Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to Himself - College of Stoic Philosophers

ii TO HIMSELF 19
life than that which he now lives, or live another
than that which he now loses. The longest and
the shortest come to the same thing.
The present
is the same for all (even though the loss be not
the same) ; what you lose or win, is just the
flying moment. A man cannot be losing either
past or future how can he be deprived
of that
which is not his ? Remember then two things
first, that all things from all eternity are of one
and the same recurrent form, and that it makes
no difference whether a man watches the same
show for a hundred years, or for two hundred, or
for an infinity ; secondly, that the loss of the
longest -lived and the shortest is one and the
same. It is the present only of which a man can
be deprived, that and that only being his, and
what is not his he cannot lose.
The view taken is everything. The objections 15
urged against Monimus the Cynic are obvious ;
but so too is the value of the dictum, if one
accepts the gist of it, so far as it is true.
Man's soul does violence to itself, first and 16
foremost when it makes itself, so far as it can, a
kind of tumour and excrescence on the universe ;
any chafing against the order of things
is a