They choose it and blame God, just as the addict blames others for his addiction, and cannot escape. Remedies granted through dreams-when I was coughing blood, for instance, and having fits of dizziness. For all of the pessimism at times in the work, I find that Meditations is very quotable and that is where Meditations shines.

A series of spiritual exercises filled with wisdom, practical guidance, and profound understanding of human behavior, it remains one of the greatest works of spiritual and ethical reflection ever written. For anyone who struggles to reconcile the demands of leadership with a concern for personal integrity and spiritual well-being, the Meditations remains as relevant now as it was two thousand years ago. Lee lifted the breadbox and took out a tiny volume bound in leather, and the gold tooling was almost completely worn away—The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius in English translation. Additionally much of the advice that is espoused here is at the heart of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).

I could find no listing on Goodreads that I'm confident is a fair reflection of what I actually read. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done and there is nothing new under the sun. That I had good grandparents, a good mother and father, a good sister, good teachers, good servants, relatives, friends-almost without exception. With the way the introduction was written, who knows what was lost to history and what the translator had the liberty of changing.

I strongly recommend this book to anyone who feels lost in life and is looking to find the tools on how to best approach life's uncertainties and challenges as well as rise above their circumstances.My rating, therefore, is intended to reflect on the translation/edition, and even here I must offer a caveat: The version I read, free on Kindle, purported to be the Gregory Hays translation, but I suspect it was poorly, perhaps manually, copied to . And maybe they were connected in some way, but about halfway through the book I realized that if I just took each verse on its own and gleaned as much wisdom from it, then I would get more out of it. With an Introduction that outlines Marcus’s life and career, the essentials of Stoic doctrine, the style and construction of the Meditations, and the work’s ongoing influence, this edition makes it possible to fully rediscover the thoughts of one of the most enlightened and intelligent leaders of any era. Not prone to go off on tangents, or pulled in all directions, but sticking with the same old places and the same old things.

The result is a handsome collection of short exhortations and aphorisms that encourage a noble, if stoical approach to life.The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Because Marcus challenges our (modern) habits of rushing through life, ever busy, never truly present, often angry, and attached to external goods - we are consuming, but are we living? When you need encouragement, think of the qualities the people around you have: this one’s energy, that one’s modesty, another’s generosity, and so on . It is just a different reading experience, one that I (a new, naïve reader) was neither expecting nor wanting.