Marcus Aurelius

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[Meditations] "Do the right thing. The rest doesn’t matter. Cold or warm. Tired or well-rested. Despised or honored.” [Ryan Holiday] : The 16 Greatest Lessons From 16 Years With Marcus Aurelius - https://ryanholiday.medium.com/the-16-greatest-lessons-from-16-years-with-marcus-aurelius-ba87737f75fd # It can ruin your life only if it ruins your character. # To accept without arrogance, to let it go with indifference. aka Receive without pride, let go without attachment. # [Philosophy] is designed to help us deal with the difficulties of life # Stoicism into three distinct disciplines (perception, action, will) ... See things for what they are. Do what we can. Endure and bear what we must # “Go straight to the seat of intelligence,” and, “Mastery of reading and writing requires a master. Still, more so life.” - RG [Robert Greene] # “No man steps in the same river twice,” [Heraclitus] # “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.” [Memento Mori] # Books are investments # Marcus has a wonderful phrase for the approval and cheering of other people. He calls it “the clacking of tongues” — that’s all public praise is # “The student as a boxer, not a fencer.” Why? Because the fencer has a weapon they must pick up. A boxer’s weapons are a part of him, he and the weapon are one. Same goes for knowledge, philosophy and wisdom. # “It stares you right in the face,” Marcus writes. “No role is so well suited to philosophy as the one you happen to be in right now.” # Almost every other piece of literature is a kind of performance — it’s made for the audience. Meditations isn’t. In fact, their original title (Ta eis heauton) roughly translates as To Himself. # A great rhetorical exercise from Marcus goes essentially like this: “Is a world without shameless people possible? No. So this person you’ve just met is one of them. Get over it.” It’s something I try to remind myself every time I meet someone who frustrates or bothers me. # “contemptuous expressions” - see these things as they really are, to “strip away the legend that encrusts them.” # [Pierre Hadot]’s excellent book [The Inner Citadel] - an explicit explanation of a Stoic exercise he calls “turning obstacles upside down.” - the obstacle is the path # [Gregory Hays] favorite passage “Keep in mind how fast things pass by and are gone–those that are now and those to come. Existence flows past us like a river: the ‘what’ is in constant flux, the ‘why’ has a thousand variations. Nothing is stable, not even what’s right here. The infinity of past and future gapes before us — a chasm whose depths we cannot see.” {tags: People, Book}
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