Advice from Marcus Aurelius
1. You can concentrate every minute if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life and stop being aimless.
2. Make time for yourself to learn something worthwhile and stop letting yourself be pulled in all directions.
3. Spiritual growth means the capacity for logical and accurate analysis of everything that happens to us.
4. Sprint for the finish. Write off your hopes. If your well-being matters to you, be your own savior while you can.
5. The world is nothing but change. Our life is only perception.
6. Death is something like birth, a natural mystery, elements that split and recombine. Because death overshadows you, be good while you are alive and able.
7. Your conversion should always rest on a conviction that it's right, or benefits others, not because it is more appealing or more popular.
8. Anything like an emerald, gold, ivory that is genuinely beautiful does not need supplementing like praise or contempt.
9. If you seek tranquillity, do less or do what's essential. So, ask yourself at every moment "Is this necessary?" and eliminate unnecessary assumptions and actions that follow. Then, the life of a good man is being contented with what nature assigned him and satisfied with being just and kind himself.
10. something threatening to cause you pain is no misfortune. Rather it is a great good fortune when you endure it and prevail. True good fortune is what you make for yourself. Good fortune: good character, good intentions, and good actions.
11. They are like a vine that produces grapes without looking for anything in return, a bee with its honey stored, a human being after helping others.
12. Things are wrapped in such a veil of mystery that many good philosophers have found it impossible to make sense of them. Even the Stoics have trouble. Any assessment we make is subject to alteration just as we are.
13. Pride is a master of deception: when you think you're occupied in the weightiest business, that's when he has you in his spell.
14. Don't assume it's impossible because you find it hard. But recognize that if it's humanly possible, you can do it too.
15. Everything is interwoven and none of its parts are unconnected. Together they compose the world.
16. Discard your misconceptions, stop being jerked like a puppet, limit yourself to the present, understand what happens, analyze what exists, break it all down, anticipate your final hours, and leave other people's mistakes to their makers.
17. Wash yourself clean with simplicity, humility, indifference to everything but right and wrong. Care for other human beings.
18. Observing life for forty years is as good as a thousand.
19. Perfection of character: to live your last day, every day without frenzy, sloth, or pretense.
20. The first step to take is not to be anxious because nature controls it all. The second one is to concentrate on what you have to do and remind yourself that your task is to be a good human being. Stick to what's in front of you-idea, action, utterance.
21. A rational being can turn each setback into raw material and use it to achieve its goal.
22. Don't let your imagination be crushed by life as a whole and stick with the situation at hand and ask " Why can't I endure it?"
23. Remind yourself that past and future have no power over you. Only the present. Just mark off its limits.
24. Do what nature demands and 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.
25. Your actions and perceptions need to aim at accomplishing practical ends, the exercise of thought, and maintaining a confidence founded on understanding.
26. To follow the logos in all things it to be relaxed, energetic, joyful and serious at once.
27. Stop talking about what the good man is like, and just be one. Live your brief life rightly and train for your logos in life observed accurately and scientifically. So keep at it until it is fully digested.
