Status Updates From Meditações

“Remind yourself too that each of us lives only in the present moment, a mere fragment of time: the rest is life past or uncertain future. Sure, life is a small thing, and small the cranny of the earth in which we live it: small too even the longest fame thereafter, which is itself subject to a succession of little men who will quickly die, and have no knowledge even of themselves, let alone of those long dead.”

“Revere your power of judgement. All rests on this to make sure that your directing mind no longer entertains any judgement which fails to agree with the nature or the constitution of a rational being. And this state guarantees deliberate thought, affinity with other men, and obedience to the gods.”

“In the mind of one who is chastened and cleansed you will find no suppuration, no simmering ulcer, no sore festering under the skin. Fate does not catch him with his life unfulfilled, as one might speak of an actor leaving the stage before his part is finished and the play is over. Moreover you will find nothing servile or pretentious, no dependence or alienation, nothing to answer for, no lurking fault.”

“A man who has put first his own mind and divinity, and worships the supremacy of the god within him, makes no drama of his life, no hand-wringing, no craving for solitude or crowds: most of all, his will be a life of neither pursuit nor avoidance, and it is of no remote concern to him whether he will retain the bodily envelope of his soul for a longer or a shorter time.”

“Never regard as a benefit to yourself anything which will force you at some point to break your faith, to leave integrity behind, to hate, suspect, or curse another, to dissemble, to covet anything needing the secrecy of walls and drapes.”

Important, powerful, brilliantly written