Marcus Aurelius Quotes

Life was precious. Life was fragile. Here one moment, gone the next. Every second should be milked for all it's worth because you never know when the bottom was going to drop out.

Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is in your power, be good.

Be not as one that hath ten thousand years to live; death is nigh at hand: while thou livest, while thou hast time, be good.

I was brought up to appreciate the here and now, and, knowing this is your only life, to view death as an inevitable and reassuring end.

Live mindful of how brief your life is.

When you understand that you will die to-morrow, if not to-day, and nothing will be left, then everything is so unimportant!... So one goes on living, amusing oneself with hunting, with work - anything so as not think of death

It is possible to depart from life at this moment. Have this thought in mind whenever you act, speak, or think.

Everything you see, you might be seeing for the last time.

Sometimes the hardest part of my job is the incessant reminder of the fact we're all trying so assiduously to ignore: we are here temporarily. Life is only ours on loan.

Continuously thou wilt look at human things as smoke and nothing at all; especially if thou reflectest at the same time, that what has once changed will never exist again in the infinite duration of time. But thou, in what a brief space of time is thy existence? And why art thou not content to pass through this short time in an orderly way?

Life is short and we have scarcely begun to live when we are called to die.

With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch.

If the study of history teaches anything, it teaches us the limitations of life.

I only live one time.

Time that withers you will wither me. We will fall like ripe fruit and roll down the grass together. Dear friend, let me lie beside you watching the clouds until the earth covers us and we are gone.

Consider when thou art much vexed or grieved, that man's life is only a moment, and after a short time we are all laid out dead.

to die tomorrow was no worse than dying on any other day. Every day was there to be lived or to mark one’s departure from this world.

One hundred years from now, we'll all be dead. It's hard to believe. One hundred years from now, everyone we see every day will be gone.

A great moment of clarity when I realized I'm dying. There's no reason to wait to do the things we want to do.

For mortal kind taketh thought only for the day, and hath no more surety than the shadow of smoke.

There's no sense that you're there forever. No parent is there forever.

When we're alive, life consumes us. But when we die, all of the color and the motion is gone so quickly, it's as though it can no longer stand to be wasted on us.

Our lives disappear, even as we live them.

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.