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Book 11
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Meditations, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Philosophy, The Mind, and Living Well
Relationships and The City
Nature and the Gods
Mortality and Dying Well
Summary
Analysis
1. Everything you’re striving for is attainable right now, but you keep getting in your own way. You just need to forget about the past and trust God with the future. In the present, practice reverence (acceptance of what nature gives) and justice (speaking the truth and acting as you should). And when it comes to death, what you’re really afraid of is not dying, but never having lived properly.
In this last section of the Meditations, Marcus takes a somewhat more introspective turn, perhaps anticipating how soon he’ll die.
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2. If you learn to see your soul the way God sees it—stripped bare of everything earthly—will you desire things like earthly possessions and fame?
Marcus’s exhortations to himself suggest that philosophy isn’t something he feels he’s achieved once and for all—it requires ongoing work, trial and error, and readjustment of perspective.
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4. We love ourselves more than we love other people, and yet we care more about their opinions than our own.
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5. If we protest the deaths of the most godlike people, then we imply that the gods are unfair. But the gods don’t do anything that isn’t right or natural, so we know it must be fair.
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14. If there’s a God, then try to be worthy of God’s help. And if the world is nothing but randomness, then be grateful you have a mind that’ll guide you through the storm; it can’t be swept away, even if the rest of you is.
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16. You can’t expect a bad person not to harm others—it’s like expecting “babies not to cry, horses not to neigh.” It’s inevitable. If it makes you angry, then you need to work on that.
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20. Don’t undertake anything without a purpose, or for any reason besides the common good.
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23. There’s no disgrace in death. It arrives on time, a part of nature’s schedule in renewing all things. When we follow God’s path, we become godlike.
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26. A person’s mind is from God. In fact, everything and everyone comes from that same source. So life is about how a person chooses to see things—and living in the present, because it’s all we have.
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27. Most of the things we want are trivial. It’s more “philosophical” to practice virtue and obey God without being showy about it. False humility is intolerable.
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28. If somebody asks how you can be sure there are gods, tell them to just look around. Besides, the soul is invisible, too.
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