Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

Rating: 10/10

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My favorite of the classic Stoic texts (the others being Letters from a Stoic by Seneca and Discourses by Epictetus. The mental framework of Marcus Aurelius is second to none. I find myself returning to this book for advice more often than any other book I have read. One could spend days reflecting on each chapter in this book, the insight is quite dense.

Introduction

History of Marcus

Born to an upper-class family, lived a privileged childhood into his early teen years
Came to be the Emperor of the Roman empire in the 2nd century via an adoption process by Antoninus Pius, himself adopted to Hadrian, the current emperor.
From the age of 169 to 179, Marcus would lead Rome through various wars and battle personal struggle with the death of wife

Philosophical Background

Philosophy in Marcus' time was focused around a "design for living," more similar to religious principles today.
Philosophical schools were concerned with created "belief systems," of which the Stoic school many subscribed → to the Stoic school was founded in 323 BC by Zeno.
The root of stoicism is that all things occur through the logos, which designates rational, connected thought. While deterministic, Stoicism left open the possibility of free will but left it more or less as the ability to be a part of the logos or be dragged by it.
If logos are the bank of being, pneuma flows from it into structures and animates it for a short period before returning to the logos
Greek stoicism started as speculative and theoretical, but the more widely adopted and influential Stoicism was of the Romans and focused on generating an attitude for life.
The flow of Stoics went from Zeno, Musonius (himself quite poor) to Epictetus and contemporaneously with Seneca, then Marcus

Stoicism and the Meditations

Zeno had divided Stoicism into logic, physics, and ethics, but the more broadly accepted one focused more closely on ethics
Marcus seeks to answer metaphysical questions and ethical ones — Why are we here? How should we live our lives? How can we ensure that we do what is right? Etc.
- Marcus wrote about three "disciplines" — of perception, action, and will. Perception deals with our senses taking in external influence through our hegemonikon → these senses are produced into Phantasia or a mental picture. Over this picture, a filter is laid through which we react
- The action relates to your relationship with others. As human beings, we are social animals and our duty is to accommodate ourselves, "to live as nature requires."
- Will governs our attitude to things that re not within our control.
Competitors to Stoicism were Cynicism (ascetic homeless folk who were concerned with living in pain and with nature) and the hedonistic Epicureans

Meditations: Genre, Structure, and Style

The main lens through which to read the Meditations is one that recognizes that Marcus wrote this book to himself without ever thinking it would be read by others. It was simply a document to himself in which he repeated the ideals and principles he felt most directly applied to his life.
The books are not written in any particular order and might have been separated only by physically running out of pages and starting a new one.
Some of the recurring things include dealing with death, dealing with pain or bodily weakness, love for nature, contempt for human actions and existence
Often readers walk away with a melancholy feeling of human existence, and it is important to recognize this when reading.

Book 1 — Debts and Lessons

Avoid public schools, hire good private teachers, and accept the resulting costs as money well spent

To put up with discomfort, not make demands, do my work, and have no time for slanderers.

To hear unwelcome truths.

To behave in a conciliatory way when people who have angered or annoyed us want to make up.

To read attentively, specifically Epictetus' lectures

To show intuitive sympathy for friends, tolerance to amateurs and sloppy thinkers.

To investigate and analyze, with understanding and logic, the principles we ought to live by.

To praise without bombast, to display expertise without pretension.

Not to be constantly correcting others, but to insert the right expression unobtrusively.

Not to be telling others that you are too busy unless you truly are

Not to shrug off a friend's resentment, but to try to put things right.

Never doubt your friends' affection for you.

From my adopted father Antonius

Self-control and resistance to distractions
The sense of staying on the path rather than being kept on it.
Indifference to superficial honors.
Searching and curious questions at meetings.
Constancy to friends, never getting fed up nor playing favorites.
Advance planning
Restrictions on acclamations
His handling of material comforts that fortune had supplied—without arrogance and without apology. If they were there, he took advantage of them. If not, he didn't miss them.
His willingness to take care of himself. Not a hypochondriac or obsessed with his appearance, but not ignoring things either.
His willingness to yield the floor to experts, and to support them energetically.
Not prone to go off on tangents, but sticking with the same old places and the same old things
No bathing at strange hours, no self-indulgent projects, no concern for foods, or the cut and color of his clothes, or having attractive slaves.
You could have said of him that he knows how to enjoy and abstain from things that most people find it hard to abstain from all too easy to enjoy. Strength, perseverance, self-control in both areas

Book 2 — On the River Grand, Among the Quadi

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. I have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own, not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.

Throw away your books; stop letting yourself be distracted. That is not allowed. Instead, as if you were dying right now, despise your flesh. Stop allowing your mind to be a slave, to be jerked around by selfish impulses.

There is a limit to the time assigned you, and if you don't use it to free yourself, it will be gone and will never return.

Concentrate every minute like a Roman—like a man— on doing what's in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness. Tenderly, willingly, and with justice. And on freeing yourself from all other distractions. Yes, you can, and 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.

Do external things distract you? Then make time for yourself to learn something worthwhile. People who labor all their lives but have no purpose to direct every thought and impulse toward are wasting their time even when hard at work.

Sins committed out of desire are worse than the ones committed out of anger. The man motivated by desire, who is mastered by pleasure, seems somehow more self-indulgent, less manly in his sins.

You could leave right now. Let that determine what you do, say, and think. If there were anything harmful on the other side of death, they would have made sure the ability to avoid it was within you. But death and life, success and failure, pain and pleasure, wealth and poverty, all these things happen to good and bad alike and they are neither noble nor shameful, neither good nor bad.

The real nature of the things our senses experience, especially those that entice us with pleasure or frighten us with pain or are loudly trumpeted by pride. To understand those things—how stupid, contemptible, grimy, decaying, and dead they are.

Remember: you cannot lose another life than the one you're living now, or live another one than the one you're losing now.

Human Life: Duration: momentary. Nature: changeable. Perception: dim. Condition of Body: decaying. Soul: spinning around. Fortune: unpredictable. Lasting Fame: uncertain. What can guide us? Only philosophy.

Book 3

Don't waste the rest of your time here worrying about other people. It will keep you from doing anything useful. You'll be too preoccupied with what so and so is doing, and why, and what they're saying, and what they're thinking, and what they're up to, and all the other things that throw you off and keep you from focusing on your mind.

Someone like that, someone who refuses to put off joining the elect, untouched my arrogance, undefiled by pleasures, welcoming wholeheartedly whatever comes, not worrying too often, or with any selfish motive, about what other people say, or do, or think.

How to act: Never out under compulsion, without forethought, out of selfishness, no surplus words or unnecessary actions. Cheerfulness. Without requiring other people's help.

If you come across anything better than justice, honesty, self-control, courage, if you find anything better than that, embrace it without reservations— it must be an extraordinary thing indeed.

Never regard something as doing you good if it makes you betray a trust, or lose your sense of shame, or makes you show hatred, suspicion, ill-will, or hypocrisy.

Your ability to control your thoughts— treat it with respect. It's all that protects your mind from false perceptions.

Keep hold of this alone and remember it: Each of us lives only now, this brief instant.

Always define whatever it is we perceive, to trace its outline— so we can see what it really is, its substance, stripped bare, as a whole. For nothing is so conducive to spiritual growth as this capacity for logical and accurate analysis of everything that happens to us.

If you do your job in a principled way, with diligence, energy, and patience, if you keep yourself free of distractions, keep the spirit undamaged, find fulfillment in what you're doing now, then your life will be happy. No one can prevent that.

Body. Soul. Mind. Sensations: the body. Desires: the soul. Reasoning: the mind. To experience sensations, every grazing beasts do that. TO let your desires control you, even wild animals do that— and rutting humans and tyrants. To make your mind your guide for what seems best, even people who deny the gods do that. If all the rest is common coin, then what is unique to the good man? To welcome with affection what is sent by fate.

Book 4

Our inward power, when it obeys nature, reacts to events by accommodating itself to what it faces— to what is possible. It needs no specific material. It pursuits its own aims as circumstances allow it turns obstacles into fuel. As a fire overwhelms what would have quenched a lamp. What's thrown on top of the conflagration is absorbed, consumed by it— and makes it burn still higher.

No random actions— none not based on the underlying principles and values.

People try to get away from it all— to the country, to the beach, to the mountains. You always wish you could do that too. Which is idiotic. You can get away from it any time you like. By going within. An instant's recollection and there it is complete tranquility.

Turn to these two: 1. Disturbance comes only from within our own perceptions. 2. Everything you see will soon alter and cease to exist. The world is nothing but change, our life is the only perception.

That sort of person is bound to do that. You might as well resent a fig tree for secreting juice. Anyway, before very long you'll both be dead, dead and soon forgotten.

Choose not to be harmed, and you won't feel harmed. Don't feel harmed, and you haven't been.

Many lumps of incense on the same altar. One crumbles now, one later, but it makes no difference.

The tranquility that comes when you stop caring what they say. Or think, or do. Only what you do. Not to be distracted by their darkness. To run straight for the finish line, unswerving.

What use is praise except to make your lifestyle a little more comfortable?

If you seek tranquility, do less. Or (more accurately), do what's essential— what the logos of a social being requires, and in a requisite way. Which brings a double satisfaction: to do less, better. Because most of what we say and do is not is essential. If you eliminate it, you'll have more time and more tranquility. Ask yourself at every moment, is this necessary?

Poor: (adj.) requiring others; not having the necessities of life in one's own possession.

Survey the records of other eras. And see how many others gave their all and soon died and decomposed into the elements that formed them.

What is "eternal" fame? Emptiness. Then what should we work for? A resolve to accept whatever happens as necessary and familiar, flowing like water from that same source and spring.

Nothing that goes on in anyone else's mind can harm you. Nor can the shifts and changes in the world around you. —Then where is harm to be found? In your capacity to see it. Stop doing that and everything will be fine.

Supposed that a god announced that you were going to die tomorrow or the day after. Unless you were a complete coward you wouldn't kick up a fuss about which day it was—what difference would it make? Now recognize that the difference between years from now and tomorrow is just as small.

To be like the rock that the waves keep crashing over. It stands unmoved and the raging of the sea falls still around it.

Our life is so brief. And to live it out in these circumstances, among these people, in this body? Nothing to get excited about. Consider the abyss of time past and the infinite future. Three days of life or three generations. What's the difference

Book 5

—But we have to sleep sometime... Agreed. But nature set a limit on that, as it did on eating and drinking. And you're over the limit. You've had more than enough of that. But not working. There you're still below your quota.

People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it, they even forget to wash or eat.

Some people, when they do someone a favor, are always looking for a chance to call it in. And some aren't, but they're still aware of it— still, regard it as a debt. But others don't even do that. They're still like a bine that produces grapes without looking for anything in return. We should be like that. Acting almost unconsciously.

Not to feel exasperated, or defeated, or despondent because your days aren't packed with wise and moral actions. But to get back up when you fail and fully embrace the pursuit you've embarked on.

Things not proper to human nature, if any of them were proper to us, it would be improper to disdain or resit it. Nor would we admire people who show themselves immune to it. If the things themselves were good, it could hardly be good to give them up. But in reality, the more we deny ourselves such things (and things like them) or are deprived of them involuntarily, even, the better we become.

When people obstruct our proper tasks, they become irrelevant to us, like the sun, wind, animals. Our actions may be impeded by them, but there can be no impeding of our intentions or our dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting. The impediment to action advanced action. What stands in the way becomes the way.

Remember: Matter. How tiny your share of it. Time. How brief and fleeting your allotment of it. Fate. How small a role you play in it.

Soon you'll be ashes or bones. The things we want in life are empty, stale, and trivial.

You can lead an untroubled life provided you can grow, can think, and can act systematically.

Book 6

The best revenge is not to be like that.

When jarred, unavoidably, by circumstances, revert at once to yourself.

Seeing roasted meat and other dishes in front of you and realizing it. This is a dead fish. A dead bird. Or that this noble vintage is grape juice, and the purples robes are sheep wool dyed with shellfish blood. Perceptions like that— latching onto things and piercing through them so we see what they really are. That's what we need to do all the time, all things that lay claim to our lives, lay them bare and see how pointless they are.

Change and flux constantly remake the world, just as the incessant progression of time remakes eternity. Which of the things around us should we value when none of them can offer a firm foothold?

All that public praise amounts to— a clacking of tongues.

And if you can't stop prizing a lot of other things? Then you'll never be free—free, independent, and imperturbable. Because you'll always be envious and jealous, afraid that people might come and take it all away from you. Plotting against those who have them—those things you price.

The way people behave, they refused to admire their contemporaries, the people whose lives they share. No, but to be admitted by Posterity—people they've never met and never will— that's what they set their hearts on. You might as well be upset at not being a hero to your great grandfather.

If anyone can refute me— show me I'm making a mistake or looking at things from the wrong perspective— I'll gladly change. It's the truth I'm after, and the truth never harmed anyone. What harms us is to persist in self-deceit and arrogance.

Remember— your responsibilities can be broken down into individual parts as well. Concentrate on those, and finish the job methodically—without getting stirred up or meeting anger with anger.

People are drawn toward what they think is good for them. —But it's not good for them. Then show them that. Prove it to them. Instead of losing your temper.

Take Antoninus as your model, always. His energy in doing what was rational.. his steadiness in any situation.. his sense of reverence, his calm expression, his gentleness, his modesty, his eagerness to grasp things. And how he never let things go before he was sure he had examined them thoroughly, understood them perfectly, the way he put up with unfair criticism, without returning it, how he couldn't be hurried, how he wouldn't listen to the informer, how reliable he was as a judge of character and of actions, not prone to backbiting, or cowardice, or jealousy, or empty rhetoric, content with the basics, in living quarters, bedding clothes food, servants.. how hard he worked, how much he put up with.. his ability to work straight through till dusk because of his simple diet, his constancy and reliability as a friend.. his tolerance of people who openly questions his views and delight at seeing his ideas improved on.. his piety without a trace of superstition.

If you've seen the present then you've seen everything— as it's been since the beginning as it will be forever.

You take things you don't control and define them as "good" or "bad." So when the bad things happen or the good ones don't you feel hatred for the people responsible, or those you decide to make responsible. But if this is because we try to apply such criteria. If we limited "good" or "bad" to our own actions, we'd have no call to challenge God or to treat others as enemies.

When you need encouragement, think of the qualities the people around you have: this one's energy, that one's modesty, another's generosity, and so on. Nothing is as encouraging as when virtues are visibly embodied in the people around us when we are practically showered with them. All of those people who cane into the world with me and have already left it.

No one can keep you from living as your nature requires. Nothing can happen to you that is not required by Nature.

Remember that our own worth is measured by what we devote our energy to.

Don't be ashamed to need help. Like a soldier storming a wall, you have a mission to accomplish. And if you've been wounded and you need a comrade to pull you up? So what?

It doesn't hurt me unless I interpret its happening as harmful to me. I can choose not to.

What are you doing here, Perceptions? Get back to where you came from, and good riddance. I don't need you. Yes, I know, it was only a force of habit that brought you. No, I'm not angry with you. Just go away.

To feel affection for people even when they make mistakes is uniquely human. You can do it if you simply recognize: that they're human too, that they act out of ignorance, against their will, and that you'll both be dead before long. And, above all, that they haven't really hurt you. They haven't diminished your ability to choose.

When people injure you, ask yourself what good or harm they thought would come of it. If you understand that, you'll feel sympathy rather than outrage or anger.

Treat what you don't have as nonexistent. Look at what you have, the things you value most, and think of how much you'd crave them if you didn't have them. But be careful. Don't feel such satisfaction that you start to overvalue them— that it would upset you to lose them.

And why should we feel anger at the world? As if the world would notice!

Keep constantly in mind how the elements alter into one another. To watch the courses of the stars as if you revolved with them. Thoughts like this wash off the mud of life below.

No escape from the rhythm of events. Which is why observing life for forty years is as good as a thousand. Would you really see anything new?

Everywhere, at each moment, you have the option: to accept this event with humility. To treat this person as he should be treated. To approach this thought with care, so that nothing irrational creeps in.

Don't pay attention to other people's minds. Resist the body's urges. Avoid rashness and credulity.

Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what's left and live it properly.

Look at who they really are, the people whose approval you long for, and what their minds are really like. Then you won't blame the ones who make mistakes they can't help, and you won't feel a need for their approval. You will have seen the sources of both— their judgments and actions.

The perfection of character: to live your last day, every day, without frenzy, or sloth, or pretense.

It's silly to try to escape other people's faults. They are inescapable. Just try to escape your own.

Book 8

So you know how things stand. Now forget what they think of you. Be satisfied if you can live the rest of your life, however short, as your nature demands. Focus on that, and don't anything distract you.

For every action, ask: how does it affect me? Could I change my mind about it?

The first step: Don't be anxious, nature controls it all. The second step: Concentrate on what you have to do. Fix your eyes on it.

Progress for a rational mind means not accepting falsehood or uncertainty in its perceptions, making unselfish actions its only aim, seeking and shunning only the things it has control over.

No time for distractions. For controlling your arrogance, yes. For overcoming pain and pleasure, yes. For outgrowing ambition, yes. For not feeling angry at stupid and unpleasant people, yes.

Don't be overheard complaining about life at court. Not even to yourself.

When you have to deal with someone, ask yourself: What does he mean by good and bad? If he thinks x or y about pleasure and pain, about fame and disgrace, about death and life, then it shouldn't shock or surprise you when he does x or y.

If it's in your control, why do you do it? If it's in someone else's, then who are you blaming? Atoms? The gods? Stupid either way.

Stick to what's at hand— idea, action, utterance.

Three relationships: i. with the body you inhabit. ii. with the divine, the cause of everything in all things. iii. with the people around you

To erase false perceptions, tell yourself: I have it in me to keep my soul from evil, lust, and all confusion. To see things as they are and treat them as they deserve. Don't overlook this innate ability.

But there are external obstacles... Not to behaving with justice, self-control, and good sense. —Well but perhaps to some more concrete action. But if you accept the obstacle and work with what you're given, an alternative will present itself. Another piece of what you're trying to assemble. Action by action.

Stop perceiving the pain you imagine and you'll remain completely unaffected.

For rational creatures, anything that obstructs the operation of the mind is harmful. Apply this to yourself. No one can obstruct the operations of the mind. Nothing can get at them, not fire or steel, not tyrants, not abuse, nothing.

People find pleasure in different ways. I find it in keeping my mind clear.

The mind without desires is a fortress. No place is more secure. Once we take refuge there we are safe forever. To see it and not seek safety means misery.

Stick with first impressions, cease extrapolation, and nothing can happen to you.

You want praise from people who kick themselves every fifteen minutes, the approval of people who despise themselves. Is it a sign of self-respect to regret nearly everything you do?

Book 9

To privilege pleasure over pain, life over death, fame over anonymity, is clearly blasphemous.

Don't look down on death, but welcome it. Like all the other physical changes at each stage of life, our dissolution is no different. And consider the two things that should reconcile you to death: the nature of the things you'll leave behind you and the kind of people you'll no longer be mixed up with. Enough to make you to death, "Come quickly, before I start to forget myself, like them."

Objective judgment, now at this very moment. Unselfish action, now at this very moment. Willing acceptance, now at this very moment.

Blot out your imagination. Turn your desire to stone. Quench your appetites. Keep your mind centered on itself. Be wary of your desires, urges, and distractions.

Work. Not to arouse pity, not to win sympathy or admiration. Only this: Activity. Stillness.

Today, I escaped anxiety. Or not, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions, not outside.

Enter their minds, and you'll find the judges you're so afraid of— and how judiciously they judge themselves.

Endless suffering— all from allowing the mind to do its job. Enough.

When you face someone's insults, hatred, whatever, look at his soul. Get inside him. Look at what sort of person he is. You'll find you don't need to strain to impress him. But you do have to wish him well.

Get a move on— if you have it in you. Don't worry whether anyone will give you credit for it. And don't go expecting Plato's Republic; be satisfied with even the smallest progress, and treat the outcome of it all as unimportant.

Consider the lives led once by others, long ago, the lives to be led by others after you, the lives led even now, in foreign lands. How many people don't even know your name. How many will soon have forgotten it. How many offer your praise now—and tomorrow, perhaps contempt.

You can discard most of the junk that clutters your mind— things that exist only there, and clear out space for yourself. By comprehending the scale of the world, by contemplating infinite time, by thinking of the speed with which things change, each part of everything, the narrow space between our birth and death, the infinite time before, the equally unbounded time that follows.

What their minds are like. What they work at. What evokes their love and admiration. Imagine their souls stripped bare. And their vanity. To suppose that their disdain could harm anyone, or their praise help them.

How does it injury you anyway? You'll find that none of the people you're upset about has done anything that could do damage to your mind. Yes, boorish people do boorish things. What's strange or unheard of about that? And now you're astonished that he's gone and done it. It was you who did wrong, by assuming that someone with those traits deserves your trust.

Book 10

To my soul, are you ever going to achieve goodness? Ever be fulfilled, ever stop desiring—lusting and longing for people and things to enjoy? And instead be satisfied with what you have and accept present, all of it?

Just remember: you can endure anything your mind can make endurable, by treating it as in your interest to do so.

Epithets for yourself: Upright. Modest. Straightforward. Sane. Cooperative. Disinterested. If you maintain your claim to these epithets, without caring if others apply them to you or not, you'll become a new person.

Sloth. Servility. Every day they blot out those sacred principles of yours— which you daydream thoughtlessly about, or just let slide.

What people say or think about him, or how they treat him, isn't something he worries about. Only these two questions: IS what he's doing now the right thing to be doing? Does he accept and welcome what he's been assigned?

Why all this guesswork? You can see what needs to be done. If you can see the road, follow it.

Continual awareness of all time and space, of the size and life span of the things around us. a grape seed in infinite space. A half twist of a corkscrew against eternity.

Possibilities: i. To keep on living (you should be used to it by now) ii. To end it (it was your choice, after all) iii. To die (having met your obligations)

When faced with people's bad behavior, turn around and ask when YOU have acted like that. Your anger will subside as soon as you recognize that they acted under compulsion, as you often have.

A blazing fire takes whatever you throw on it and makes it light and flame. Don't pretend that anything's stopping you. You'll never stop complaining until you feel the same pleasure that the hedonist gets from self-indulgence, only from doing what's proper to human beings as afar as circumstances.

All other obstacles either affect the lifeless body or have no power to shake or harm anything unless misperception takes over or the logos surrenders voluntarily. Otherwise, those they obstruct would be degraded by them immediately. In all other entities, when anything bad happens to them, it affects them for the worse. Whereas here a person is improved by it, and we admire him for reacting as a person should.

How many traits do you have that would make a lot of people glad to be rid of you?

Learn to ask of all actions: why are they doing that? And start with your own.

Book 11

Characteristics of the rational soul: Self-perception, self-examination. It reaps its own harvest. It reaches its intended goal. It delves into the endlessness of time to extend its grasp and comprehension of the periodic births and rebirths that the world goes through. Affection for its neighbors. Truthfulness. Humility.

To acquire indifference. Look at the individual parts and move from analysis to indifference.

A branch is cut away from the branch beside it is separated from the whole tree. So too a human separated from another is cut loose from the whole community. The branch is cut off by someone else. But people cut themselves off— through hatred, through rejection. We can reattach ourselves, but if the rupture is too often repeated, it makes the severed part hard to reconnect and to restore. You can see the difference between the branch that's been there since the beginning, remaining on the tree and growing with it, and the one that's been cut off and grafted back.

They can't keep you from doing what's healthy, don't let them stop you from putting up with them either. Take care on both counts. Not just sound judgments, solid actions, tolerance as well, for those who try to obstruct or give us trouble in other ways.

It's the pursuit of these things, and your attempt to avoid them, that leaves you in such turmoil. And yet they aren't seeking you out, you are the one seeking them.

Someone despises me. That's their problem. Nine: not to do or say anything despicable. Someone hates me. Their problem. Mine: to be patient and cheerful with everyone including them. What is there that can harm you?

A straightforward, honest person should be like someone who stinks: when you're in the same room with him, you know it.

Remember: when you lose your temper, or even feel irritated, that human life is very short.

That isn't what they do that bothers us: that's a problem for their minds, not ours. It's our own misperceptions. Discard them. Be willing to give up thinking of this as a catastrophe. And your anger is gone.

That kindness is invincible, provided its sincere. What can even the most vicious person do if you keep treating him with kindness?

Four habits of thought to watch for, and erase from your mind when you catch them 1. This thought is unnecessary. 2. This one is destructive to the people around you. 3. This wouldn't be what you really think.

If you don't have a consistent goal in life, you can't live it in a consistent way.

The town mouse and the country mouse. The distress and agitation of the town mouse.

We need to master the art of acquiescence. We need to pay attention to our impulses, making sure they don't go unmoderated, that they benefit others, that they're worthy of us. W need to steer clear of desire in any form and not try to avoid what's beyond our control.