Alexandra Schae > Alexandra's Quotes

“Observe the movements of the stars as if you were running their courses with them, and let your mind constantly dwell on the changes of the elements into each other. Such imaginings wash away the filth of life on the ground.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Asia and Europe: tiny corners of the Cosmos. Every sea: a mere drop. Mount Athos: a lump of dirt. The present moment is the smallest point in all eternity. All is microscopic, changeable, disappearing. All things come from that faraway place, either originating directly from that governing part which is common to all, or else following from it as consequences. So even the gaping jaws of the lion, deadly poison, and all harmful things like thorns or an oozing bog are products of that awesome and noble source. Do not imagine these things to be alien to that which you revere, but turn your Reason to the source of all things.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Your days are numbered. Use them to throw open the windows of your soul to the sun. If you do not, the sun will soon set, and you with it.”
― Marcus Aurelius, The Emperor's Handbook

“Everything is banal in experience, fleeting in duration, sordid in content; in all respects the same today as generations now dead and buried have found it to be.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Adapt yourself to the life you have been given; and truly love the people with whom destiny has surrounded you”
― Marcus Aurelius

“We are the other of the other”
― Marco Aurelio

“Human life. Duration: momentary. Nature: changeable. Perception: dim. Condition of Body: decaying. Soul: spinning around. Fortune: unpredictable. Lasting Fame: uncertain. Sum Up: The body and its parts are a river, the soul a dream and mist, life is warfare and a journey far from home, lasting reputation is oblivion.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Never forget that the universe is a single living organism possessed of one substance and one soul, holding all things suspended in a single consciousness and creating all things with a single purpose that they might work together spinning and weaving and knotting whatever comes to pass.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Don’t let yourself forget how many doctors have died, furrowing their brows over how many deathbeds. How many astrologers, after pompous forecasts about others’ ends. How many philosophers, after endless disquisitions on death and immortality. How many warriors, after inflicting thousands of casualties themselves. How many tyrants, after abusing the power of life and death atrociously, as if they were themselves immortal.
How many whole cities have met their end: Helike, Pompeii, Herculaneum, and countless others.

And all the ones you know yourself, one after another. One who laid out another for burial, and was buried himself, and then the man who buried him - all in the same short space of time.

In short, know this: Human lives are brief and trivial. Yesterday a blob of semen; tomorrow embalming fluid, ash.

To pass through this brief life as nature demands. To give it up without complaint.

Like an olive that ripens and falls.

Praising its mother, thanking the tree it grew on.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“That which has died falls not out of the universe. If it stays here, it also changes here, and is dissolved into its proper parts, which are elements of the universe and of thyself. And these too change, and they murmur not".”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“‎"Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: ‘I have to go to work—as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for—the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?

—But it’s nicer here…

So you were born to feel ‘nice’? Instead of doings things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands?

—But we have to sleep sometime…

Agreed. But nature set a limit on that—as it did on eating and drinking. And you’re over the limit. You’ve had more than enough of that. But not of working. There you’re still below your quota. You don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you. People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it, they even forget to wash or eat. Do you have less respect for your own nature than the engraver does for engraving, the dancer for dance, the miser for money or the social climber for status? When they’re really possessed by what they do, they’d rather stop eating and sleeping than give up practicing their arts.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Live every day as if they last.”
― Marcus Aurelius

“All of us are creatures of a day; the rememberer and the remembered alike.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“In the human life time is but an instant, and the substance of it a flux, and the perception dull, and the composition of the whole body subject to putrefaction, and the soul a whirl, and fortune hard to divine, and fame a thing devoid of certainty. And, to say all in a word, everything that belongs to the body is a stream, and what belongs to the soul is a dream and vapor, and life is a warfare and a stranger's sojourn, and after- fame is oblivion. What then can guide a man? One thing and only one, philosophy.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“In the life of man, his time is but a moment, his being an incessant flux, his senses a dim rushlight, his body a prey of worms, his soul an unquiet eddy, his fortune dark, and his fame doubtful. In short, all that is of the body is as coursing waters, all that is of the soul as dreams and vapours; life a warfare, a brief sojourning in an alien land;and after repute, oblivion. Where, then, can man find the power to guide and guard his steps? In one thing and one alone: the love of knowledge.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Its a dream, a fearful dream, life is”
― Marcus Aurelius

“Frequently consider the connection of all things in the Universe. ... Reflect upon
the multitude of bodily and mental events taking place in the same brief time,
simultaneously in every one of us and so you will not be surprised that many
more events, or rather all things that come to pass, exist simultaneously in the
one and entire unity, which we call the Universe. ... We should not say ‘I am an
Athenian’ or ‘I am a Roman’ but ‘I am a Citizen of the Universe'.”
― Marcus Aurelius

“The soul of a man harms itself, first and foremost, when it becomes (as far as it can) a separate growth, a sort of tumour on the universe; because to resent anything that happens is to separate oneself in revolt from Nature, which holds in collective embrace the particular natures of all other things.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Though thou shouldst be going to live three thousand years, and as many times ten thousand years, still remember that no man loses any other life than this which he now lives, nor lives any other than this which he now loses. The longest and shortest are thus brought
to the same. For the present is the same to all, though that which perishes is not the same; and so that which is lost appears to be a mere moment.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“If you give a man a fish he is hungry again in an hour. If you teach him to catch a fish you do him a good turn.”
― Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie

“In no great while you will be no one and nowhere, and nothing that you now behold will be in existence, nor will anyone now alive. For it is in the nature of all things to change and alter and perish, so that others may arise in their turn.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Everything is only for a day, both that which remembers and that which is remembered”
― Marcus Aurelius

“Disgraceful: for the soul to give up when the body is still going strong.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“We should remark the grace and fascination that there is even in the incidentals of Nature's processes.. When a loaf of bread,. for instance,. is in the oven,. crack appear in it here and there; and these flaws,. though not intended in the baking,. have a rightness of their own,. and sharpen the appetite..”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“It is not death that a man should fear, but rather he should fear never beginning to live.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Death smiles at us all; all we can do is smile back.”
― Marcus Aurelius

“What am I but a little flesh, a little breath, and the thinking part that rules the whole?”
― Marcus Aurelius, The Emperor's Handbook

“He who eats my bread does my will.”
― Marcus Aurelius

“fame in a world like this is worthless.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations