English- Choice Quotes from Marcus Aurelius' Meditations
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EnglishVoice Age
Young Adult (18-35)Accents
North American (General)Transcript
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When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly they are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good and the ugliness of evil and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own, not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative or hate him? We are born to work together like feet, hands and eyes like the two rows of teeth upper and lower to obstruct each other is unnatural to feel anger at someone to turn your back on him. These are obstructions. Remember how long you've been putting this off, how many extensions the gods gave you and you didn't use them. At some point, you have to recognize what world it is that you belong to what power rules it. And from what source you spring that there is a limit to the time assigned to you and if you don't use it to free yourself, it will be gone and never returned. Do external things distract you then make time for yourself to learn something worthwhile. Stop letting yourself be pulled in all directions, but make sure you guard against the other kind of confusion. People who labor all their lives but have no purpose to direct every thought and impulse toward are wasting their time. Even when hard at work, how to act never under compulsion, out of selfishness without forethought with misgivings. Don't gussy up your thoughts, no surplus words or unnecessary actions. But the spirit in you represent a man, an adult, a citizen, a Roman, a ruler taking up his post like a soldier and patiently awaiting his recall from life, needing no oath or witness, cheerfulness without requiring other people's help or serenity supplied by others to stand up straight, not straightened, forget everything else. Keep hold of this alone. And remember it, each of us lives only now this brief instant, the rest has been lived already or is impossible to see the span we live is small. Small is the corner of the earth in which we live. It small is even the greatest renown passed from mouth to mouth by short lived stick figures, ignorant alike of themselves and those long dead. If you do the job in a principled way with diligence, energy and patience, if you keep yourself free of distractions and keep the spirit inside you undamaged as if you might have to give it back at any moment. If you can embrace this without fear or expectation, confine fulfillment in what you're doing now as nature intended and in superhuman truthfulness, every word, every utterance, then your life will be happy. No one can prevent that not to live as if you had endless years ahead of you. Death overshadows you while you're alive and able be good.