Meditations
Marcus Aurelius's private notebook, written for himself and quoted by everyone else.
Meditations is a set of personal notes written in Greek by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius between roughly 170 and 180 CE, largely on campaign. It was never intended for publication; the Greek title given to it, Ta eis heauton, means 'to himself', and the text reads as self-instruction — commands, reminders, and arguments the author needed to rehearse.
That origin shapes how it should be quoted. The imperatives are addressed to Marcus, not to a reader, and passages that sound like universal counsel are often a man arguing himself out of a bad morning. Context restores rather than diminishes them: the emperor telling himself that people will be ungrateful today is more interesting than an aphorism about ingratitude.
The book is a magnet for fabricated quotations. Lines invented for films, gym posters, and productivity blogs are attributed to it constantly, and because it is aphoristic by nature, inventions blend in. Check any Meditations quotation against a numbered book-and-section reference in a scholarly translation.
For research: the standard modern English versions are Farquharson (1944), Hays (2002), and Hard (2011). They differ substantially in phrasing, so cite the translator alongside book and section.
“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly.”
Keep reading the glossary
A 2,000-year-old practice of distilling ethical instruction into short, repeatable lines.
A published record of a notable person's informal conversation, usually taken down by an admirer at meals.
The Sayings of the Desert Fathers — collected wisdom of the early Christian monastic elders.
Naming the translator, because a quotation in translation is also that translator's wording.