Meditations, Book 2 – Marcus Aurelius‏

“Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful, and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is akin to me, not only of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in the same intelligence and the same portion of the divinity, I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him, For we are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one another then is contrary to nature; and it is acting against one another to be vexed and to turn away.”

“Meditations“, Book 2, 1

Marcus Aurelius

____________

Marcus Aurelius was an emperor, he ruled
Rome for just under 20 years, from 161 to
180 A.D., a highly unlikely fount of
philosophical inspiration, do potentates
think this way, for instance, nowadays

meanwhile the advice above is not a
bad way to start any day, I think, even
for impotentates

respectfully

Richard

psst: “Remember that all is opinion.”,
Book 2, paragraph 15, also one of my
favourite ruminations

for all I‘m apparently therefore worth