Last updated: November 3, 2026

Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor from 161 to 180, used Stoic philosophy as a daily practice for getting through difficult people, bad news and his own moods. His private notebook, now called the Meditations, shows him doing three things again and again: preparing each morning for the people who would annoy him, reminding himself that those people were his kin and acted out of ignorance, and zooming out to see his worries against the size of the cosmos. Those three habits still work as a kind of emotional first aid.

This post explains how Marcus used them, what he actually wrote, and where his example is more complicated than the quote graphics suggest. If you want the philosophy behind it first, start with What Is Stoicism?.

You Are Here, Crying in the Shower

The meme above is a photo of a spiral galaxy with an arrow pointing at a nondescript spot in one of its arms: you are here, crying in the shower before work. It is funny because it is cruel and comforting at the same time. Your crisis is real, and it is also happening on a speck of dust in a galaxy of a few hundred billion stars, which itself is one of countless galaxies.

Marcus Aurelius would have recognised the joke. He had no telescope, but he practised exactly this shift in perspective, and he did it as the most powerful man in the Mediterranean world. If the emperor of Rome needed to remind himself how small his troubles were, so can the rest of us. That is the core of what modern readers find in him: not a theory, but a toolkit for bad mornings.

The Emperor’s Private Notebook

Marcus was born in Rome in 121 into a wealthy family and caught the attention of the emperor Hadrian, who arranged for him to be adopted by his successor, Antoninus Pius. As a teenager he fell in love with philosophy, and his teachers introduced him to the works of Epictetus. He became emperor in 161 and for almost twenty years dealt with crisis after crisis: wars with Parthia in the east, a devastating epidemic known as the Antonine plague, and long campaigns against Germanic tribes on the Danube frontier. He died in 180 during one of those campaigns.

The Meditations were never meant for us. Marcus wrote them in Greek, for himself, probably during the last decade of his life, and the title most manuscripts give is simply “To Himself”. Some books carry notes like “among the Quadi on the Granua” and “at Carnuntum”, places in his military camps. It is not a philosophy textbook but a training diary, full of repetitions, because he kept having to tell himself the same things. That is part of its appeal. You are reading a tired man trying, every day, to become a little better than he was.

The first book is unlike the rest. It is a long list of thanks to the people who shaped him: his grandfather for good temper, his mother for simplicity, his adoptive father for patience and modesty, his teachers for introducing him to Epictetus. Before saying anything about how to live, Marcus spends a whole book on gratitude. Modern readers who skip straight to the quotable parts miss one of his most practical habits.

The three habits that run through the whole book are easiest to see side by side, with a pointer to where Marcus practises them.

The Morning Speech: “They Cannot Tell Good From Evil”

The most searched line from the Meditations comes from the opening of Book 2, and it is a morning exercise. In George Long’s classic translation: “Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil.” Modern translations put the last part more sharply: they are like this because they cannot tell good from evil.

It sounds like a recipe for a grumpy day. It is the opposite. Marcus prepares for difficult people the way you might check the weather before going out. If you expect rudeness, it no longer surprises you, and surprise is half of what makes it hurt. And by explaining bad behaviour as ignorance rather than malice, he removes the sting of being targeted. The rude colleague is not your enemy. He is mistaken about what matters.

The passage then turns to kinship. Marcus reminds himself that the person who wrongs him shares the same nature, reason and divine spark, and that we were made for cooperation, “like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth”. To work against each other is against nature. Getting angry and turning away would be like one hand refusing to help the other. Another morning note, from Book 5, deals with the oldest problem of all, not wanting to get up: at dawn, when you rise unwillingly, remind yourself that you are rising “to the work of a human being”.

Why Your Annoying Neighbour Is Family

The kinship idea comes from Stoic physics. The Stoics saw the cosmos as one living whole, ordered by reason, logos, in which every rational being takes part. That made all human beings fellow citizens of one great city, an idea we trace back to the Cynics in Cynicism vs Stoicism. Marcus returns to it again and again. What is not good for the hive, he writes, is not good for the bee.

You do not have to accept Stoic cosmology to use the exercise. When someone irritates you, ask what they believe that makes their behaviour seem right to them, and remember that you, too, sometimes act out of ignorance. Marcus himself does exactly that in a list of reflections on anger in Book 11, where one item reminds him that he also does wrong and is held back from worse only by fear or reputation. The point is not to excuse bad behaviour but to stop being ruled by it.

The View From Above

The meme’s exercise has a name in the scholarship on Marcus: the view from above. Again and again he imagines looking down on human life from a great height, seeing the armies, farms, weddings, births and deaths, the marketplaces and the courts, all at once and all very small. He reminds himself that Asia and Europe are corners of the universe, that the whole sea is a drop and Mount Athos a clod of earth.

He also practises a view from above in time. Think of the days of Vespasian, he writes, and you will see people marrying, raising children, falling ill, dying, fighting, feasting, flattering and plotting, and all of that life is gone. Alexander the Great and his mule driver, he notes in another passage, were brought to the same state by death. The point is not that nothing matters. It is that the things we panic about matter much less than we feel, and the things that do matter, how we act and how we treat people, are within our power.

The modern version of this is familiar. When the astronomer Carl Sagan reflected on a 1990 photograph of Earth taken by the Voyager 1 probe from billions of kilometres away, he called it a pale blue dot and drew almost exactly Marcus’ conclusion: our posturing and imagined self importance look different from there. Astronauts describe a similar shift, which the writer Frank White named the overview effect. For a darker version of the cosmic view, see When the Universe Doesn’t Care. Marcus would answer that the size of the universe is a reason for calm, not despair.

Everything Passes, Including This

A third habit runs through the whole book: reminding himself of impermanence. Everything flows, Marcus writes, like a river, and what is happening now will soon be gone and replaced by something else. Fame is a short echo. The people who praise you will soon be dead, and so will those who remember them. The same thought that makes a celebrity’s status look fragile makes a bad day look survivable.

This is close to the Stoic practice of remembering death, memento mori, which we explore in Stoic Philosophy and Death. For Marcus it was not morbid. If you could die tomorrow, he reasons, then the only sensible thing is to do today’s work well and kindly, without waiting for better circumstances. His advice to himself is to do each thing as if it were the last act of his life, without carelessness, without pretence and without complaint.

Ten Reasons Not to Be Angry

Marcus was not naturally serene, and the Meditations show it. Book 11 contains a long passage in which he lists reasons not to give in to anger, numbered like a checklist, as if he needed to run through it on bad days. He reminds himself to consider how people behave at home and at table and what opinions drive them; that if they are doing wrong, they do it unwillingly and from ignorance; that he himself does plenty of wrong; that he cannot be sure they are doing wrong at all, since many things are done for reasons we do not see; that life is short and we will all soon be laid out dead; and that it is not people’s actions that disturb us but our own judgments about them.

The most striking item is the one about kindness. Genuine kindness, Marcus writes, is invincible. What can even the most insolent person do to you if you remain gentle with him and, when the moment allows, calmly show him where he is going wrong? The passage ends with a note that anger is a sign of weakness rather than strength, since the one who stays gentle is the one in control. It is hard to read it without thinking of comment sections.

But What About Injustice?

A fair objection to all this calm is that it could become an excuse for accepting things that should be changed. If the rude colleague is simply ignorant and the universe is enormous, why bother fighting injustice? The Stoics would say this misreads them. Justice is one of the four Stoic virtues, and Marcus repeatedly tells himself that he was made to act for the common good. Calm is not the same as indifference. It is the condition for acting well rather than lashing out.

Marcus’ own record shows both the promise and the limits. He was praised in antiquity as a conscientious ruler, and ancient historians report that when a general, Avidius Cassius, rebelled against him in 175, he hoped to be able to pardon him. But his reign also saw persecutions of Christians, including the martyrs of Lyon in 177, and he made his son Commodus co-emperor and successor, a decision that ended badly for Rome. Historians still debate how much responsibility he bears for each. A philosopher on the throne is still a ruler of his time, and reading Marcus honestly means admiring the notebook without turning its author into a saint.

How to Read the Meditations

If you want to read Marcus yourself, the translation matters. George Long’s 1862 version, which is in the public domain and quoted above, is accurate but sounds old fashioned. Gregory Hays’ modern translation from 2002 is the most popular today and much easier to read. Robin Hard and Robin Waterfield have also produced good modern versions. Read slowly, a few sections a day, because the book was written that way.

For the ideas behind the notebook, the French historian of philosophy Pierre Hadot is the best guide. In The Inner Citadel (published in French in 1992) he argued that the Meditations are not a random collection of thoughts but spiritual exercises: deliberate, repeated practices meant to reshape how the writer perceives the world. That reading explains why Marcus repeats himself so often, and why the view from above and the morning speech keep coming back. They are not insights to be discovered once. They are muscles to be trained.

How to Borrow Marcus’ Day

If you want to try his habits, you do not need an empire. In the morning, take two minutes to imagine the day’s likely frictions and decide in advance how you want to meet them, adding his reminder that difficult people act from ignorance and are still your kin. During the day, when something knocks you off balance, separate the event from your judgment about it and ask what, right now, is actually up to you. When a worry swells, zoom out, in space or in time, until it shrinks back to its real size. And in the evening, write a few honest lines to yourself, as Marcus did, about what went well and what you would do differently.

None of this guarantees peace. Marcus did not have it either, which is why he kept writing. But the notebook shows that a person can keep returning to the same few truths and slowly let them reshape how a day feels. For why the Stoics are suddenly everywhere online, read Why Is Stoicism Trending?, and for Seneca’s version of the same advice, “Live Immediately”. There is also a Marcus Aurelius shirt for the mornings you need a reminder.