Meditations by topic

Six themes gather the passages that people look up most often.

• The morning: starting the day
• Anger and other people's faults
• Death and the shortness of life
• Opinion, judgement and what disturbs us
• Calm of mind
• Duty and work

The text is George Long's English translation of 1862, in the public domain, and its old-fashioned English ("thou", "thy") is unchanged. The notes beside it are our own wording. Marcus Aurelius wrote these for himself; they are a diary, not a book of rules.