Meditations

About this book

The private notebook of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, written in Greek in the 170s CE during his campaigns and never meant for publication. Read here in a public-domain English translation. Its twelve short books return again and again to the same Stoic exercises: accept what you cannot control, act justly, remember that you will die, and do not waste the present on resentment or fear. It has been read as practical philosophy for nearly two thousand years.