My Perspective

• There are few more famous books that Marcus Aurelius’ ‘Mediations’, it was written as a series of spiritual exercises and the common belief was that it would never to be published. For me it is the inner dialogue of an extremely powerful and rich man – the Emperor of Rome –  trying to fight the same battles that we all face on a daily basis: how to be a better person, how to show courage, be just, be clever and remain self-controlled.
• I’m slightly embarrassed that it took me so long to read, it has been on my list for years, but I am so glad that I did. I’ll definitely read it again but perhaps not from start to finish, it is written in such a way that it can be picked up and read in short chunks.
• Below are the key points that I took away, most are direct quotes, but some are my summation of certain parts. I read the Penguin Classic version, translated by Martin Hammond, with an excellent introduction from Diskin Clay, a Professor of Classical Studies at Duke University, who died in 2014.
• At first it isn’t an optimistic read, the themes he returns to an over and over are everything we experience has happened before, ultimately everything dies and bad things happen so deal with them. And yet reading and realising these things does give you some optimism and a realisation that knowing this will all happen is a form of release because you know that it can all be dealt with.
• Marcus Aurelius is not only a famous Roman Emperor he is also a famous stoic, and ‘Mediations’ is one of the core texts on Stoicism. If you are looking for information on stoicism, or philosophy more generally, I suggest you read my book review on Alain de Botton’s ‘Consolations of Philosophy’, http://jablifestyle.net/2017/01/08/consolations-of-philosophy/.
• I’d highly recommend this to any millennial, it is an absolute must read, and especially applicable for anyone currently struggling with a personal difficulty or feeling isolated and like you’re the only person who is feeling the way you are. You can find the version of the book these notes are from on Amazon, here.

Book Notes

Introduction 

• ‘Repetition is a form of spiritual exercise designed to reinforce the main principles of Marcus’ philosophy… Three of the most common imperatives Marcus addresses to himself are: ‘Remember’, ‘Keep in mind’, ‘Do not forget’
• The importance of finding mental ‘retreat’ (‘inner citadel’) not just physical retreat (the country, sea, hills). Do mental retreats regularly ‘to wash away all your pain and send you back free of resentment at what you must rejoin’
• Marcus embraced and exhibited the 4 cardinal virtues: prudent self-control, practical intelligence, courage & justice. One addition in Meditations; integrity
• ‘Anger represents an ‘involuntary spasm’ and a momentary lapse of reason’ (2.10). It severs the rational bond that unites all human beings (2.1 and 2.16)’

Book 1

• Background: Clearly written as a whole, probably as a later summation
• Book one is focused on Marcus detailing the important lessons he learned from key people throughout his life and thanking them for helping him become the man he did

Book 2

• Background: Details most of the philosophy and principles which are recurrent in the rest of Meditations
• Awesome quotes: 2.1 – Prepare yourself for the people you’ll meet every morning. 2.5 – Give everything you do your complete attention until it’s complete
• ‘The offences of lust are graver then those of anger…the lust-led offender has given in to pleasure and seems somehow more abandoned and less manly in his wrongdoing’ (2:10)
• ‘A soul harms itself…when it gives in to pleasure or pain’ (2:16)

Book 3

• Background: Detailed exploration of what it means to be a good man, written in a happier tone than Book 2.
• ‘We must have a sense of urgency, not only for the ever closer approach of death, but also because our comprehension of the world and our ability to pay proper attention will fade before we do’ (3:1)
• 3.12 – excellent summary of the virtues of setting yourself only on your present task
• ‘the defining characteristic of the good person is to love and embrace whatever happens to him along his thread of fate’ (3:16)

Book 4

• ‘No action should be undertaken without aim’ (4:2)
• ‘Things can not touch the mind; they are external and inert’ (4:4)
• ‘Remove the judgement, and you have removed the thought ‘I am hurt’: remove the thought ‘I am hurt’, and the hurt itself is removed’ (4:7)
• ‘Most of what we say and do is unnecessary: remove the superfluity, and you will have more time and less bother…And the removal of the unnecessary should apply not only to actions but to thoughts also: then no redundant actions either will follow.’ (4:24)
• ‘Change: nothing inherently bad in the process, nothing inherently good in the result’ (4:42)
• ‘You should always look on human life as short and cheap. Yesterday sperm: tomorrow a mummy or ashes.’ (4:48)
• Instead of: ‘it is my bad luck that this has happened to me’, you should say: ‘it is my good luck that, although this has happened to me, I can bear it without pain, neither crushed by the present nor fearful of the future.’ (4:49)

Book 5

• ‘Display those virtues which are wholly in your power – integrity, dignity, hard work, self-denial, contentment, frugality, kindness, independence, simplicity, discretion, magnanimity’ (5:5)
• ‘Welcome all that happens to you, even if it seems rather cruel’ (5.8)
• 5.13 – Talking about the connectedness of everything, everything in nature is connected and change is the norm
• ‘Another does wrong. What is that to me? Let him see to it: he has his own disposition’ (5.25)
• ‘Luck is the good fortune you determine for yourself: and good fortune consists in good inclinations of the soul, good impulses, good actions’ (5.37)

Book 6

• ‘The best revenge is not to be like your enemy’ (6.6)
• ‘When circumstances force you to some sort of stress, quickly return to yourself. Do not stay out of rhythm for longer than you must: you will master the harmony the more by constantly going back to it.’ (6.11)
• ‘When things have such a plausible appearance, show them naked, see their shoddiness, strip away their own boastful account of themselves.’ (e.g. ‘Your purple-edged robe simply the hair of a sheep soaked in a shell-fish blood’)
• Vanity is the greatest seducer of reason: when you are most convinced that your work is important, that is when you are most under its spell’ (both 6.13)
• Follow the example of Antoninus: tolerating those who unfairly blamed him without returning the blame…never listen to malicious gossip…always acting according to his reason…slow to criticise…’content with little by way of house, bed, dress, food, servants’…. ‘his love of work, and his stamina’ (6.30)
• ‘You should meditate often on the connection of all things in the universe and their relationship to each other.’ (6.38)
• ‘Determine that only what lies in our own power is good or evil there is no reason left us either to charge god or take a hostile stance to a man.’ (6.41)
• ‘All that happens to the individual is to the benefit of the Whole’ (6.44)…therefore don’t feel angry or sad about the hand you are dealt, simply embrace it and make the best of it.

Book 7

• ‘When someone does you some wrong, you should consider immediately what judgement of good or evil led him to wrong you. When you see this, you will pity him, and not feel surprise or anger’ (7.26)
• ‘Do not dream of possession of what you do not have: rather reflect on the greatest blessings in what you do have, and on their account remind yourself how much they would have been missed if they were not there.’ (7.27)
• ‘Erase the print of imagination. Stop the puppet-strings of impulse…Leave the wrong done by another where it started.’ (7.29)
• ‘A king’s lot: to do good and be damned.’ (7.63)
• ‘Mere things, brute facts, should not provoke your rage: they have no mind to care’ (7.38)
• ‘Don’t join in mourning, or in ecstasy.’ (7.43)
• ‘Love only what falls your way and is fated for you.’ (7.57)
• ‘Dig inside yourself. Inside there is a Spring of goodness ready to gush at any moment, if you keep digging.’ (7.59)
• ‘Perfection of character is this: to live each day as if it were your last, without frenzy, without apathy, without pretence.’ (7.69)
• ‘When you have done good and another has benefited, why do you still look, as fools do, for a third thing besides – credit for good works, or a return?’ (7.73)

Book 8

• ‘You must compose your life action by action, and be satisfied if each action achieves its own end as best can be: and no one can prevent you from that achievement’ (8.32)
• ‘Universal nature has brought you nothing you can’t endure’ (8.46)
• ‘If you distress has some external cause, it is not the thing itself that troubles you, but your own judgement of it – and you can erase this immediately’ (8.47)…if the reason for failure doesn’t lie with you, its outside your control, therefore can’t distress you.
• ‘Remember that your directing mind becomes invincible when it withdraws into its own self-sufficiency, not doing anything it does not wish to do, even if its possible durian is unreasonable. How much more, then, when the judgement it forms is reasoned and deliberate? That is why a mind free from passions is a fortress: people have no stronger place to retreat, and someone taking refuge here is then impregnable. Anyone who has not seen this is short of wisdom: who has seen it and doesn’t not take refuge is short of fortune’ (8.48)
• ‘Individual wickedness does no harm to the recipient: it is only harmful to the perpetrator, and he has the option to be rid of it just as soon as he himself decides’ (8.55)
• ‘He who fears death fears either unconsciousness or another sort of consciousness. Now if you will no longer be conscious you will not be conscious either of anything bad. If you are to take on a different consciousness, you will be different being and life will not cease’ (8.58)
• ‘Men are born for the sake of each other. So either teach or tolerate’ (8.59)

Book 9

• ‘Anyone who is not himself indifferent to pain and pleasure, death and life, frame and obscurity…is clearly committing a sin’ (9.1)
• ‘Do not despise death: welcome it, rather, as one further part of natures will’ (9.3)
• ‘Good or ill for the rational social being lies not in feeling but in action: just as also his own virtue or vice shows not in what he feels, but in what he does.’ (9.16)
• ‘You should leave another’s wrong where it lies’ (9.20)
• ‘Reflect that neither memory nor fame, nor anything else at all, has any importance worth thinking of’ (9.30)
• ‘In general, you can always re-educate one who has lost his way: and anyone who does wrong has missed his proper aim and gone astray.’ (9.42)
• ‘When you complain of disloyalty or ingratitude, turn inwards on yourself. The fault is clearly your own, if you trusted that a man of that character would keep his trust’ (9.42)

Book 10

• ‘From he is going wrong, teach him kindly and show him what he has failed to see.’ (10.4)
• ‘No more roundabout discussion of what makes a good man. Be one!’ (10.16)
• ‘Always have clear in your mind that ‘the grass is not greener’ elsewhere, and how everything is the same here as on top of a mountain, or in the sea-shore, or wherever you will.’ (10.23)
• ‘The healthy mind too must be ready for all eventualities. The mind which says ‘my children must live’, or ‘there must be popular acclaim for all I do’, is the eye demanding pale or the teeth demanding pap.’ (10.35)

Book 11

• ‘There is nothing more degrading than the friendship of wolves: avoid that above all. The good, honest, kindly man has it in his eyes, and you cannot mistake him.’ (11.15)
• ‘Life through life the best way you can. The power to do so is in a man’s own soul, if he is indifferent to things indifferent. And he will be indifferent if he looks at these things both as a whole and analysed into their parts, and remembers that none of them imposes a judgement of itself it forces itself on us. The things themselves are inert: it is we who procreate judgements about them.’ (11.16)
• ‘When you are high in indignation or perhaps losing patience, remember that human life is a mere fragment of time and shortly we are all in our graves.’ (11.18.6)
• ‘Kindness is invincible – if it is sincere, not fawning or pretence. What can the most aggressive man do to you if you continue to be kind to him?’ (11.18.9)
• ‘In your fits of anger have this thought ready to mind, that there is nothing manly in being angry, but a gentle calm is both more human and therefore more virile.’ (11.18.10)
• ‘The closure to control of emotion, the closer to power.’  (11.18.10)
• ‘The aim we should set ourselves is a social aim, the benefit of our fellow citizens.’ (11.21)
• ‘In writing and reading you must learn before you can teach. Yet more so in life.’ (11.29)

Book 12

• ‘There are three things in your composition: body, breath, and mind. The first two are yours to the extent that you must take care for them, but only the third is in the full sense your own.’ (12.3)
• ‘Practise even what you have despaired of mastering. For lack of practice the left hand is awkward for most tasks, but has a stronger grip on the bridle than the right – it is practised in this.’ (12.6)
• ‘How one should be in both body and soul when overtaken by death; the shortness of life; the immensity of Time future and past; the feebleness of all things material.’ (12.7)
• ‘If it is not right, don’t do it: if it is not true, don’t say it.’ (12.17)
• ‘Think how worthless all this striving is: how much wiser to use the material given you to make yourself in all simplicity, just self-controlled, obedient to the gods.’ (12.27)
• ‘Think nothing important other than active pursuit where your own mature leads and passive acceptance of what universal nature brings.’ (12.32)

• ‘How does your directing mind employ itself? This is the whole issue. All else, of your own choice or not, is just corpse and smoke.’ (12.33)