The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius — Read

Let this too serve as a correction to excessive vanity, that you are no longer able to have lived your life wholly, or even from your youth up, as a philosopher. You can clearly perceive, and many others can see it too, that you are far from Philosophy. So then your life is in chaos, and no longer is it easy for you to win the credit of being a philosopher; and the facts of your life too war against it. If then your eyes have really seen where the truth lies, do not care any more what men shall think of you, but be content if the rest of you life, whether long or short, be lived as your nature wills. Make sure then what that will is, and let nothing else draw you aside. For past experience tells you in how much you have gone astray, nor anywhere touched upon the true life; no, not in the subtleties of logic, or in wealth or fame or enjoyment, or anywhere. Where then is it to be found? In doing that which is the quest of man's nature. How then shall a man do this? By having axioms as the source of his impulses and actions. What axioms? On the nature of Good and Evil, showing that nothing is for a man's good except what makes him just, temperate, manly, free; nor any thing for his ill that makes him not the reverse of these.

In every action ask thyself, How does it affect me? Shall I regret it? But a little and I am dead and all that lies between is past. What more do I ask for, as long as my present work is that of a living creature, intelligent, social, and under one law with God?