Audiobook narration - Marcus Aurelius
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EnglishVoice Age
Middle Aged (35-54)Accents
North American (General)Transcript
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page 30 How to act Never under compulsion, out of selfishness, without forethought, with misgivings. Don't gussy up your thoughts. No surplus of words or unnecessary actions. Let this spirit in. You represent a man and adults, a citizen, a Roman, a ruler, taking up his post like a soldier and patiently awaiting his recall from life needing no oath or witnesses. Cheerfulness without requiring other people's help or serenity supplied to others to stand up straight, not straightened. Nothing is more pathetic than people who run in circles, delving into things that lie beneath in conducting investigations into the world of people around them. Never realizing that all you have to do is to be attentive to the power inside of you in worship it sincerely. To worship it is to keep it from being muddled with turmoil, becoming aimless, dissatisfied with nature, divine and human. Suppose that a god announced that you were going to die tomorrow or the day after, unless you were a complete coward. You wouldn't kick up a fuss about which day. What difference would it make now? Recognize that the difference between years from now and tomorrow is just a small 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 off if I'm going to do what I was born for? The things I was brought into this world to do? Or is this what I was created for? Huddle under the blanket and stay warm to feel affection for people even when they make mistakes is uniquely human. You can do it too, if you simply recognize that they're human too, that they act out of ignorance against their will and that you'll both be dead before long. And above all that they haven't really hurt you. They haven't diminished your ability to choose. Treat what you have as non existent. Look at what you have, the things you value most And think of how much you'd crave them if you didn't have them. But be careful. Don't feel such satisfaction that you start to overvalue them would upset you toe lose them when you wake in the morning. Tell yourself the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous. And surely they're like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good in the ugliness of evil and have recognized the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own none of the same blood or birth, but of the same mind in possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me in comparing sins the way people do that one's committed out of desire or worse than the ones committed out of anger, which is good philosophy. The angry man seems to turn his back on the reason out of a kind of pain or inter convulsion. But the man motivated by desire, who is mastered by pleasure, seems somehow more self indulgent, less manly in this sense and philosophically sound. To see that the sin is committed out of pleasure deserves a harsher rebuke than one committed out of pain, the angst mannesmn, or like a victim of wrongdoing provoked by pain to anger. The other man rushes into wrongdoing on his own move by the action. My desire not to feel exasperated or defeated were despondent because your days aren't packed with wise and moral actions, but to get back up when you fail to celebrate behaving like a human, however imperfectly, and fully embrace the pursuit that you've embarked on,