Stoic Books
Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations
Private reminders on judgment, duty, mortality, fellowship, and returning attention to the work at hand.
What this text offers
Private reminders on judgment, duty, mortality, fellowship, and returning attention to the work at hand. Ask Stoics preserves this edition as a searchable public-domain source rather than presenting isolated quotations without context.
The library contains 510 passage records from this work, with locators and edition provenance.
How to study it
Begin with a live question, read more than the first matching excerpt, and compare the passage with its surrounding argument.
Then choose one existing practice that turns the distinction into a concrete act of attention, restraint, courage, justice, or review.
Questions to bring to the text
Search this work for judgment, duty, mortality, and fellowship. For each result, ask what claim is being made, what distinction supports it, and what kind of conduct follows.
Compare several passages before drawing a conclusion. The same word can serve a different part of an argument in another book, letter, or conversation.
From reading to practice
Write one sentence that preserves the author’s distinction in your own situation without turning the source into a slogan or an external promise.
Choose one act that remains yours—attention, assent, refusal, intention, speech, or conduct—and return afterward to the passage to test whether your reading held up.
Keep the locator beside your note. On the next reading, revise the note if the wider argument corrects or complicates your first interpretation.
Edition and provenance
Translation: George Long. Coverage: complete surviving work. Rights status: public domain in the launch territories.
The source link and locator attached to every excerpt let the reader return to the preserved edition.
Primary-text evidence
These excerpts are shown with their exact work locators. Read them as evidence for study, not as detached slogans.
“From my grandfather Verus I learned good morals and the government of my temper.”
“Love that only which happens to thee and is spun with the thread of thy destiny. For what is more suitable?”
“Man, thou hast been a citizen in this great state [the world]; what difference does it make to thee whether for five years [or three]? for that which is conformable to the laws is just for all. Where is the hardship then, if no tyrant nor yet an unjust judge sends thee away from the state, but nature who brought thee into it? the same as if a prætor who has employed an actor dismisses him from the stage.—“But I have not finished the five acts, but only three of them.”—Thou sayest well, but in life the three acts are the whole drama; for what shall be a complete drama is determined by him who was once the cause of its composition, and now of its dissolution: but thou art the cause of neither. Depart then satisfied, for he also who releases thee is…”