Marcus Aurelius Quotes
Everything that happens happens as it should, and if you observe carefully, you will find this to be so.
Aurelius, Marcus. Meditations. Translated by George Long, D. Appleton and Company, 1904, p. 36.
This quotation is sometimes used as an illustration of a difficulty that many Western officials have in dealing with Islamic governments. Failure of their plans, policies, and strategies do not become a learning experience or an example to guide the future. The failure was the will of Allah and not the result of the policy. So repeating the strategy of staying with the policy is not per se destructive or useless. Allah may favor it the next time. So there are no consequences of bad policies. Only destiny which Allah has shaped for any of a thousand reasons which are not known to man.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was Roman emperor from 161 to 180 and a Stoic philosopher. He was the last of the rulers known as the Five Good Emperors (a term coined some 13 centuries later by Niccolò Machiavelli), and the last emperor of the Pax Romana (27 BC to 180 AD), an age of relative peace and stability for the Roman Empire. He served as Roman consul in 140, 145, and 161.
