Marcus Aurelius Quotes

When I die, and people realize that I will not be resurrected in three days, they will forget me. That is the way it should be.

Oblivion is the rule and fame the exception, of humanity.

Just to be remembered is good enough for me. Lots of people are forgotten.

Oh my God, if I know anything, I know I'm gonna die! I never forget that. I know I'll be forgotten in a minute, and that's just fine with me.

After I die, I'll be forgotten.

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.

Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.

People will forget me pretty quick.

It doesn't matter how popular an actor you are: nobody will remember you forever.

Tomorrow I too – this feeling and thinking soul, the universe I am to myself – yes, tomorrow I too will be someone who no longer walks these streets, someone others will evoke with a vague: 'I wonder what's become of him?” And everything I do, everything I feel, everything I experience, will be just one less passer-by on the daily streets of some city or other.

Man passes away; his name perishes from record and recollection; his history is as a tale that is told, and his very monument becomes a ruin.

One day I'll be old, dead, forgotten. And at this very moment, while I'm sitting here thinking these things, a man in a dingy hotel room is thinking, "I will always be here."

Life is a warfare and a stranger's sojourn, and after fame is oblivion.

Books are not life, only its ashes.

Seeking to perpetuate one's name on earth is like writing on the sand by the seashore; to be perpetual it must be written on eternal shores.

Everything is ephemeral, both that which remembers and that which is remembered.

He knows that after him everything will continue on much as before, except that there will be a minuscule absence, a barely detective gap in the so-called grand scheme, one unit fewer now. Or not even that, not even an empty space where he once was, for all will rush immediately to fill that vacuum. Pft. Gone. Recollections of him will remain in the minds of others for a while, but presently those others too will die and his few relics with them. And then all will be dark.

Jump to the day we'll all be dead and none of this will matter. Jump to the day another house will stand here and the people living there won't know we ever happened.

Time has a doomsday book, upon whose pages he is continually recording illustrious names. But as often as a new name is written there, an old one disappears. Only a few stand in illuminated characters never to be effaced.

To set one's name to a work gives no one a title to be remembered, for who knows how many of the best of men have gone without a trace? The iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppyseed and when wretchedness falls upon us one summer's day like snow, all we wish for is to be forgotten.

Don't cling to fame. You're just borrowing it. It's like money. You're going to die, and somebody else is going to get it.

Celebrity was a long time in coming; it will go away. Everything goes away.

Oh, I'll be forgotten too, don't worry.