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 and 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 unnatural. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
4 1 The unchangeable character. In the strict sense, it is not true that one’s character is unchangeable; rather, this popular tenet means only that during a man’s short lifetime the motives affecting him cannot normally cut deeply enough to destroy the imprinted writing of many millennia. If a man eighty thousand years old were conceivable, his character would in fact be absolutely variable, so that out of him little by little an abundance of different individuals would develop. The brevity of human life misleads us to many an erroneous assertion about the qualities of man.
59 Intellect and morality. One must have a good memory to be able to keep the promises one has given. One must have strong powers of imagination to be able to have pity. So closely is morality bound to the quality of the intellect.
82 The skin of the soul. Just as the bones, flesh, intestines, and blood vessels are enclosed by skin, which makes the sight of a man bearable, so the stirrings and passions of the soul are covered up by vanity: it is the skin of the soul.
I am a skeptic. I started asking questions when I started talking 50 years ago. I think that 99% of all the questions I ever asked were directed to myself in my head. Of all those questions I ever asked myself, I would guess that the top ten questions get asked over and over again as if we are addicted.
I found my reasoning, for my reasoning some years ago. As a good skeptic, I have learned the pitfalls we can step into if you let your mind go unattended. Reading Greek philosophers will get you a long way, and after that, there are endless philosophers and other thinkers who have put our behavior under a microscope. We are good at believing the things we live with, the thoughts that have been with us for a long time, and the stories we hear around us. Questioning yourself, your life, and the people around you who live the same direction is hard; saying goodbye to a world you know and know is not true because it claims to be true is hard.
Being skeptical and act on the consequences is not something you choose. I never wanted to ask all these irritating questions, as my siblings and friends did when they were 6 and 7, but it ebbed away in them. You can train to become more skeptical, but we all know it is primarily a character trade, a gift from nature like red hair or brown eyes. Most people are not skeptical or don’t act if the answers tell them to go another way; they are skeptics but of the cowardly kind.
So, I am skeptical about writing about this, about hoping it might change a few minds. As I said before, you can read and get educated by starting at the beginning of philosophy. These books have been lying around for thousands of years with little effect besides on a few who are already believers. What will my mediocre writing add to what is already said? I do it for the most part for myself. It keeps my mind organized, and it also keeps my faint hope that I will one day know what to write alive. And be honest, would it not be the best for this world if everybody wrote their ideas in a blog that no one reads.
70 Executions. How is it that every execution offends us more than a murder? It is the coldness of the judges, the painful preparations, the understanding that a man is here being used as a means to deter others. For guilt is not being punished, even if there were guilt; guilt lies in the educators, the parents, the environment, in us, not in the murderer, I am talking about the motivating circumstances.
586 Of the hour hand ef /life. -Life consists of rare individual moments of the highest significance and countless intervals of time in which at best the shadowy images of those moments hover around us. Love, spring, every beautiful melody, mountains, the moon, the sea – only once do all those things speak fully to the heart: if in fact they ever do find their way completely into words. For many people do not have any such moments and are themselves intervals and pauses in the symphony of real life.
I don’t know why I expect there to be a manual that explains how to live life. It seems that no one has written a convincing one, though it would be helpful to get one when you turn eighteen, for instance—a manual containing a what-to-do list, a FAQ section, and a troubleshooting chapter. And I know that thousands of religions and so-called truth-tellers tell their stories and make their manuals for how to live, but that is like having an endless amount of manuals for how to turn on your TV and switch channels. I guess that only the creator of the TV can make the correct manual, and we obviously don't have a creator. For me, it's amazing that so many people act as if they know, or do they just pretend like I do to get by? I wonder what life would be like if we all had learned from the beginning that finding a way (together) is better than leading the way.
Nochrisis 