A key point to bear in mind: The value of attentiveness varies in proportion to its object. You’re better off not giving the small things more time than they deserve.

Forget everything else. Keep hold of this alone and remember it: Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see.

Brief is man’s life and small the nook of the earth where he lives; brief, too, is the longest posthumous fame, buoyed only by a succession of poor human beings who will very soon die and who know little of themselves, much less of someone who died long ago.

How much time he saves who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks.

Altogether the interval is small between birth and death; and consider with how much trouble, and in company with what sort of people and in what a feeble body, this interval is laboriously passed.

Keep in mind how fast things pass by and are gone – those that are now and those to come. Existence flows past us like a river: the ‘what’ is in constant flux, the ‘why’ has a thousand variations. Nothing is stable, not even what’s right here. The infinity of past and future gapes before us – a chasm whose depths we cannot see.

How short is the time from birth to dissolution, and the illimitable time before birth as well as the equally boundless time after dissolution.

The perfection of moral character consists in this, in passing every day as if it were the last, and in being neither violently excited nor torpid nor playing the hypocrite.

Concentration is the ability to think about absolutely nothing when it is absolutely necessary.

It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.

Live the life you’ve dreamed.

Life is not fair; get used to it.

Think of all the years passed by in which you said to yourself “I’ll do it tomorrow,” and how the gods have again and again granted you periods of grace of which you have not availed yourself. It is time to realize that you are a member of the Universe, that you are born of Nature itself, and to know that a limit has been set to your time. Use every moment wisely, to perceive your inner refulgence, or ’twill be gone and nevermore within your reach.

Your life is short. You must turn to profit the present by the aid of reason and justice.

Not to waste time on nonsense.

Receive without conceit, release without struggle

Be content to seem what you really are.

Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears. 

Remember: Matter. How tiny your share of it. Time. How brief and fleeting your allotment of it. Fate. How small a role you play in it. 

You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.

Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.

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

Life is a long lesson in humility.

Life is a lively process of becoming.

If it’s not right, don’t do it. If it’s not true, don’t say it.

The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.

Integrity and manliness. (What Marcus learned from his father)

To accept without arrogance, to let it go with indifference.

Each day provides its own gifts.

Anger cannot be dishonest.

Nothing should be done without a purpose.

Even the smallest thing should be done with reference to an end.

Stick to what’s in front of you – idea, action, utterance.

What is your art? To be good.

Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly.

If you judge, investigate.

Give yourself a gift: the present moment.

The true man is revealed in difficult times. So when trouble comes, think of yourself as a wrestler whom God, like a trainer, has paired with a tough young buck. For what purpose? To turn you into Olympic-class material. But this is going to take some sweat to accomplish.

There were two vices much blacker and more serious than the rest: lack of persistence and lack of self-control… persist and resist.

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

Look within. Within is the foundation of good, and it will ever bubble up, if you will ever dig.

To love only what happens, what was destined. No greater harmony. 

You don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you.

Consider if you have behaved to all in such a way that this way be said of you: Never has he wronged a man in deed or word.

What is divine deserves our affection because it is good; what is human deserves our affection because it is like us.

People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it, they even forget to wash or eat.

The spiritual meaning of love is measured by what it can do. Love is meant to heal. Love is meant to renew. Love is meant to bring us closer to God.

[Treat] unenlightened souls with sympathy and indulgence, remembering that they are ignorant or mistaken about what’s most important. Never be harsh, remember Plato’s dictum: ‘Every soul is deprived of the truth against its will.’

Shall any man hate me? That will be his affair. But I will be mild and benevolent toward every man, and ready to show even him his mistake, not reproachfully, nor yet as making a display of my endurance, but nobly and honestly.

Accustom yourself to attend carefully to what is said by another, and as much as it is possible, try to inhabit the speaker’s mind.