Marcus Aurelius on Mindfulness Quotes

"The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts."

"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."

"Wipe out the imagination. Stop the pulling of the strings. Confine thyself to the present."

"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."

"Life is neither good nor evil, but only a place for good and evil."

"To live a good life: We have the potential for it. If we can learn to be indifferent to what makes no difference."

"If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment."

"If you are pained by any external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs you, but your own judgment about it."

"Concentrate every minute like a Roman—like a man—on doing what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly, willingly, with justice."

"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."

"It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live."

"You can discard most of the junk that clutters your mind—things that exist only there—and clear out space for yourself."

"Your mind will take the shape of what you frequently hold in thought."

"Be like the cliff against which the waves continually break; but it stands firm and tames the fury of the water around it."

"Let not your mind run on what you lack as much as on what you have already."

"Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears."

"Dig within. There lies the fount of good; a fount whose waters will ever bubble up, if you but dig deep enough."

"Dig deep within yourself, for there is a fountain of goodness ever ready to flow if you will keep digging."

"The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are."

"Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too."

"Today I escaped anxiety. Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions — not outside."

"The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts."

"Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them."

"The universal order and the personal order are nothing but different expressions of a common underlying principle."

"Look within. Within is the fountain of good, and it will ever bubble up, if thou wilt ever dig."

"How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks, but only at what he does himself, to make it just and holy."

"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."

"Justice is the source of all the other virtues."

"Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see."

"Do every act of your life as though it were the very last act of your life."

"It is in your power to retire into yourself whenever you choose."

"Do not waste what remains of your life in speculating about your neighbors. Anything that distracts you from fidelity to the ruler within you means a loss of opportunity."

"Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth."