BOOK 8 -42

I have no cause to hurt myself: I have never consciously hurt anyone else.

BOOK 8 -41 2

Now apply all this to yourself. Is pain or pleasure affecting you? That is for the senses. You have formed an impulse and then met some obstruction> If this was an unconditional aim, then yes, the obstruction harms your rational nature: but if you accept what is common experience, no harm is yet done or hindrance caused. You see, no one will impede the proper functions of the mind. The mind cannot be touched by fire, steel, tyranny, slander, or anything whatever, once it has become 'a perfect round in solitude'.

BOOK 8 -41

An obstacle to sense perception is harmful to animal nature. An obstacle to impulse is likewise harmful to animal nature. (Something else will be similarly obstructive and harmful to the constitution of all plants.) It follows that an obstacle to the mind is harmful to intelligent nature.

BOOK 8 -40

If you remove your judgement of anything that seems painful, you yourself stand quite immune to pain. 'What self?' Reason. 'But I am not just reason.' Granted. So let your reason cause itself no pain, and if some other part of you is in trouble, it can form its own judgement for itself.

BOOK 8 -39

In the constitution of the rational being I can see no virtue that counters justice: but I do see the counter to pleasure - self-control.

BOOK 8 -38

If you have a sharp sight, use it: but as the poet says, add wise judgement.

BOOK 8 -37

Is Panthea or Pergamus still sitting by the coffin of Verus? Or Chabrias or Diotimus by Hadrian's? Ridiculous! And if they were sitting there, would the dead be aware? And if they were aware, would they be pleased? And if they were pleased, would they make their mourners immortal? Was it not their fate also first to grow old - old women and old men like any others - and then to die? And with them dead, what would those they mourned do then? It is all stench and corruption in a bag of bones.

BOOK 8 -36

Do not let the panorama of your life oppress you, do not dwell on all the various troubles which may have occurred in the past or may occur in the future. Just ask yourself in each instance of the present: 'What is there in this work which I cannot endure or support?' You will be ashamed to make any such confession. Then remind yourself that it is neither the future nor the past which weighs on you, but always the present: and the present  burden reduces, if only you can isolate it and accuse your mind of weakness if it cannot hold against something thus stripped bare.

BOOK 8 -35

Just as the nature of the Whole is the source of all other faculties in every rational creature, so it has given us the power too. In the same way that nature turns to its own purpose anything obstructive or contrary, placing it in the fated scheme of things and making it part of itself, so the rational being can also convert every obstacle into material for its own use, and use it to further whatever his original purpose was.

BOOK 8 -34

If you have ever seen a severed hand or foot, or a head cut and lying some way away from the rest of the body - analogous is what someone does to himself, as far as he can, when he will not accept his lot and severs himself from society or does some unsocial act. Suppose you have made yourself an outcast  from the unity of nature - you were born a part of it, but now you have cut yourself off. Yet here lies the paradox - that it is open to you to rejoin that unity. No other part has this privilege from god, to come together again once it has been separated and cut away. Just consider the grace of god's favor to man. He has put it in man's power not to be broken off from the Whole in the first place, and also, if he has broken off, to return and grow back again, resuming his role as a member.

BOOK 8 -33

Accept humbly: let go easily.

BOOK 8 -32

You must compose your life action by action, and be satisfied if each action achieves its own end as best as best can be: and no one can prevent you from that achievement. 

'But there will be some external obstacle.'

No obstacle, though to justice, self-control, and reason.

'But perhaps some other other source of action will be obstructed.' 

Well, gladly accept the obstruction as it is, make a judicious change to meet the given circumstance, and another action will immediately substitute and fit into the composition of your life as discussed.

BOOK 8 -31

The court of Augustus - wife, daughter, grandsons, step-sons, sister, Agrippa, relatives, households, friends, Areius, Maecenas, doctors, diviners: an entire court dead. Go on now to other cases, where it is not death of just one individual but of a whole family, like Pompeys. And there is the inscription you see on tombstones: "The last of his line'. Just think of all the anxiety of previous generations to leave behind an heir, and then one has to be the last. Here again the death of a whole family.

BOOK 8 -30

When you speak in the senate or to an individual, be straight-forward, not pedantic. Use language which rings true.

BOOK 8 -29

Erase the impressions on your mind by constantly saying to yourself: 'It is in my power now to keep this soul of mine free from any vice or passion, or any other disturbance at all: but seeing all things for what they are, I can treat them on their merits.' Remember this power which nature gives you.

BOOK 8 -28

Pain is an evil to the body - so let the body give its evidence - or to the soul. But the soul can preserve its own clear sky and calm voyage by not assessing pain as evil. Every judgement, every impulse, desire and rejection is within the soul where nothing evil can penetrate..

BOOK 8 -27

Three relations. First, to your environment; second, to the divine cause which is the source of all that happens to all men; third, to your fellows and contemporaries.

BOOK 8 -26

Man's joy is to do man's proper work. And work proper to man is benevolence to his own kind, disdain for the stirrings of the senses, diagnosis of the impressions he can trust, contemplation of universal nature and all things entailed.

BOOK 8 -25

Lucilla buried Verus, then Lucilla was buried. Secunda buried Maximus, then Secunda next. Such with Epitynchanus and Diotimus, Antononus  and Faustina. The same story always. Celer saw Hadrian to his grave, then went to his own grave. Where are they now, those sharp minds, those prophets or prigs? Certainly Cerax, Demetrius, Eudaemon, and others like them were sharp minds. But all creatures of a day, long dead. Some not remembered even briefly, some turned into legend, and some now vanishing even from legend.

So remember this, that either the poor compound of your body must be scattered, or your frail spirit must be extinguished, or else migrate and take its post elsewhere.

BOOK 8 -24

Just as you see your bath - all soap, sweat, grime, greasy water, the whole thing disgusting - so is every part of life and every object in it.

BOOK 8 -23

Doing something? I do it with reference to the benefit of mankind. Something happening to me? I accept it in reference to the gods and the universal source from which all things spring interrelated.

BOOK 8 -22

Concentrate on the subject or the act in question, on principle or meaning.

You deserve what you are going through. You would rather become good tomorrow than be good today.

Book 8 -21

Turn it inside out and see what it is like, what it becomes in age, sickness and death.

Life is short both for praiser and praised, for the remembering and the remembered. And this, moreover, in just a cranny of one continent: even here not all are not attuned to each other, or even an individual to himself. And the whole earth is a mere point in space.

BOOK 8 -20

Nature's aim for everything includes cessation just as much as its beginning and duration - like someone throwing up a ball. How can it be good for the ball on the way up and bad on the way down, or even when it hits the ground? How can it be good for the bubble when it forms, and bad when it bursts? A candle is a similar example.

BOOK 8 -19

Everything has come into being for a purpose - a horse, say, a vine. Does this surprise you? Even the sun will say, 'I came into being for a purpose': likewise the other gods. For what purpose, then, were you created? For your pleasure? Just see whether this idea can be entertained.

BOOK 8 -18

What dies does not pass out of the universe. If it remains here and is changed, then here too it is resolved into the everlasting constituents, which are the elements of the universe and of you yourself. These too change, and make no complaint of it.

BOOK 8 -17

If the choice is your, why do the thing? But if it is another's choice, what do you blame - atoms or gods? Either is madness. There is no blame. If you can, put him right: if you can't at the least put the matter itself right. If that is impossible, what further purpose does blame serve? Nothing should be done without purpose.