12 January 2025
The second book reveals the connection between nature and death. In this book, Marcus Aurelius seeks the meaning of life and what helps a person navigate life while avoiding evil.
1. Encountering evil is inevitable, but it should not be feared if you know how to resist it.
2. A human being is body, breath, and instincts. None of these should be valued due to their impermanence and transience. The world is sustained through constant change. Death is part of the changes that shape our world. Death is the disintegration of the elements from which everything in the world is composed. Our world is a series of constant combinations and disintegrations of these elements. Therefore, anyone who fears the order of nature is like a child.
3. Life is finite. Therefore, one should not postpone the pursuit of becoming better for a future that may never come.
4. Any task should be done as if it were your last—honestly, reliably, nobly, justly, and guided solely by reason.
5. Work helps to overcome problems, but an excessive amount of aimless tasks leads only to exhaustion.
6. Missteps made in pleasures deserve harsher blame than those made in sorrow.
7. Good and bad things happen equally to both good and bad people.
8. Everything disappears quickly—both the material and even the memory of it. But the fastest to vanish are things tied to feelings and emotions.
9. What matters most is not the external but the internal. It is important to keep your mind free from passions and resentment toward anything.
10. People who cannot distinguish good from evil do not deserve anger but only compassion, as it is akin to an illness where a person cannot differentiate black from white. After all, no one would be angry at someone because of their sickness.
11. In dying, we lose only the present, as neither the past nor the future belongs to us. Those who lived long and those who lived briefly are equal, for they lose the same thing—the present.
12. Nature is cyclical; everything repeats. In the future, there will be nothing that has not already existed in the past.
13. The meaning of a person is to follow mind. The soul suffers in those who resist nature (by being angry, succumbing to passions, harboring hostility, lying, or acting without purpose).
14. Everything physical is like a river. Everything spiritual is like a dream. Life is like a battle or an exile. Memory after death is akin to oblivion. The only thing that protects us in this world is philosophy, which exists to preserve and guard our minds from evil.
15. If death is a meeting with God, then there is nothing bad in it, for God is good.