you live, not on where, so any place you can live is a place you can live well.

“But he must live in a palace.” Marcus raises the objection and answers it in the next breath. The example was close to home: he lived at court, and in 6.12 he calls the court his stepmother and philosophy his mother, and tells himself to return to philosophy often. Put your own circumstance in the sentence: you can live well in this job, in this town.

Past the lines above, Marcus offers a second thought for the dye: an argument that the good of a reasoning creature is society (Meditations 5.16). The series he means isn’t a stock of comforting phrases. It is a set of reasons about what is good.

What the line means, read as a Stoic would

Two phrases in the popular version need translating back.

“Happiness.” The Greek word for the goal of life, eudaimonia, is usually translated as happiness, but it means flourishing or living well, not feeling good. The Stoics held that virtue is necessary and sufficient for it (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)). Read that way, Collier’s sentence is sound Stoicism: whether your life goes well depends on how you judge. Read as advice to think cheerful thoughts so that you feel happy, it says something Marcus doesn’t.

“The quality of your thoughts.” For Marcus a good thought is a true one, not a pleasant one. Say a colleague answers your proposal with two lines: “Not convinced. Let’s discuss.” Positive thinking tells you it’s probably fine. The Stoic questions are what has actually happened (a short email), whether it is as bad as your first reaction says, and what is up to you (your reply, and how you prepare). That is Collier’s wariness in assent: not agreeing to the first story your mind tells.

Because 5.16 is about habit, it argues for regular practice more than for a slogan. One Stoic form of that practice is the Evening Examination: Seneca describes going over his whole day each night before sleep (On Anger 3.36), so the day’s judgments get looked at before they set.

How to quote it correctly

If you like Collier’s sentence, use it, and credit the translator:

• “The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts” (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 3.9, trans. Jeremy Collier, 1701)

If you want Marcus’s thought in a closer translation:

• “the soul is dyed by the thoughts” (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 5.16, trans. George Long, 1862)
• “Reverence the faculty which produces opinion” (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 3.9, trans. George Long, 1862)

Both translations are in the public domain, and Long’s is free at Project Gutenberg (opens in a new tab). Hays’s version is still under copyright. See translations of the Meditations for why the wordings differ and how to cite the Stoics for the format.

To test another line credited to Marcus, Epictetus or Seneca, use the quote checker.