The book is about leading a righteous life, a life free of corruption of the soul. It is about being in control of your impulses and sensations. Understanding corporeal urges, understanding power, ego, pride, sin, God, Human, and nature itself.
- The fact that this book even though it was written 2000 years ago is so relevant to what we today as a society struggle with is very interesting. His advice on productivity, mental health, emotional intelligence, well-being, and education is something we hear from the most prolific psychologists, sociologists, scientists, and productivity gurus of the modern day.
- I was particularly impressed by the mention of so many historical figures who lived before him. I know today information is at the tip of our fingers (literally) for those who want to learn and read, but for him, it wasn’t easy to get information, I felt like he was a genuine scholar, he educated himself his entire life.
- His stoic approach to life is to be admired.
I was looking for a book on meditation and stumbled upon this.
I have of course heard of this book from all productivity gurus, meditation masters, and other content creators around the internet.
Everyone! It is a book everyone can profit from. It is a blueprint for life. A blueprint for how you should act in any situation life can throw at you.
It is a book that teaches you how to conduct yourself at all times. It teaches you how to approach work, play, friends, family, emotions, and more.
<aside> ?? Well, to find out that an emperor who ruled half of the known world of the time, struggled with the same human difficulties I struggle with, makes me feel good about myself. It makes me feel like whatever I am going through is normal. Not that I didn’t know that, it’s just that now I have another perspective!
The book showed me that I should have a higher tolerance over how much I should control or should I say *understand my emotions and impulses. It showed that discipline has a lot of layers and that there is always room for improvement.
- 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 informers . . . 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 (he didn’t even need to relieve himself, except at set times) . . . his constancy and reliability as a friend . . . his tolerance of people who openly questioned his views and his delight at seeing his ideas improved on . . . his piety—without a trace of superstition . . . So that when your time comes, your conscience will be as clear as his.
- Not a dancer but a wrestler: waiting, poised and dug in, for sudden assaults.
- Nature did not blend things so inextricably that you can’t draw your own boundaries—place your own well-being in your own hands. It’s quite possible to be a good man without anyone realizing it. Remember that.
- Perfection of character: to live your last day, every day, without frenzy, or sloth, or pretense.
- Have you ever seen a severed hand or foot, or a decapitated head, just lying somewhere far away from the body it belonged to . . . ? That’s what we do to ourselves—or try to—when we rebel against what happens to us, when we segregate ourselves. Or when we do something selfish. You have torn yourself away from unity—your natural state, one you were born to share in. Now you’ve cut yourself off from it. But you have one advantage here: you can reattach yourself. A privilege God has granted to no other part of no other whole—to be separated, cut away, and reunited. But look how he’s singled us out. He’s allowed us not to be broken off in the first place, and when we are he’s allowed us to return, to graft ourselves back on, and take up our old position once again: part of a whole.
- Give yourself a gift: the present moment. People out for posthumous fame forget that the Generations To Come will be the same annoying people they know now. And just as mortal. What does it matter to you if they say x about you, or think y?
- The cucumber is bitter? Then throw it out. There are brambles in the path? Then go around them. That’s all you need to know. Nothing more. Don’t demand to know “why such things exist.” Anyone who understands the world will laugh at you, just as a carpenter would if you seemed shocked at finding sawdust in his workshop, or a shoemaker at scraps of leather left over from work.
- No carelessness in your actions. No confusion in your words. No imprecision in your thoughts. No retreating into your own soul, or trying to escape it. No overactivity. They kill you, cut you with knives, shower you with curses. And that somehow cuts your mind off from clearness, and sanity, and self-control, and justice?
- Objective judgment, now, at this very moment. Unselfish action, now, at this very moment. Willing acceptance—now, at this very moment—of all external events. That’s all you need.
- Whatever happens to you has been waiting to happen since the beginning of time. The twining strands of fate wove both of them together: your own existence and the things that happen to you.
- Epithets for yourself: Upright. Modest. Straightforward. Sane. Cooperative. Disinterested. Try not to exchange them for others. And if you should forfeit them, set about getting them back.
- Why all this guesswork? You can see what needs to be done. If you can see the road, follow it. Cheerfully, without turning back. If not, hold up and get the best advice you can. If anything gets in the way, forge on ahead, making good use of what you have on hand, sticking to what seems right. (The best goal to achieve, and the one we fall short of when we fail.)
- To stop talking about what the good man is like, and just be one.
- “If you don’t have a consistent goal in life, you can’t live it in a consistent way.” Unhelpful, unless you specify a goal.
- It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own. If a god appeared to us—or a wise human being, even—and prohibited us from concealing our thoughts or imagining anything without immediately shouting it out, we wouldn’t make it through a single day. That’s how much we value other people’s opinions—instead of our own.
- The student as boxer, not fencer. The fencer’s weapon is picked up and put down again. The boxer’s is part of him. All he has to do is clench his fist.
