“People look for retreats for themselves, in the country, by the coast, or in the hills . . . There is nowhere that a person can find a more peaceful and trouble-free retreat than in his own mind. . . . So constantly give yourself this retreat, and renew yourself.”
- Marcus Aurelius
Are you distracted by outward cares? Then allow yourself a space of quiet wherein you can add to your knowledge of the Good and learn to curb your restlessness. Nowhere can a man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul. Avail yourself often, then, of this retirement, and so continually renew yourself.
- Marcus Aurelius
More quotes by Marcus Aurelius:
The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.
You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.
The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.
Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.
Because your own strength is unequal to the task, do not assume that it is beyond the powers of man; but if anything is within the powers and province of man, believe that it is within your own compass also.
Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life.
Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.
The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.
Loss is nothing else but change, and change is Nature's delight.
Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.
Adapt yourself to the things among which your lot has been cast and love sincerely the fellow creatures with whom destiny has ordained that you shall live.
Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the Universe loves nothing so much as to change the things which are, and to make new things like them.
Death, like birth, is a secret of Nature.
To the wise, life is a problem; to the fool, a solution.
Natural ability without education has more often raised a man to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.
Our life is what our thoughts make it.
Let it be your constant method to look into the design of people's actions, and see what they would be at, as often as it is practicable; and to make this custom the more significant, practice it first upon yourself.
Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too.
What springs from earth dissolves to earth again, and heaven-born things fly to their native seat.
Despise not death, but welcome it, for nature wills it like all else.
The universal order and the personal order are nothing but different expressions and manifestations of a common underlying principle.
To refrain from imitation is the best revenge.
The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing.
And thou wilt give thyself relief, if thou doest every act of thy life as if it were the last.
Begin - to begin is half the work, let half still remain; again begin this, and thou wilt have finished.
Men exist for the sake of one another.
Life is neither good or evil, but only a place for good and evil.
The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.
The secret of all victory lies in the organization of the non-obvious.
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