Last Friday I hurt my knee playing tennis and was limping badly enough to end up in a doctor’s office by Monday and in physical therapy today. To keep from whining too much, I turned my thoughts to the wisest of Roman Emperors - the stoic Marcus Aurelius. Marcus Aurelius is probably best known today as the old Emperor who was murdered by the “Joaquin Phoenix character” (Commodus) at the beginning of the movie “Gladiator.” “Gladiator” was completely inaccurate historically here; in reality Marcus died of exhaustion from having fought off Germanic hordes and from the tolls of running an Empire.

 

Despite being from one of the richest families in Rome, as a young man Marcus slept on the floor to renounce pleasure and to toughen himself up. His “Meditations” is a masterpiece, an intensely personal book he never imagined being published. When he says “you need to do such and such,” the “you” literally is Marcus Aurelius. “Meditations” survived because the “you” can be anyone else, including injured tennis players. There is a mix of toughness, idealism, humility, and humanity rarely found so well balanced in a single work - or a single man for that matter.

 

Below are some of my favorite quotes from “Meditations.”

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• Perceive at last that you have within yourself something stronger and more divine than the things which create your passions and make a downright puppet of you. Book 12, chapter 19

 

• When you run against someone’s wrong behavior, go on at once to reflect what similar wrong act of your own there is. Book 10, chapter 30

 

• That man prays: “How may I know that woman”; do you pray: “How may I not desire to know her.” Another prays: “How may I get rid of him”; do you pray: “How may I not want to be rid of him.” Book 9, chapter 40

 

• The art of living resembles wrestling more than dancing, inasmuch as it stands prepared and unshaken to meet what comes and what it did not foresee. Books 7, chapter 61

 
 

• Do not be ashamed to be helped; the task before you is to accomplish what falls to your lot, like a soldier in a storming party. Suppose you are lame and cannot scale the wall by yourself, yet it can be done with another’s help. Book 7, chapter 7

 

• Is it change that a man fears? Why, what can have come to be without change, and what is dearer or more familiar to Universal Nature? Can you yourself take your bath, unless the firewood changes? Can you be nourished, unless what you eat changes? Book 7, chapter 18

 

• Alexander the Great and his stable boy were leveled and death, for they were either taken up into the same life-giving of principles of the Universe or were scattered without distinction into atoms. Book 6, chapter 24

 

• Suppose a man can convince me of error and bring home to me that I am mistaken in thought or act; I shall be glad to alter, for the truth is what I pursue, and no one was ever injured by the truth, whereas he is injured who continues in his own self-deception and ignorance. Books 6, chapter 21

 

• Don’t be disgusted, don’t give up, don’t be impatient if you do not carry out entirely conduct based in every detail upon right principles; but after a fall return again, and rejoice if most of your actions are worthier of human character. Book 5, chapter 9

 
 

• You are a spirit bearing the weight of a dead body, as Epictetus used to say. Book 4, chapter 41

 

• Does an emerald become worse than it was, if it be not praised? Book 4, chapter 20

 

• How great a rest from a labour he gains who does not look to what his neighbor says or does our thinks, but only to what he himself is doing, in order that exactly this may be just and holy, or in accord with a good man’s conduct. Book 4, chapter 18

 

•  Never value as an advantage to yourself what will force you one day to break your word, to abandon self-respect, to hate, suspect, execrate another, to act a part, to covet anything that calls for walls or covering to conceal it. Book 3, chapter 7

 

• Remember how long you have been putting off these things, and how many times the gods have given you days of grace, and yet you do not use them. Now it is high time to perceive the kind of Universe whereof you are a part and the nature of the governor of the Universe from whom you subsist as an effluence, and that the term of your time is circumscribed, and that unless you use it to attain calm of mind, time will be gone and you will be gone and the opportunity to use it will not be yours again. Book 2, chapter 4

 

• Say to yourself in the early morning: I shall meet today inquisitive, ungrateful, violent, treacherous, envious, and uncharitable men. All these things have come upon them through ignorance of real good and ill. But I, because I have seen that the nature of good is the right, and of ill the wrong, and that the nature of the man himself who does wrong is akin to my own (not of the same blood and seed, but partaking with me in mind, that is in a portion of divinity), I can neither be harmed by any of them, for no man will involve me in wrong, nor can I be angry with my kinsmen or hate him; for we have come into the world to work together, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of upper and lower teeth. To work against one another therefore is to oppose Nature, and to be vexed with another or to turn away from him is to tend to antagonism. Book 2, chapter 1

 

 
 

Translations above by A. S. L. Farquharson, Everyman’s Library, Alfred. A. Knopf Publisher