Marcus Aurelius

Though you break your heart, men will go on as before.

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

The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.

Neither worse then nor better is a thing made by being praised.

Death hangs over thee, While thou still live, while thou may, do good.

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.

Consider frequently the connection of all things in the universe and their relation to one another. For things are somehow implicated with one another, and all in a way friendly to one another.

By a tranquil mind I mean nothing else than a mind well ordered.

Submit to the fate of your own free will.

Reflect often upon the rapidity with which all existing things, or things coming into existence, sweep past us and are carried away.

Letting go all else, cling to the following few truths. Remember that man lives only in the present, in this fleeting instant: all the rest of his life is either past and gone, or not yet revealed. This mortal life is a little thing, lived in a little corner of the earth; and little, too, is the longest fame to come - dependent as it is on a succession of fast-perishing little men who have no knowledge even of their own selves, much less of one long dead and gone.

If you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical, self-centered, irritable.

I, who have never willfully pained another, have no business to pain myself.

Your days are numbered. Use them to throw open the windows of your soul to the sun. If you do not, the sun will soon set, and you with it.

He is a true fugitive who flies from reason.

For nowhere either with more quiet or more freedom from trouble does a man retire than into his own soul, particularly when he has within him such thoughts that by looking into them he is immediately in perfect tranquility; and I affirm that tranquility is nothing else than the good ordering of the mind.

Withdraw to the untroubled quietude deep within the soul, and refresh yourself.

Everything is interwoven, and the web is holy; none of its parts are unconnected. They are composed harmoniously, and together - they compose the world.

While you live, while it is in your power, be good.

Things themselves cannot touch the soul, not in the least degree, nor have they admission to the soul nor can they turn or move the soul: it turns and moves itself alone and whatever judgment it may think proper to make, such it makes by remaking for itself the things that present themselves to it

Change your attitude to the things that bother you and you will be aware of them.