# Marcus Aurelius' best quotes from the Meditations (the real ones)

The lines from the emperor's private notebook that people still underline, with the book of the Meditations each comes from. None of the viral fakes ('You have power over your mind…', 'Everything we hear is an opinion…'), which Wikiquote lists as misattributed.

- 51 votes · 13 items
- Sep 24, 2020 · Thabo Nkosi
- https://even.best/en/l/2093/marcus-aurelius-best-quotes-from-the-meditations-the-real-ones

## Top 13

1. **Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.** (6 · ▲6 ▼0) — Meditations, Book X.
2. **Very little is needed to make a happy life.** (6 · ▲6 ▼0) — Meditations, Book VII.
3. **The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.** (6 · ▲6 ▼0) — Meditations, Book VI.
4. **The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.** (4 · ▲5 ▼1) — Meditations, Book IV (Morgan translation).
5. **Never esteem anything as of advantage to you that will make you break your word or lose your self-respect.** (4 · ▲4 ▼0) — Meditations, Book III.
6. **The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.** (3 · ▲3 ▼0) — Meditations, Book V (Hays translation).
7. **If it is not right, do not do it; if it is not true, do not say it.** (3 · ▲3 ▼0) — Meditations, Book XII.
8. **Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.** (3 · ▲3 ▼0) — Meditations, Book VII.
9. **Remember that man lives only in the present, in this fleeting instant; all the rest of his life is either past and gone, or not yet revealed.** (3 · ▲3 ▼0) — Meditations, Book III.
10. **Look within. Within is the fountain of the good, and it will ever bubble up, if thou wilt ever dig.** (2 · ▲3 ▼1) — Meditations, Book VII.
11. **The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts.** (2 · ▲2 ▼0) — Meditations, Book V.
12. **How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks, but only at what he does himself, to make it just and holy.** (2 · ▲2 ▼0) — Meditations, Book IV.
13. **Confine thyself to the present.** (1 · ▲2 ▼1) — Meditations, Book VII.

How is this ranking ordered? By people's votes: each ▲ adds a point and each ▼ takes one away. Anyone can vote and add what is missing.