“The obstacle is the way”: what Marcus Aurelius actually wrote

The verdict

This is one of the famous Marcus lines that passes the check. Unlike the lines on our list of fake Stoic quotes, it translates something he actually wrote. What shifts in the short version is the meaning. Cut to five words, it sounds like a promise that any obstacle leads to success if you push hard enough. Marcus’s claim is narrower: nothing in your way can stop you from acting well, because the obstacle itself gives you something to act well on.

Meditations 5.20 in full

Marcus Aurelius wrote the Meditations in Greek, as private notes to himself, and 5.20 is one short paragraph. Here it is complete in George Long’s 1862 translation, which is in the public domain:

Long’s English is old and the paragraph is compressed, so here it is a phrase at a time.

“In one respect man is the nearest thing to me.” Marcus starts with people, not problems. In this first respect, nothing comes closer to him than other people, and he owes them two things: to “do good to men and endure them” (Meditations 5.20). Endure here means bear with: put up with them, faults and all. The opening of Book 2 gives his reason: people are made to work together, like hands and feet (Meditations 2.1).

“One of the things which are indifferent.” The second sentence covers the times when someone blocks “my proper acts,” the things that are his to do. In that respect, and only in that respect, the person becomes indifferent. In Stoic usage the word sorts things rather than describing a mood: health, money and what other people do are all indifferent, because none of them can by itself make you good or bad (see preferred indifferents). So the person, taken as an obstruction, goes in the same class as “the sun or wind or a wild beast” (Meditations 5.20). You don’t resent a headwind or take a charging animal personally. You plan around it. Both sentences hold at once. The colleague who has sat on your approval for three weeks is still someone you owe decency, and the delay itself belongs with the wind.

“No impediments to my affects and disposition.” This is the hinge. Other people can stop the action: the project, the trip, the sale. They can’t reach what Long calls his affects and disposition, the inner side of acting: what he is aiming at and the state of mind he acts from. Two things keep that side free. The first is “acting conditionally,” Long’s phrase for an aim held with a reservation, an allowance for being stopped built in from the start. Marcus never staked himself on the outcome, so being stopped leaves what he was really after intact. Modern writers call this the reserve clause. The second is “changing”: when one act is blocked, he turns to another. In Meditations 6.50 he spells this out. In our paraphrase: try to persuade people, and if someone blocks you by force, accept it calmly and use the obstacle to practice some other virtue, remembering that you made the attempt with a reservation.

“Every hindrance to its activity into an aid.” The closing clauses say the same thing three times, and the third is the line the slogan comes from: “an obstacle on the road helps us on this road” (Meditations 5.20). Notice which road. Marcus has been talking about his proper acts, not his plans. The obstacle may well end the plan; the three-week delay might sink the project. What it can’t do is close off the next right act, and often it creates one: the patience the delay calls for, a straight account of it to your team instead of blaming the colleague, the time you now have to fix the weakest part of the proposal. In that sense the hindrance really has been made “a furtherance to an act.”

Read whole, then, 5.20 is about the people who obstruct Marcus, and it begins with his duties to them. That is the half the slogan drops, and it matters. On its own, the last line can sound like permission to see whoever blocks you as something to clear out of the road. With its first half restored, it asks you to keep your duties to the person and stop taking the obstruction personally. Stoicism and difficult people takes that further.

Where the slogan comes from

The punchy version you have probably seen is from Gregory Hays’s translation of the Meditations (Modern Library, 2002), the one many readers meet first. Hays renders the close of 5.20 as two short sentences, and the second is the one most often shared. His translation is still under copyright, so we describe it rather than quote it. If you searched for Marcus on an impediment to action, that is Hays’s wording; Long’s equivalent is the end of the passage above.

The five words themselves are a book title. Ryan Holiday’s The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph (Portfolio, 2014) adapted Hays’s line for its title, and since then the title has often been shared as if it were Marcus’s own sentence. The book is a modern work about meeting adversity. A quote card that credits its title to Marcus is half right: the idea is his, the sentence isn’t.

Other modern translations word the passage differently again, among them Maxwell Staniforth’s (1964), Martin Hammond’s (2006), Robin Hard’s (2011) and Robin Waterfield’s (2021), all still under copyright. This site quotes Long because his text is free and can be checked word for word on Project Gutenberg (opens in a new tab). Which translation of the Meditations compares them.

The same idea elsewhere in Marcus

Marcus came back to this thought more than once. Its closest companion is 8.47, which comes at obstacles from the side of action:

The end of the entry is about being pained that you aren’t doing something you think right. If nothing actually stops you, the answer is to do it: “why dost thou not rather act than complain?” (Meditations 8.47). If something insurmountable does, there is nothing to grieve over, because “the cause of its not being done depends not on thee.” Read with 5.20, that leaves no case uncovered. What you can do, you do. What you can’t, you aren’t answerable for, and the mind turns to the next thing it can do.

Two more sections put the point in general terms. In 8.35, in our paraphrase, Marcus says that as nature takes whatever opposes it and makes it part of itself, a reasoning being can turn any hindrance into material for its own purposes; the passage is on Stoic quotes for hard times. In 10.33 he says that reason passes through whatever stands against it as naturally as fire rises and a stone falls.

Marcus owed his acquaintance with Epictetus to his teacher Rusticus (Meditations 1.7), and Epictetus makes the same point in the Enchiridion. In section 9, disease hinders the body and lameness the leg, but neither hinders the will unless the will itself gives way; in section 10, he says to meet each event by asking which of your own powers it calls on, such as endurance or patience. Stoicism and failure reads both, along with Marcus’s image of the promontory that stands firm while the waves break against it (Meditations 4.49).

Practice it on a real obstacle

Pick something that is actually in your way this week: a person who hasn’t replied, a delay you didn’t choose, a no. The free Outside My Control exercise takes you through the first part of the Stoic response. You sort what is involved into what is up to you and what isn’t, decide what to stop trying to control, and name one thing to do next.

When you finish, add the question 5.20 asks: now that this is in the way, what does it let me do well? A slow reply is an occasion for patience. A canceled plan frees an afternoon for the work you have been putting off. A no from a client is a chance to ask what would have made it a yes. That is the turn Marcus describes, from hindrance to aid.

In the app, 5.20 is one of the morning passages in the unit on courage and adversity, and the guided Setback and Difficult Person exercises are part of Premium.