All Is Well in the Great Mess

“True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing. The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach. A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not”
– Seneca, De Vita Beata

Sales of works by ancient Roman Marcus Aurelius have seen a sharp uptick in recent months.

According to Penguin Random House, print sales of Meditations are up 28% for the first quarter of 2020 vs 2019, while print sales of Letters from a Stoic are up 42% for the same period. In the last four weeks, its ebook sales rose by 356%"

The Guardian: ‘Dress rehearsal for catastrophe’: how Stoics are speaking to locked-down readers.

Book 2

ON THE RIVER GRAN, AMONG THE QUADI

1. When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The
people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful,
arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this
because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the
beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized
that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own—not of
the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a
share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one
can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my
relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like
feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and
lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at
someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.

A New Translation, with an Introduction, by Gregory Hays. THE MODERN LIBRARY
NEW YORK.

Book 1

DEBTS AND LESSONS

1. MY GRANDFATHER VERUS

Character and self-control.

2. MY FATHER (FROM MY OWN MEMORIES AND HIS REPUTATION)

Integrity and manliness.

3. MY MOTHER

Her reverence for the divine, her generosity, her inability not
only to do wrong but even to conceive of doing it. And the
simple way she lived—not in the least like the rich.

This text was first published in Emerson’s Essays collection in 1841. Emerson drew on his journals of 1832-40 for a number of ideas and passages he wrote here. Over the years, he delivered the text as speeches and lectures, so it evolved over time.

“Ne te quæsiveris extra.”

“Man is his own star; and the soul that can
Render an honest and a perfect man,
Commands all light, all influence, all fate;
Nothing to him falls early or too late.
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.”
– Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher’s Honest Man’s Fortune

“External things are not the problem. It’s your assessment of them. Which you can erase right now.”
– Marcus Aurelius

“It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
– R.W. Emerson, Self-Reliance

“Only time can heal what reason cannot.”
– Seneca

Die Selbstbetrachtungen von Marc Aurel sind als kostenloses Reclam Hörbuch auf YouTube verfügbar . Gelesen von Winfried Frey.

Warum sind wir so geizig mit unserem Geld, gehen aber verschwenderisch mit unserer Lebenszeit um? In seinem Traktat „Das Leben ist kurz“ plädiert Seneca für einen verantwortungsvollen Umgang mit der Ressource Zeit.

Lesung mit Reinhard Glemnitz

“The life we are given isn’t short but we make it so; we’re not ill provided but we are wasteful of life.”
– Seneca

“Today I escaped from anxiety. Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions – not outside.”
– Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Without going out-of-doors,
one may know all under heaven;
Without peering through windows,
one may know the Way of heaven.
The farther one goes,
The less one knows.
For this reason,
The sage
knows without journeying,
understands without looking,
accomplishes without acting.”
– Victor H. Mair (Lao Tzu - Tao Te Ching)

“Remember that no one loses any other life than this which he is living, nor lives any other than this which he is losing.”
– Marcus Aurelius

“My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.”
– Michel de Montaigne

“Loss is nothing but change, and change is nature’s delight.”
– Marcus Aurelius

“It’s impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows”
– Epictetus

“You always own the option of having no opinion. There is never any need to get worked up or to trouble your soul about things you can’t control. These things are not asking to be judged by you. Leave them alone.”
– M. Aurelius

This site I made solely to please myself. I have in the past burnt much of my creative output in garden bonfires in a quest for simplicity and less baggage, but now it seems putting it on the web will serve a similar purpose.