The Most Powerful Lines From Marcus Aurelius

How can a 2,000-year-old book still change the way you think today? In this episode, Ryan Holiday shares passages from Meditations that he’s returned to more than a hundred times over the years. Each reading has revealed something new, and these lines are the ones that have had the biggest impact on how he thinks and lives. Reading Marcus Aurelius can change your life, but only if you know how to read his work 👉 Head here now to grab your Meditations book and guide bundle | https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/meditations-month-2026 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues: courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

• 0:15Ryan Holiday?

  This book right here is a miracle. It should not exist. It was not ever intended for publication, but this book would make its way here to us all these years later on a continent that he could not even have imagined existing. It is a miracle upon miracles. I'm talking, of course, about Marcus Aurelius's meditation, the private thoughts of the Emperor of Rome. And I love this book. I've read it more than 100 times. Every time I read it, I get something new out of it. I wanted to read you some of my favorite passages, passages that have changed my life, and passages that I think will change your life. It's a scary thing when you realize you can't trust your mind. And yet, when you realize you can't trust your mind, it makes you less afraid.

• 0:57Ryan Holiday?

  In Book 411, he says, "Not what your enemy sees and hopes that you will, but what's really there." In Alcoholics Anonymous, they have this great acronym for fear. It's False Evidence Appearing Real. What Stoicism is as a philosophy, as a rational way of thinking, is something that helps us break down our irrational fears. We actually look at what that worst-case scenario is and think about whether it's actually so bad. We take a minute and think about whether the emotion we're having, whether the doubt we're having, whether the feeling we're having is true or not. Is it based on anything real? Can we trust our perceptions here? Is there something we're missing? What are we making up about this situation? So Stoicism is about being rational.

• 1:41Ryan Holiday?

  It's about breaking these things down. Epictetus would talk about taking every opinion and putting it to the test, checking if it's true. Sure, we trust our gut, we trust ourselves, but we have to verify. We have to make sure that that's true. And that's what Marcus Aurelius is saying, right? The enemy wants you to be intimidated. The enemy wants you to overestimate their forces, wants you to overestimate their odds, underestimate your odds. They want you to be scared. That's why they're doing that tactic. That's why they're making themselves seem bigger than they are. That's why they're... Talking a good game. And what Stoicism does is it helps us break this down. So we can see not what our doubt and our fears want us to see, not the false evidence, but what is really there.

• 2:22Ryan Holiday?

  We can best understand Marcus Aurelius's meditations as trying to calm himself down, trying to get to a center, trying not to freak out. He's an anxious person. He's a frustrated person. He's a scared person. He is a normal person like you and I. And that's why Book nine thirty-two is so beautiful. Here we have, again, Marcus Aurelius, the Emperor of Rome, saying, "You can discard most of the junk that clutters your mind, things that exist only there." And he says, "You can clear out space for yourself." How do we do this? He lists some bullets. "Comprehending the scale of the world by contemplating infinite time, by thinking of the speed with which things change, each part of everything," he says, "the narrow space between our birth and death,

• 3:04Ryan Holiday?

  the infinite time before, the equally unbounded time that follows." Meditations is a place where Marcus Aurelius is zooming his thinking in, zooming his thinking out, challenging himself to think about things differently, trying to clean out the junk that clutters his mind, trying to clear out some space for himself in what must have been an incredibly busy and stressful and frustrating life. He had every luxury, every technology, every benefit, every good thing you could possibly imagine. But he took the time to remind himself that these things didn't actually matter. They weren't what they appeared to be. There was false advertising associated with all of them. This is Meditations, Book six thirteen. You can imagine him at a dinner party observing this.

• 3:49Ryan Holiday?

  He says, "Like seeing roasted meat and other dishes in front of you and suddenly realizing this is a dead fish, a dead bird, a dead pig, or that this noble vintage," he's talking about wine, "his grape juice and the purple robes are sheep's wool dyed with shellfish blood." Says, "Or even making love, something rubbing against your penis, a brief seizure and a little cloudy liquid. Perceptions like this," he reminds himself, "latching on to things and piercing through them. We want to see what they really are." Says, "That's what we need to do." All the time, all through our lives, when things lay claim to our trust, to lay them bare and see how pointless they are, to strip away the legend that encrust them. Said, "Pride is a master of deception.

• 4:32Ryan Holiday?

  When you think you're occupied in the weightiest business, that's when he has you in his spell." Again, he's not saying that, that you can never have sex, you can never have a nice meal, you can never have a nice drink, you can never do anything fun, that you, you shouldn't respect or, or honor the, the job or the profession you've earned. You should just remind yourself what it really is, to, to take it seriously, but not yourself for having it or getting it. And to not do anything shameful or embarrassing in pursuit of those things because you tell yourself they're so important and priceless and impressive. They are not, you have to strip them of the legend that encrust them, wipe away the false advertising and see what they really are. Marcus Aurelius was very rich. Marcus Aurelius had a lot. And yet, what Stoic philosophy teaches him

• 5:17Ryan Holiday?

  is that material things don't really matter. This is book seven, twenty seven. "Treat what you don't have as nonexistent. Look at what you have, the things you value most, and think of how much you'd crave them if you didn't have them. But be careful. Don't feel such satisfaction that you start to overvalue them, that it would upset you to lose them." But this actually makes me think of a passage here towards the beginning of the book. It's wrong to think of the Stoics as not caring about anything, having no possessions, you know, rejecting the world entirely. That, that's actually not it. It's a little more complicated than that. In book one of Meditations, Marcus Aurelius is talking about what he learns from his stepfather, Antoninus. And this is a good one. He says, "The way he handled the material comforts that fortune had supplied him in such abundance, without arrogance and without apology.

• 6:02Ryan Holiday?

  If they were there, he took advantage of them. And if not, he didn't miss them." That's exactly the middle ground, the balance we're trying to get. You can't care about stuff too much. You can care about and be grateful for the things you have, but again, not too much.

• 6:20Ryan Holiday?

  Couple of years ago, I lost one of the most valuable things in the world to me. It was my copy of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. I was on a flight from London to Vancouver and I left it in the seat pocket of an Air Canada flight. The reason that my copy of Meditations is so valuable is that it has 20 years of notes, 20 years of highlights, 20 years of me coming back to the same ideas over and over again. Marcus Aurelius is clearly fond of the philosopher Heraclitus, but one of the lines from Heraclitus is the idea that we never step in the same river twice. And so it goes with reading the same book, even though this book is the same as it was when it first arrived on my doorstep all those years ago. Every time I come to it, I'm a new person.

• 7:05Ryan Holiday?

  The world is different. What I know is different. What I'm looking for is different. And so I find something new out of it each time. So I've gotten so much out of this edition, which I've read, and thankfully, a lovely flight attendant returned it to lost and found, and I was able to get it and this book came back to me. But I have many other editions. My point is, there are certain books that grow with you, that change with you, that aren't books that you have read, but they are books that you are reading. And Meditations, I think, is the ultimate book of that. And here, this month is the month of Marcus Aurelius's birth. If you haven't read Meditations yet, I don't know what you're waiting for. There's a reason this book has endured over the last 20 centuries. There's a reason it's endured even in my own life over the last two decades.

• 7:49Ryan Holiday?

  And if you haven't picked it up yet, you're missing out.

• 7:56Ryan Holiday?

  This is one of the most famous misunderstood passages in it. He says, "When you wake in the morning, tell yourself the people I will deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly." Now, you think this is Stoicism, sort of being pessimistic in advance, managing expectations, being a little bit cynical, but that is actually precisely wrong. Although it is true, we will meet annoying and obnoxious and dishonest and shitty people in the course of the day. That's not what Marcus Aurelius wanted to remember. He says, "They are like this because they can't tell good from evil." But I have seen... Seeing the beauty of good and the ugliness of evil, and I have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own. This is actually the most important, he says, "No one can implicate me in ugliness,

• 8:39Ryan Holiday?

  nor can I feel angry at my relative or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural," he said. "To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him, these are obstructions." So yes, there will be annoying, there will be obnoxious people, there will be frustrations today. But your job is to work with those people, to manage those frustrations, to not let shitty people turn you into a shitty person, to not let obnoxious people make you obnoxious. Be prepared for it, anticipate it, don't let it break you, don't let it ruin you, don't let it make you bitter, or angry, or ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, or surly.

• 9:21Ryan Holiday?

  When you run up against someone else's shamelessness, ask yourself, "Is a world without shamelessness possible?" No, then don't ask the impossible. There have to be shameless people in the world, and this is one of them. The same goes for someone vicious, or untrustworthy, or with any other defect. Remembering that the whole class has to exist will make you more tolerant of his members. He's trying to say, "Look, a world without assholes, a world without jerks, a world without liars, a world without passive aggressive people, a world without frustrating people, a world without haters, a world without setbacks. This is not possible. You're gonna experience these things. When you're experiencing them, tell yourself, "This was statistically inevitable. I am dealing with what I was always going to have to deal with. I'm not being singled out.

• 10:05Ryan Holiday?

  This person isn't trying to make my life a living hell. This is not unique or unprecedented, this is very precedent, this was unavoidable. So let me be patient, let me deal with it, let me learn from it, let me grow from it, and let me focus on the positive here, which is, the majority of people are not those shameless, annoying, untrustworthy, obnoxious people. Most people are good. So once I finish dealing with this bad person, I'm getting it out of the way, and most of the other interactions I'm gonna have are going to be positive." Marcus Aurelius was beloved and admired, but of course, not by everyone. No politician, no leader, no great man or woman has ever... Achieved anything without there being haters and doubters and critics. And so he gives us a prescription for dealing with that. He says in in book nine twenty seven, when you face someone's insults, hatred, or whatever,

• 10:48Ryan Holiday?

  look at their soul, get inside them, look at what kind of person they are. You'll find you don't need to strain to impress them, but you do have to wish them well, he said. They are your closest relative. The gods assist them just as they do you by signs and dreams and every other way to get what he weren't. His point is this this person who who you so desperately want to impress, who you don't like that they don't like you. Think about, he says elsewhere in meditations, what they do in private. Think about their own values, think about their own problems. You shouldn't hate the haters, you shouldn't let the haters make you worse. In fact, sometimes haters are helping you, guiding you, telling you things you need to know. But you also shouldn't let them turn you off to your fellow human beings. You should keep their opinions and views in perspective, not dismiss them entirely, but don't give them more credit than they're due.

• 11:31Ryan Holiday?

  Someone just hurt you, someone just screwed you over, someone just did something shitty and awful and frustrating. Well, here's a two thousand year old piece of advice from the most powerful man in the world. He said, when faced with people's bad behavior, turn around and ask when you have acted like that. When you saw money as a good or pleasure or social position. He said, your anger will subside as soon as you recognize that they acted under a compulsion. What else could they do? He's trying to remind himself of something that Socrates talked about, that nobody's wrong on purpose. When you were wrong or you did wrong, you didn't know it was wrong. You thought it was right. You were acting with the information that you had. And by the way, what'd you do after? Even if you did realize you were wrong, you forgave yourself. So don't hold people to a standard that you don't hold yourself to.

• 12:14Ryan Holiday?

  And in fact, give them the grace that you so readily give yourself. But if you can take a minute and put yourself in that other person's shoes, if you can think about what they thought about what they were doing as they were doing it. It's going to take away some of that anger. It's going to calm you down and it's going to allow you to move on. It's going to also allow you to get better because now you see something of yourself in other people.

• 12:38Ryan Holiday?

  He was betrayed by his most trusted general. He was criticized. He was slandered. His wife may have cheated on him. Certainly, people lied to his face. Certainly, people tried to take advantage of him. He saw, in many ways, the absolute worst of people. And yet, he writes this wonderful prescription in Meditations that is advice to us more than 2,000 years later. Best revenge is not to be like that. Another version of this translation in Meditations is, "The best revenge is to not be like your enemy." I think this is critical. You can't let bad people make you a bad person. You can't let the assholes turn you into an asshole. You also can't let bad times turn you into a bad person. You have to stay good. You have to stay true to your principles. And really, we have to remember the Stoics say,

• 13:23Ryan Holiday?

  "The only way we can truly be harmed by anyone or anything is if we let it affect our character, if we let it change who we are for the worse." That is the only way we have been irreparably harmed by someone or something else. It's so phony. It's such bullshit. And yet, we just accept it like it's not. We just act like it's totally normal. He says, "The despicable phoniness of people who say, 'Listen, I'm gonna be level with you.'" He says, "What does that even mean? It shouldn't need to be said." He said, "It should be honest, written in block letters on your forehead. It should be audible in your voice, visible in your eyes, like a lover who looks into your face and takes the whole story in at your glance." Says, "A straightforward, honest person should be like someone who stinks.

• 14:07Ryan Holiday?

  When you're in the same room with him, you know it." Another translation says, "An honest person should be like a smelly goat in the room. You know when you're in the room with them." But the point is, when you say, "I'm gonna be honest with you here," or you say, "With all due respect," these little prefaces, these little empty phrases, they're actually saying a lot. And what they're saying, when you say, "Can I be honest with you here? Can I give it to you straight?" What you're saying is that that isn't your default. What you're saying is that that's not what you normally do, that that's not your reputation, that people don't know what to expect when they hear from you, and that is embarrassing. And that's why you should cultivate this habit of being honest, of being straightforward, of saying what you mean, of course, with kindness, of course, with tact, but always... With the truth. A prescription for what he needed to do, whatever that day brought him.

• 14:52Ryan Holiday?

  Whether it was temptation or adversity, good news or bad news, ideal conditions or frustrating ones. He says it here in Book Six, Two of Meditations. He says, "Just that you do the right thing, the rest doesn't matter. Cold or warm, tired or well-rested, despised or honored." He says, "Even if you're busy, even if you're dying, because dying too," he says, "is one of our assignments in life. And even then, he says, "you have to do well what needs doing. Just that you do the right thing, the rest doesn't matter. If you're an emperor or an ordinary person, it's a big situation or a little one, just that you do the right thing, the rest doesn't matter."

• 15:43Ryan Holiday?

  We think all our problems are so modern. We think they're so new. We think we live in unprecedented times. We think everything is changing really, really fast. But of course, it's always been this way. That is the oldest thing in the world, change. It says, "Some things are rushing into existence and others out of it. Some of what now exists is already gone. Change and flux constantly remake the world, just as the incessant progression of time remakes eternity." He says, "We find ourselves in a river. Which of the things around us should we value when none of them can offer a firm foothold, like an attachment to a sparrow? We glimpse it and it's gone." And in fact, he returns to this theme over and over and over again in Meditations. There's a great Southern expression about how if you don't like the weather, just wait, it'll change. He says, "It would take an idiot to feel distress

• 16:26Ryan Holiday?

  or indignation about change, because it's not going to last either." And this is the most important lesson that Marcus Aurelius can teach us about change. He says, "You're frightened of change, but what can exist without it, this present moment that you're trying to protect and preserve? It has not always existed. It itself is a product of change. You are a product of change." So what we have to do is embrace it. What we have to do is accommodate it, figure out how we're going to use it, what we're going to learn from it, and how we're going to make the best of it. Marcus Aurelius didn't have to try to get better. He didn't have to get outside of his comfort zone. He didn't have to worry about job security. He had a job for life. He was supposed to be infallible. He was literally worshipped as a kind of a god. He had unlimited power. He could make people tell him what he wanted to hear.

• 17:09Ryan Holiday?

  He could make everyone tell him he was perfect and did not need to change. And yet, we see in Meditations that he wanted to work always on getting outside of his comfort zone, on challenging himself. That's why this passage in Book 12 is so great. He says, "You should practice even what seems impossible." The left hand, he said, "is useless at almost everything for lack of practice, but it guides the reins better than the right from practice." And he talks about this elsewhere in Meditations, that he is actively trying to practice holding the reins in his non-dominant hand. He's working on getting outside of his comfort zone. He's working on trying to do things differently. He's working on doing them the hard way. He's taking the stairs instead of the elevator, so to speak. He's not taking the easy way out.

• 17:53Ryan Holiday?

  He's not giving himself the gimmies. Why? Because you don't get better if you do that. But by challenging yourself, by facing resistance on purpose, you get better, you grow, you get stronger, and the non-dominant hand gets a little less useless.

• 18:12Ryan Holiday?

  This is Book 754 of Meditations. It's a good reminder, everywhere, at each moment, you have the option to accept this event with humility, to treat this person as they should be treated, and to approach this thought with care so that nothing irrational creeps in. Easy to say, hard to do, but it's something we should all be striving for. It was one thing after another. There was a plague, there was a famine, there was a flood, there were wars. He had health issues, he had marital issues, he had family issues. He was betrayed in a coup by one of his most trusted advisors. He gets chosen to be the emperor of Rome, the most powerful man in the world, but then he has bad luck. And he addresses it here in Book 537.

• 18:56Ryan Holiday?

  He says, "I was once a fortunate man, but at some point, fortune abandoned me. Why have the gods forsaken me? Why are they picking on me? Why is my luck so bad?" But then he catches himself and he says, "No, true good fortune is that which you make for yourself." And he defines this good fortune as three things. He says, "Good fortune is good character, good intentions, and good actions." We don't choose whether we live in good times or bad times, a good world or a bad world, but we do control whether we are a good person, whether we do good, whether we play the hand we are dealt good. The people you admire aren't perfect. They screw up, they get rattled, they make mistakes, they fall short of their values.

• 19:38Ryan Holiday?

  What makes them great, though, is how quickly they're able to get back to it, how quickly they're able to return to their principles, how quickly they're able to get back on track, which is actually something Marcus really talks about in Meditations. This is one of my favorite passages. He said, and this is book 611, "When jarred unavoidably by circumstances, revert at once to yourself and don't lose the rhythm more than you can help it. You'll have a better grasp of the harmony if you keep going back to it." Point is, it's okay that you screwed up. It's normal that you screwed up. It's human that you screwed up, but you don't have to keep screwing up. What matters is how quickly you get back to it. This one is fitting here as the ocean crashes behind me. He says, "To be like the rock that the waves keep crashing over,

• 20:19Ryan Holiday?

  it stands unmoved and the raging of the sea falls still around it." Right? Stoicism is not the absence of emotion, but it is about that even keel, not getting too high and not getting too low. It's actually funny, you know, the Buddhists have a different image. They talk about if you grabbed a cup of water from the ocean or a river or a lake, it would be hard to see at first, but if you let it sit for a second, eventually it would settle down and that water would become clear. That's what Marcus really is talking about. The world is going to be noisy, the world is going to be loud, a lot of things are going to happen. But if you take a minute, if you pause and reflect, you give things a second to settle down. If you don't get lifted up by them or dragged down by them, eventually you get to a level set, a kind of point of clarity.

• 21:03Ryan Holiday?

  And in a way, that's what Marcus really is doing in Meditations itself.

• 21:11Ryan Holiday?

  It's kind of crazy if you think about it. We all know ourselves better than other people. We all know what we're trying to do. We all know who we are, and yet for some reason, we're like a weather vane. We let public opinion or trends decide what we like. We let the criticism or the potential criticism of others decide what direction we go with our life. It's so absurd that... Sir O'Connell, trying to take it to its logical extreme, said, "There are people who are afraid even to kill themselves for fear of what the neighbors might think." That's why I love this passage in Book 12 of Meditations. Marcus Verius, the most powerful man in the world, the person who really had no reason to care about what anyone else thought, and yet, to do his job well, needed to understand public opinion. He said, "It never ceases to amaze me.

• 21:53Ryan Holiday?

  We all love ourselves more than other people, but care about their opinion more than our own. If a god appeared to us," he said, "or a wise human being even, and prohibited us from concealing our thoughts or imagining anything without immediately shouting it, we wouldn't make it through a single day." That's how much we value other people's opinions instead of our own. It's not that we shouldn't care at all what other people think. We should just care a whole lot less. He says, "Take Antoninus as your model always." This is his stepfather, his predecessor, his energy in doing what's rational, his steadiness in any situation, his sense of reverence, his calm expression, his gentleness, his modesty, his eagerness to grasp things. "And how he never let things go before he was sure he'd examined them thoroughly, understood them perfectly.

• 22:35Ryan Holiday?

  The way he put up with unfair criticism without returning it, how he couldn't be hurried, how he wouldn't listen to informers, how reliable he was as a judge of character or of actions, not prone to backbiting, or cowardice, or jealousy, or empty rhetoric. Content with the basics in living quarters, in bedding, in clothes, in food, and servants. How hard he worked, how much he put up with his ability to work straight through dusk because of his simple diet. His constancy and reliability as a friend, his tolerance of people who openly questioned his views, and his delight at seeing his ideas improved on. His piety without a trace of superstition." So that when your time comes, he says, this is why he was fighting to be the person that philosophy tried to make him, "Your conscience will be as clear as his." This is Meditations 624.

• 23:18Ryan Holiday?

  I think it's one of the most powerful lines in Meditations. He says, "Alexander the Great and his mule driver both died, and the same thing happened to both. They were both absorbed alike into the life force of the world, or dissolved alike into atoms." I think he's just reminding himself here, again, a man as famous...

• 23:37Ryan Holiday?

  Perhaps even more powerful, and he's reminding himself that at the end, we're all equal. At the end, we're all mortal, that at the end of the day, we all become worm food. And so you can't let your accomplishments puff you up. You can't believe that your legacy is going to help you last forever. You've got to remind yourself, we're all equal in the end. We know that absolute power corrupts absolutely, right? And yet here in this book, which is written by the most powerful man in the world, you see him fighting to do precisely the opposite. In book 630 of Meditations, Marcus Aurelius says, "To escape imperialism, that indelible stain." He writes elsewhere about not being stained purple by the cloak of the emperor. He says, "It happens." But he says, "You have to make sure that you remain straightforward, upright, reverent,

• 24:20Ryan Holiday?

  serious, unadored, an ally of justice, pious, kind, affectionate, in doing your duty with a will." He says, "You must fight to be the person that philosophy tried to make you." So why isn't Marcus Aurelius corrupted by power? Why doesn't it break him or make him evil or wrong? Well, Meditations is the answer. He's fighting to be the person that philosophy tried to make him. He's trying to escape imperialism. He's trying not to be stained purple. And he's doing it by writing these notes to himself, by checking in with himself, by putting himself up for review, by holding himself accountable.

• 24:59Ryan Holiday?

  Well, one of the things he does is he tries to think, he says, of the qualities of the people around you. He says, "When you need encouragement, think of the qualities of the people around you." He said, "Think of this one's energy, this one's modesty, another's generosity, and so on." He says, "Nothing is so encouraging as when virtues are visibly embodied in the people around us, when we're practically showered with them." He says, "It's good to keep this in mind." And that's why the first book of Meditations is so powerful. It's known in the Gregory Hayes translation, it's titled Debts and Lessons. And in Debts and Lessons, you have Marcus Aurelius writing about what he learned from Risticus, his philosophy teacher, who told him to never be satisfied with just getting the gist of things. He talks about Sextus, the philosopher from whom he learned kindness and gravity without errors,

• 25:44Ryan Holiday?

  to investigate and analyze with understanding. In logic and the principles that we ought to live by says not to display anger or other emotions to be free of passion yet full as love. I particularly like what he says he learned from Maximus said self-control and resistance to distractions, optimism in adversity, especially illness. A personality in balance dignity and grace together. Doing other people's job without whining, other people's certainty that what he said was what he thought and that what he did was without malice. Said generosity, charity, honesty, the sense he gave of staying on the path rather than being kept on it, that even he had a great sense of humor. Marcus really says he learned from his mother, her reverence for the divine, her generosity, her inability not only to do wrong, but to even conceive of doing it.

• 26:28Ryan Holiday?

  In a simple way, she lived, not in the least like the rich, but most of all, the person Marcus really most saw these virtues embodied in. Is of course Antoninus, his beloved stepfather, right? Compassion, unwavering adherence to decisions once he'd reached them, indifference to superficial honors, hard work, persistent, his altruism. Not expecting his friends to keep him entertained or travel with him unless they wanted to. And anyone who had to stay behind to take care of something always found him the same when he returned. His constancy to his friends, never giving fed up or playing favorites. His constant devotion to the empire's needs, his stewardship of the treasury, his willingness to take responsibility and blame. His ability to feel at ease with people and put them at their ease.

• 27:08Ryan Holiday?

  His willingness to yield the floor to experts, the way he respected tradition without constantly needing to congratulate himself for safeguarding our traditional values. That he never exhibited rudeness or lost control of himself or turned violent. No one ever saw him sweat. Everything was approached logically and with due consideration. He says, you could have said of him, as they say of Socrates, that he knew how to abstain and enjoy from the things that most people found it hard to abstain from and all too easy to enjoy. Strength and perseverance, self-control in both areas, a mark of a soul in readiness, indomitable. So Marcus really saw these virtues embodied in person in the people he loved, but then he also took time to write them down, to think about them, to read about them. Which is what we have to do so we never drift far away from them.

• 27:55Ryan Holiday?

  This is one of the most powerful passages in one of the most powerful books ever written. Two thousand years ago, the Emperor of Rome, a person that many believed was a god, that believed was immortal, that they believed had so much power that no one and nothing could touch him. We have Marcus Aurelius writing in his famous Meditations in Book 221, he says, "You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think." He writes over and over again in Meditations, we see him doing this memento mori practice, remembering that he is mortal, remembering that life is ephemeral, that life is short, that we are not in control, that we don't get to decide. And so, we can't take this present moment for granted. We can't take our health for granted. We can't take other

• 28:38Ryan Holiday?

  people around us for granted. We can't take the future for granted. He says, "You could be good today. Instead, you choose tomorrow. Don't put it off. Do what you need to do now because you could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think." It would shock him today that we are still reading it. And the fact that we still know his name, that it's still a bestseller, well, he would shrug his shoulders at that. Here's what he says in Book 533, "Soon you'll be ashes or bones, a mere name at most. And even that is just a sound, an echo." And then he comes back to this theme of fame over and over and over again. He says, "People who long for posthumous fame," he says, "they forget that they won't be around to enjoy it." He says elsewhere in Meditations that, "Also, the people in the future are not that awesome. They're not going to be that

• 29:23Ryan Holiday?

  much better than the people that are around today." And then, in one of my favorite passages, he lists the names of the famous emperors who came before him, Vespasian and Trajan and Domitian, names that were so famous at the time, and yet, he says, "are already being forgotten." It's like that line from Taylor Swift about the who's who of who's the one. So, the fact that we're still reading Marcus Aurelius, he would say, "I guess that's fine. It doesn't do me any good. What matters is who I was in life. What matters is what I did with my life. Was I a good person? Did I do good things?" I'm going to end this video with the last passage in Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. It may well have been the last thing that This great man wrote, he says, "You've lived life as a citizen in a great city.

• 30:07Ryan Holiday?

  Five years or a hundred, what's the difference? The laws make no distinction." Says to be sent away not by a tyrant or a dishonest judge, but by nature who first invited you in. Why is that so terrible? Like the impresario ringing down the curtain on an actor. "I've only gotten through three acts." "Yes, but this will be a drama in three acts. The length fixed by the power that directed your creation and now directs your dissolution. Neither was yours to determine. So make your exit with grace, the same grace shown to you." And we're actually told that this is how Marcus Aurelius left this earth. He reminded his weeping friends that he wasn't the only one dying, that millions had died of the plague. And that they should take from this lesson, not sadness, but a reminder of their own mortality. To seize the present while they could, to be good while they could.

• 30:52Ryan Holiday?

  He was happy and content with the life he'd been given. He wanted to handle business, he wanted them not to miss him. And then he wanted to close his life with grace and poise, to die well. Which is, by the way, what philosophy is. Cicero said, "Philosophy is to learn how to die." We can tell from this final passage in Meditations, we can tell from how Marcus Aurelius lived his life and left this life, that he learned that lesson well.