THE ARTICLE · 10 MIN
Meditations is a set of private notes that the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote to himself, in Greek, in the second century AD. Here are its big ideas in our own words, which of the lines credited to it are really in the text, what research has found about Stoic exercises, and a few small practices drawn from the book itself.
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The book returns to death again and again, and in a few passages it treats leaving life as a choice a person may make. We describe that below as part of his philosophy, not as something to follow. Nothing on this page is treatment or medical advice.
About the book
Marcus Aurelius was born in 121, became emperor in 161 and reigned until his death in 180. Much of his reign was spent on campaign, especially in central Europe. The Meditations is twelve books of short entries, some a single line, some a page long, written as reminders to himself. Scholars now generally agree that he wrote it for his own moral improvement, not for readers.
The title is not his. The Greek title the book goes by, ta eis heauton (“to himself”), is first recorded around 900; the English title Meditations is due to a modern editor, Casaubon. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy dates the book, probably, to around 171–175, on campaign in central Europe; the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says, more cautiously, that at least part of it was written during the last years of his military campaigns. Two entries carry place-notes: Book 1 ends “Among the Quadi at the Granua”, and Book 2 ends “This in Carnuntum”, a town on the south side of the Danube. The first printed edition appeared in 1558.
It is not a treatise. Entries repeat, the order is hard to make out, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy warns that the reader who wants to understand his thought “as a whole is bound to be frustrated”. The Stoic whose writings he singles out is Epictetus: Marcus thanks his teacher Rusticus for “being acquainted with the discourses of Epictetus, which he communicated to me out of his own collection” (1.7).
We read the whole book in George Long’s English translation, first published in 1862 and now in the public domain (Project Gutenberg #15877). Quotations from the Meditations below are Long’s, with book and section numbers. His English is old (“thou art”), and he marks the places where the Greek manuscripts are damaged; at one, 5.36, his note reads “This section is unintelligible.”
The big ideas
1. It is the judgement that hurts, not the thing
Marcus tells himself again and again that events do not reach the mind; our opinion of them does. “Things do not touch the soul, for they are external and remain immovable; but our perturbations come only from the opinion which is within” (4.3). His practical version is to keep the report and drop the extra story: “Say nothing more to thyself than what the first appearances report” (8.49).
2. Your own actions are yours; the rest is not
For Marcus, as for the Stoics, only virtue is good and only vice is bad; life and death, honour and dishonour, pain and pleasure are neither (2.11). So his attention goes to what he himself does: “No longer talk at all about the kind of man that a good man ought to be, but be such” (10.16).
3. Other people are kin, even the difficult ones
One morning entry begins: “Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial” (2.1). It goes on to say that they act from ignorance of good and bad, that none of them can harm him, and that “we are made for co-operation”. Book 11 holds a list of ten rules against anger (11.18), and Book 6 a short one on revenge: “The best way of avenging thyself is not to become like [the wrong-doer]” (6.6). The square brackets are Long’s.
4. Death and change are part of nature
He reminds himself often that he will die, that fame fades and that everything changes. “Do not act as if thou wert going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over thee. While thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good” (4.17). He treats dying as one of the things “which nature wills” (9.3). In a few passages (5.29 and 10.8, for example) he also treats leaving life as a choice a person may make when living well is no longer possible; that is part of his philosophy, described here, not advice.
5. The view from above
To keep things in proportion, Marcus pictures human life from a height and over long spans of time: “Look down from above on the countless herds of men and their countless solemnities” (9.30). He runs the same exercise with history, picturing the people of the times of Vespasian and Trajan marrying, feasting, warring and plotting, all now gone (4.32).
6. Welcome what happens, and use the obstacle
He tries to accept what comes as part of a larger order: “Love that only which happens to thee and is spun with the thread of thy destiny” (7.57). And he holds that a mind can turn a setback into material: “the mind converts and changes every hindrance to its activity into an aid” (5.20), like a strong fire that feeds on whatever is thrown into it (4.1).
7. Do the work, and change your mind when shown wrong
On mornings he would rather stay in bed he tells himself, “I am rising to the work of a human being” (5.1). And he holds himself open to correction: “If any man is able to convince me and show me that I do not think or act right, I will gladly change; for I seek the truth, by which no man was ever injured” (6.21).
What holds up
The book is genuine, and for each famous line checked on this page, a related thought is in the text. What does not always hold up is the wording: several lines that travel under Marcus’s name are a modern paraphrase, a modern translation’s phrasing, or someone else’s phrase entirely. The title is not his, and the popular picture of a Stoic who feels nothing does not match what he wrote.
The link to modern therapy is real but indirect. Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck, who founded rational emotive behaviour therapy and cognitive therapy, named the Stoics as forerunners; Ellis’s list of Stoics includes Marcus, and so does one in a 1979 manual by Beck and colleagues. That is a history of ideas. Direct tests of Stoic exercises are few and small: a 2025 scoping review found that only 2 of the 28 studies it included were interventional, and the randomised trials we found are small or not yet published. In one, 52 people on haemodialysis were split into two groups, and the 26 who had eight weeks of Stoic teaching improved their spiritual coping scores more than the 26 controls did; in another, the eight-day trial in the rows below, the results were mixed. None tests the Meditations itself. The rows below give each claim, the verdict and the source.
How to use it
These describe practices drawn from the text. They rest on what Marcus wrote, not on trials; where research touches them, we say so. None is treatment.
- A morning preview. Marcus starts a day by naming the kinds of difficult people he expects to meet and reminding himself that they are kin (2.1). One way to use it is to write a few lines like it before a hard day. No study we found tests this exercise on its own. In the 2026 trial above, the Stoic group did a related one, imagining things going badly, just before a stress test, and the results were mixed.
- Sticking to the first report. His example in 8.49: being told that someone speaks ill of you is a report; that you have been injured “has not been reported”. One way to use it is to write down what happened, then what you added. Cognitive therapy later built on the same idea, but that lineage is history, not a test of the practice.
- The view from above. When something looms large, Marcus pictures it from a height and across centuries (9.30, 4.32). The same move can be used to put a worry in proportion. This is his exercise; we are not citing research for it.
- Notes to yourself. The book is the practice: short reminders, written down and reread until they stick. The Stanford Encyclopedia links this to Epictetus’s advice to write down and rehearse daily the responses one ought to have, so that they are ready at hand.
- Asking to be shown wrong. Marcus holds himself to changing his view when someone shows him a better one (6.21), and only for good reasons, not, as he says in 4.12, “because it appears pleasant or brings reputation”. It can serve as a check before digging in on a disagreement.
Who it’s for, and who can skip it
It suits readers who like to dip into a book a page at a time, and anyone curious about what a man with great power wrote for his own use. It is repetitive and unsystematic, so readers who want a shorter, more direct statement of the Stoic ideas may prefer Epictetus’s handbook, the Enchiridion, or our Stoicism overview. Long’s English is old; newer translations, such as Gregory Hays’s (2002), use modern English, and as the rows above show, a punchy modern line can belong to the translator. Anyone in acute distress is better served by the helplines above than by any book.
If you liked this
- Our overview of Stoicism, the school Marcus followed.
- The Enchiridion by Epictetus: summary, the short handbook of the teacher whose discourses Marcus thanks Rusticus for.
- Your fears, answered by the Stoics, with the passages in Marcus, Epictetus and Seneca, each with its number.
- Did They Really Say That?, which traces “you have power over your mind” and other famous lines.
- Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel (Harvard University Press, translated by Michael Chase), a book-length study of the Meditations. We have not read it; it is listed for readers who want to go deeper.
Sources
- Marcus Aurelius, The Thoughts of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, tr. George Long (first edition 1862), Project Gutenberg #15877, with Long’s notes and biographical sketch; edition dates from Wikisource.
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, tr. Meric Casaubon, Project Gutenberg #2680 (searched, not read in full).
- J. Collier, The Emperor Marcus Antoninus His Conversation with Himself (London, 1701), archive.org scan.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Marcus Aurelius” (rev. 2025) and “Stoicism”.
- Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Marcus Aurelius”.
- Open Library, record of Gregory Hays’s translation (Modern Library, 2002); D. Robertson, “Book Review: The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday” (2017).
- Harvard University Press, The Inner Citadel (Pierre Hadot, tr. Michael Chase).
- F. Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom (The Gay Science) §276, tr. Thomas Common, Project Gutenberg #52881.
- A. E. Cavanna, G. Purpura, A. Riva, R. Nacinovich and S. Seri, “The Western origins of mindfulness therapy in ancient Rome”, Neurological Sciences 44 (2023).
- A. Boostani, S. A. Vahhabzadeh Mousavi, K. Momeni and M. Arab-Zozani, “Application of Stoic philosophy teachings in nursing and allied health: a scoping review”, SAGE Open Nursing (2025).
- M. W. Lewis, C. Kalarchian and A. MacLellan, “Effects of Stoic training on fear of negative evaluation and responses to social-evaluative stress”, PsyArXiv preprint (2026).
- J. A. Karl and T. LeBon, “Stoicism, well-being, and character strengths”, PsyArXiv preprint (2026).
- G. King, “Modern Stoicism and Mental Health: A Randomised Controlled Trial”, PhD thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London (2025), unpublished; abstract read on the university’s research portal.
- A. Momeni, A. Boostani and M. Moshtagh, “Evaluating the effectiveness of stoic teachings on spiritual coping strategies in patients undergoing hemodialysis”, Journal of Health Psychology (2026).
Checked October 2026. What we read: the whole of the Meditations in George Long’s translation, with his notes and the parts of his biographical sketch on the title and the manuscripts; the encyclopedia entries and publisher pages above; and the research abstracts listed. We searched, but did not read in full, the Casaubon and Collier translations. We did not read the Greek, Gregory Hays’s translation or Pierre Hadot’s book; Hays’s wording rests on Robertson’s review. Ellis’s and Beck’s words are quoted as given in the 2023 paper by Cavanna and colleagues, because we could not open their books.
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