It would be wrong for anything to stand between you and attaining goodness — as a rational being and a citizen. 3.6 Wash yourself clean. With simplicity, with humility, with indifference to everything but right and wrong. Care for other human beings. Follow God. 7.31 Our duty is to exercise stringent control over the faculty of perception, with the aim of protecting our mind from error.

The discipline of perception requires that we maintain absolute objectivity of thought: that we see things dispassionately for what they are.The tranquility that comes when you stop caring what they say. Or think, or do. Only what you do. 4.18

Forget the future. When and if it comes, you’ll have the same resources to draw on–the same logos. 7.8 Enter their minds, and you’ll find the judges you’re so afraid of–and how judiciously they judge themselves. 9.18 It never ceases toamazeme: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own. 12.4 Awaken; return to yourself. Now, no longer asleep, knowing they were only dreams, clear-headed again, treat everything around you as a dream. 6.31But the man motivated by desire, who is mastered by pleasure, seems somehow more self-indulgent, less manly in his sins. 2.10 To follow the logos in all things is to be relaxed and energetic, joyful and serious at once. 10.12 The only thing that isn’t worthless: to live this life out truthfully and rightly. And be patient with those who don’t. 6.47

And for a human being to feel stress is normal–if he’s living a normal human life. And if it’s normal, how can it be bad? 6.33 So this is how a thoughtful person should await death: not with indifference, not with impatience, not with disdain but simply viewing it as one of the things that happens to us. Now you anticipate the child’s emergence from its mother’s womb; that is how you should await the hour when your soul will emerge from its compartment. 9.3 What is divinedeservesour respect because it is good; what is human deserves our affection because it is like us. 2.13 A straightforward, honest person should be like someone who stinks: when you’re in the same room with him, you know it. 11.15At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work–as a human being…I am going to what I was born for.” 5.1 It’s the pursuit of these things, and your attempts to avoid them, that leave your mind in such turmoil. And yet they aren’t seeking you out; you are the one seeking them.Suspendjudgmentabout them. And at once they will lie still, and you will be freed from fleeing and pursuing. 11.11 An athlete in the greatest of all contests — the struggle not to beoverwhelmedby anything that happens. 3.4 To move from one unselfish action to another with God in mind. Only there, delight and stillness. 6.7 This requires not merely passiveacquiescence in what happens, but active cooperation with the world, with fate and, above all,with other human beings. We were made, Marcus tells us over and over, not for ourselves but for others, and our nature is fundamentally unselfish. In our relationship with others we must work for their collective good, while treating them justly and fairly as possible.