Meditations
Marcus Aurelius · 180
A Roman emperor's private Stoic notebook on virtue, duty, and mortality.
George Long translation, 1862
Read the real book ↗13 cards
Philosophy & WisdomDo this 
Do thisinstantCorrect people without correcting them
One entry in Book I thanks a teacher for a move you can use in your next meeting. When somebody uses the wrong word, mangles a name, or misstates a fact: do not flag it, and do not soften a flag either. Just use the correct version inside your own next sentence, and carry on. They pick it up. Nobody loses face.
Philosophy & WisdomDo this 
Do this3 minAsk the question that pays you twice
Marcus's rule from Book IV: on every occasion, ask whether this is one of the unnecessary things. Then cut it. He claims the cut pays twice: the calm of doing things well, plus the calm of doing fewer of them. Then he extends it to thoughts — drop the unnecessary ones and the superfluous acts stop following. Run it down tomorrow's list.
Philosophy & WisdomStart here 
Nobody was ever meant to read this. That is exactly why it is worth reading.
Marcus Aurelius ran the Roman empire from 161 to 180 and wrote these notes to an audience of one. No title, no thesis, no reader to impress. Book II carries a heading placing it in a war camp on the Danube. He repeats himself constantly, and the repetition is the tell: this is a training log, not a treatise. The same man, year after year, catching himself being vain or frightened or furious, and arguing himself back down.
Read ifYou lose hours to things you were never going to control, and you want the argument that finally stops it.
Meditations
Marcus Aurelius
Philosophy & WisdomDiagram What was happening while he wrote it
This is not a calm man's philosophy written in a garden. Every line about accepting what you cannot control was drafted inside a plague, a border war, and an attempted coup.
Philosophy & WisdomFramework 
Marcus's remedies for someone who wronged you
Book XI hands you nine antidotes for anger and calls them a gift from the Muses. Here are five that still bite. Note where it lands: staying angry costs you more than what they did.
They did it in ignorance
Nobody chooses to be wrong. Had they seen it clearly they'd have acted otherwise.
You do the same things
And where you abstain it's often fear of looking bad, not virtue. Check honestly.
You may be misreading it
Often you can't tell whether an act was wrong at all. Judging takes real evidence.
The anger costs more than the act
His arithmetic: the vexation does more damage to you than the thing you're vexed at.
Expecting better is the madness
A tenth gift, from Apollo: wanting bad men not to do wrong wants an impossibility.
Philosophy & WisdomBig idea 
The first book is a list of debts, not ideas
Before philosophy arrives, Marcus spends a whole book naming people and the exact thing each taught him. Not admiration. Mechanics. His tutor: no team colours at the races, no favourite among the gladiators. Diognetus: don't credit miracle-workers, and don't obsess over fighting quails. Rusticus: stop performing your discipline for an audience. Seventeen entries. Try writing yours that precisely.
Philosophy & WisdomBig idea 
Everyone who would remember you is also dying
Marcus wants status badly enough that he has to talk himself out of it on paper, repeatedly. First the chain: whoever remembers you dies soon, then whoever remembered them, until the whole line of remembering goes dark. Then the harder move. Suppose the fame were immortal — what is that to you? An emerald is not made worse by going unpraised. Praise adds nothing to the thing itself.
Philosophy & WisdomTry it Sort it
Three of these six are actually yours
Drag the card into a bucket — or tap a bucket.
0 / 6How hard you go at the thing in front of youPick a side.
Drag the card into a bucket, or tap the bucket.
Philosophy & WisdomQuiz 
Recall check
One line in Book XII catches everybody out. Every man loves himself more than he loves anyone else, Marcus notes — and then does what?
Philosophy & WisdomQuiz 
Recall check
Someone has wronged you and you want them to pay for it. Marcus gives a one-line rule for revenge that reads at first like a dodge.
Philosophy & WisdomQuote 
A cucumber is bitter—Throw it away.—There are briers in the road—Turn aside from them.—This is enough. Do not add, And why were such things made in the world?
Book VIII, 50. The entire Stoic method compressed into a vegetable and a footpath.
Philosophy & WisdomQuote 
When we have meat before us and such eatables, we receive the impression that this is the dead body of a fish, and this the dead body of a bird or of a pig; and again, that this Falernian is only a little grape-juice, and this purple robe some sheep's wool dyed with the blood of a shell-fish.
Book VI, 13. The emperor deflating the things that dazzle him, including his own imperial purple.
Philosophy & WisdomQuote 
Though thou shouldest be going to live three thousand years and as many times ten thousand years, still remember that no man loses any other life than this which he now lives, nor lives any other than this which he now loses. The longest and shortest are thus brought to the same.
Book II, 14. The arithmetic that makes a ninety-year life and a twenty-year life come out identical.