Source identified1
Read & copy
“The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.”
Meaning & context
Retaliation is rejected when it would reproduce the very behavior one condemns.
Source details
Meditations 6.6; wording varies by translation.
Meditations Quotes by Marcus Aurelius: Context & Meanings
4 quotations linked to Meditations by or associated with Marcus Aurelius, with source notes, explanations and related topics.
About this source
Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, represented through public-domain English translation layers
Topics and ideas
Stoic character, judgment, self-command, adversity, conduct, thought and the practice of returning attention to what depends on one’s own response.
Edition and date context
c. 170 CE work · represented Casaubon English edition
Dates represented in this collection: c. 170 · c. 170 CE. Individual quotation notes provide the most specific context for a passage.
English wording
Translation
Meric Casaubon — Translator · Ancient Greek → English
The wording shown here follows the represented English edition or translation.
Why the edition matters
Translations and editions can differ in wording, punctuation and emphasis, so the source attached to each quotation matters when exact phrasing is important.
Open a public or archival text connected with these quotations
Use these links when you want to inspect the wording in its wider work or edition.
Represented passages
4 quotations with source context and meaning
Source identified2
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“Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.”
Meaning & context
The instruction moves moral philosophy from debate to conduct: character is demonstrated through action.
Source details
Meditations 10.16; wording varies by translation.
Source identified3
Read & copy
“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.”
Meaning & context
The line emphasizes the role of habitual judgment in shaping lived experience, a recurring theme in Stoic practice.
Source details
Common English rendering of a passage in Meditations; wording varies by translation.
Source identified4
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“Thou must be like a promontory of the sea, against which though the waves beat continually, yet it stands.”
Meaning & context
The image recommends steadiness under repeated pressure: external disturbance can arrive continuously without requiring inner collapse.
Source details
Meditations, Book IV, section XL, Meric Casaubon translation represented by Project Gutenberg #2680. The promontory image recommends steadiness under repeated disturbance. The frozen catalog wording shortens the represented witness after “yet it”: Gutenberg reads “yet it both itself stands, and about it are those swelling waves stilled and quieted.” This remains translation-mediated Roman Stoic moral philosophy, not a modern clinical resilience finding.
