The discipline of attention

What is badness? It is what you have seen many times before. Whenever anything happens, keep this ready: it is what you have seen many times before. Everywhere, up and down, you'll find the same things—the same things that fill the old histories, the histories of the middle ages, and the histories of today; the same things that fill cities and households now. Nothing is new. Everything is both familiar and short-lived.

How can our principles die, unless the impressions that correspond to them are put out? But it is in your power to keep fanning these thoughts back into flame. I can hold the right opinion about anything—if I can, why am I troubled? What lies outside my mind has no bearing at all on my mind. Hold to that, and you stand upright. Recovering your life is in your power. Look at things again as you once used to look at them—for that is what recovering your life means.

The empty business of pageantry, stage-plays, flocks of sheep, herds of cattle, sham fights with spears, a bone thrown to puppies, a crumb tossed into fishponds, ants laboring and hauling their loads, frightened mice scurrying about, puppets jerked by strings—all of a kind. Amid such things your duty is to keep good humor and not put on airs of superiority, while understanding that a person is worth exactly as much as the things he devotes himself to are worth.

In conversation you must attend to what is being said, and in every action you must observe what is being done. In the one, see at once what end it serves; in the other, watch closely for what is meant.

Is my understanding equal to this or not? If it is, I use it for the task as an instrument given me by universal nature. But if it is not, then either I step aside from the task and hand it to someone who can do it better—unless there's some reason I shouldn't—or I do it as well as I can, bringing in someone who, with the help of my ruling faculty, can accomplish what is now needed and useful for the common good. For whatever I do, alone or with another, should be directed to one thing only: what is useful and fitting for society.

How many who were once celebrated by fame have since been given over to oblivion; and how many who celebrated the fame of others have long since been dead.

Don't be ashamed to be helped. Your job is to carry out your duty, like a soldier in the assault on a city wall. So what if, being lame, you can't climb the battlements alone, but can with another's help?

Don't let future things trouble you. You will come to them, if you must, carrying with you the same reason you now use for present things.

All things are woven together with one another, and the bond is sacred; scarcely anything is unconnected to anything else. Things have been arranged together, and they combine to form the same ordered universe. For there is one universe made of all things, one god pervading all things, one substance, one law, one reason shared by all intelligent beings, and one truth—if indeed there is also one perfection for all beings that share the same origin and the same reason.

Everything material soon vanishes into the substance of the whole; everything causal is very soon taken back into the universal reason; and the memory of everything is very soon swallowed up in time.

For the rational animal, the same act is in accord with nature and in accord with reason.

Stand upright—or be made upright.

Just as it is with the limbs in bodies that are joined into one, so it is with rational beings, though they exist separately, for they have been constituted for one shared work. You'll grasp this more fully if you often tell yourself: I am a limb of the system of rational beings. But if you say you are merely a part, you don't yet love people from your heart; doing good does not yet delight you for its own sake; you still do it merely as a matter of propriety, not yet as doing good to yourself.

Let whatever falls from outside land where it will, on the parts able to feel its impact. Those parts that feel it can complain, if they choose. But I, unless I judge what has happened to be an evil, am not harmed. And it is in my power not to judge it so.

Whatever anyone does or says, I must be good—just as if gold, or emerald, or purple were always saying: whatever anyone does or says, I must be emerald and keep my color.

The ruling faculty does not disturb itself—does not frighten itself or cause itself pain. If something else can frighten or pain it, let it try. The faculty itself will not, by its own judgment, turn itself toward such states. Let the body take care, if it can, that it suffers nothing, and let it speak up if it does suffer. But the soul itself—the part subject to fear and pain, which holds full power over its own judgments about these things—will suffer nothing, for it will never bend itself into such a judgment. The ruling principle in itself lacks nothing, unless it manufactures a lack for itself; and so it is free from disturbance and unimpeded, as long as it doesn't disturb and impede itself.

Happiness is a good guiding spirit, or a good thing. So what are you doing here, imagination? Go away, I beg you by the gods, the way you came—I have no need of you. You've come out of old habit. I'm not angry with you: just go.

Is anyone afraid of change? What, after all, can happen without change? What is dearer or more fitting to universal nature? Can you take a bath unless the wood changes? Can you be nourished unless the food changes? Can anything useful at all be accomplished without change? Don't you see, then, that your own change is exactly the same kind of thing, and just as necessary to universal nature?

Through the universal substance, as through a raging torrent, all bodies are swept along, bound by nature to the whole and cooperating with it, as the parts of our body cooperate with one another. How many a Chrysippus, how many a Socrates, how many an Epictetus has time already swallowed up! Let the same thought come to you regarding every person and thing.

Only one thing troubles me: that I might do something the constitution of man does not allow, or in a way it does not allow, or something it does not allow right now.

Near is your forgetting of all things; and near is the forgetting of you by all.

It is characteristic of a human being to love even those who do wrong. This becomes possible if, when they wrong you, it occurs to you that they are kin, that they do wrong out of ignorance and against their will, that soon both of you will be dead, and above all, that the wrongdoer has done you no real harm, since he has not made your ruling faculty worse than it was.

Universal nature, out of the universal substance, as if it were wax, now molds a horse, and having broken that up, uses the material for a tree, then for a man, then for something else; and each of these subsists for a very short time. It is no hardship for a vessel to be broken apart, just as there was none in its being put together.

A scowling look is entirely unnatural. Assume it often, and all charm dies out of the face, until at last it's extinguished so completely it can never be lit again. Try to conclude from this very fact that a scowl is against reason. For if even the awareness of doing wrong departs, what reason is left for living any longer?

Nature that governs the whole will soon change everything you see, and out of their substance make other things, and again other things from the substance of those, so that the world may stay forever new.

When someone has wronged you, consider at once what opinion about good or evil led him to do it. Once you see that, you'll pity him, and neither be astonished nor angry. For either you yourself still think the same thing he does is good, or something similar—in which case it's your duty to forgive him. Or if you no longer think such things good or evil, you'll find it even easier to be well disposed toward someone in error.

Don't dwell so much on what you lack as on what you have. Of what you have, pick out the best, and reflect how eagerly you'd seek them if you didn't have them. But at the same time, be careful that in prizing them so, you don't fall into overvaluing them, so that you'd be troubled if you ever lost them.

Withdraw into yourself. The ruling reason has this nature: it is content with itself when it acts justly, and so secures its own calm.

Wipe away the imagination. Stop the strings from pulling you. Confine yourself to the present. Understand clearly what happens, whether to you or to another. Divide and sort every object into its causal and material aspects. Think of your last hour. Let the wrong someone else does stay where it was done.

Pay attention to what is said. Let your understanding enter into what is being done and who is doing it.

Adorn yourself with simplicity and modesty, and with indifference toward what lies between virtue and vice. Love mankind. Follow God. The poet says law rules all—and it's enough to remember that law rules all.

About death: whether it is a scattering, or a dissolving into atoms, or annihilation, it is either extinction or change.

About pain: pain that is unbearable carries us off; pain that lasts a long time is bearable. The mind maintains its own calm by withdrawing into itself, and the ruling faculty is not made worse. But let the parts harmed by pain, if they can, speak their own opinion of it.

About fame: look at the minds of those who chase it—observe what they're like, what they avoid, and what they pursue. And consider how, just as heaps of sand piled one on another bury the earlier sand, so in life the events that came before are soon buried under those that come after.

From Plato: The man with a lofty mind, who takes in all of time and all of substance—do you suppose it possible for him to think human life is anything great? It is not possible, he said. Such a man, then, will think death too is no evil. Certainly not.

From Antisthenes: It is a king's part to do good and be slandered for it.

It is a shameful thing for the face to be obedient, arranging and composing itself as the mind commands, while the mind fails to arrange and compose itself.

It is not right to rage at things, for they care nothing about it.

To the immortal gods and to us, give joy.

Life must be harvested like ripe ears of grain: one is born, another dies.

If the gods have no care for me and for my children, there is a reason for it.

For the good is with me, and the just.