But I can think of instances where - if I said that to someone - I'd be a victim because of the beating the community would give me for saying it. Stoicism is not without its faults, but it absolutely has tenants and perspectives that have enriched my everyday lived experience. My rating doesn't reflect on the work of Aurelius or Stoic philosophy on the whole - who am I to judge a work that is still being read, studied, and discussed nearly two thousand years after it was written? A series of spiritual exercises filled with wisdom, practical guidance, and profound understanding of human behavior, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations remains one of the greatest works of spiritual and ethical reflection ever written.

You could have said of him (as they say of Socrates) that he knew how to enjoy and abstain from things that most people find it hard to abstain from and all too easy to enjoy. United States President Bill Clinton said that Meditations is his favorite book, [28] and former United States Secretary of Defense James Mattis carried his own personal copy of The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius throughout his deployments as a Marine Corps officer in the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan and Iraq.It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own. An Original Leather is being used for binding this book with Golden Leaf Printing and designing on Spine, front and Back of the book with edge gilding. Conrad Gesner stated in his dedicatory letter that he "received the books of Marcus from the gifted poet Michael Toxites from the library of Otto Heinrich, Prince Palatine", i. His "Meditations" is a loosely-organized set of thoughts relating to his stoic philosophy, now in an acclaimed new translation. This was rhetoric, the key to an active political career under the empire, as it had been under the Republic.

As you kiss your son good night, says Epictetus, whisper to yourself, 'He may be dead in the morning. Book 1 of the Meditations offers glimpses of Marcus’s schooling, and we can fill out the picture by what is known of upper-class education generally at this period. One is the Codex Palatinus (P), also known as the Codex Toxitanus (T), first published in 1558/9 but now lost. Both Russell and Rees find an element of Marcus' Stoic philosophy in the philosophical system of Immanuel Kant.Miraculously, these writings survive–and contained within them is a profound prescription for wisdom, justice, discipline and courage. A kind of single-mindedness, almost, never content with first impressions, or breaking off the discussion prematurely. In urging himself not to fear death, Marcus makes use of several arguments found in other ancient thinkers: that others have faced extinction with courage, that death is a natural process, that non-existence did not harm us before our birth and can't harm us after it, that death is unavoidable in any case.