Marcus Aurelius Quotes

"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."

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

"Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking."

"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."

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

"Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears."

"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."

"You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength."

"Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, but do so with all your heart."

"Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away."

"Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one."

"Our life is what our thoughts make it."

"The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury."

"How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it."

"Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life."

"If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it."

"The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts."

"That which is not good for the bee-hive cannot be good for the bees."

"Nothing happens to any man that he is not formed by nature to bear."

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

"Begin - to begin is half the work, let half still remain; again begin this, and thou wilt have finished."

"Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul."

"Everything that happens happens as it should, and if you observe carefully, you will find this to be so."

"To live happily is an inward power of the soul."

"Here is the rule to remember in the future, When anything tempts you to be bitter: not, 'This is a misfortune' but 'To bear this worthily is good fortune.'"

"He who lives in harmony with himself lives in harmony with the universe."

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

"Each day provides its own gifts."

"Poverty is the mother of crime."

"A man's worth is no greater than his ambitions."