No longer talk at all about the kind of man that a good man ought to be, but be such.
The context
The Meditations is a set of private notes. Marcus wrote them for himself, in Greek, while he was emperor, and it is unlikely he ever meant them to be published. Notes in the text place the first book “among the Quadi,” a people across the Danube he was at war with, and the second at Carnuntum, a Roman town on the Danube.
This entry is a single sentence. The one before it reads: “Short is the little which remains to thee of life. Live as on a mountain.” If time is short, spending it on definitions of goodness is a waste.
Why it matters
According to his translator George Long, Marcus took up “the dress of philosophers” at eleven, and later gave up poetry and rhetoric for Stoic philosophy. He had studied what a good life is for most of his own. That is exactly what he warns himself against here: it’s easy to mistake knowing what a good person is for being one, and talking about it can feel like progress.
Most of us know what being good looks like on an ordinary day: patience with the people around us, honesty when it costs something, doing the work we said we’d do. The hard part is doing it now, today, without first waiting to work out the perfect definition.
About Marcus Aurelius
Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher, 121–180
Marcus Aurelius was born in Rome in 121. In 138 the future emperor Antoninus Pius, named as Hadrian’s successor, adopted him, which put him in line for the throne. He was taught Latin by Fronto, and of his teachers in philosophy Junius Rusticus did most to turn him toward Stoicism. He ruled from 161 until his death in 180, at first jointly with his adoptive brother Lucius Verus.
His reign was hard. The Antonine Plague, which broke out in 165 or 166, killed an estimated five to ten million people, and he spent years at war with the Marcomanni, Quadi and Iazyges across the Danube. Through it he kept the private notes, written in Greek, that we now call the Meditations, a key source for ancient Stoic thought.
The source, and how we checked it
It comes from Meditations, Book 10, 16 (translated by George Long, 1862), 161–180.
We matched the quote word for word against the Project Gutenberg text of George Long's 1862 translation, where it is the whole of Book 10, entry 16. Marcus wrote in Greek, so other translations word it differently. The Meditations can't be dated exactly. Parts of it were written on campaign in the 170s, so the date given here is his reign. We last checked this on 30 October 2026.