My Virtual Reading Room

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 or birth, but of 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 obstructions.

(Marcus Aurelius, "Meditations", translated by Gregory Hays)