Shopping cart
Your cart empty!
Meditations
One of the world's most famous and influential books, Meditations, by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 121–180), incorporates the stoic precepts he used to cope with his life as a warrior and administrator of an empire. Ascending to the imperial throne in A.D. 161, Aurelius found his reign beset by natural disasters and war. In the wake of these challenges, he set down a series of private reflections, outlining a philosophy of commitment to virtue above pleasure and tranquility above happiness.
Reflecting the emperor's own noble and self-sacrificing code of conduct, this eloquent and moving work draws and enriches the tradition of Stoicism, which stressed the search for inner peace and ethical certainty in an apparently chaotic world. Serenity was to be achieved by emulating in one's personal conduct the underlying orderliness and lawfulness of nature. And in the face of inevitable pain, loss, and death — the suffering at the core of life — Aurelius counsels stoic detachment from the things that are beyond one's control and a focus on one's own will and perception.
Presented here in a specially modernized version of the classic George Long translation, this updated and revised edition is easily accessible to contemporary readers. It not only provides a fascinating glimpse into the mind and personality of a highly principled Roman of the second century but also offers today's readers a practical and inspirational guide to the challenges of everyday life.
More Books from Marcus Aurelius
![The Complete Harvard Classics 2024 Edition [newly updated] Benjamin Franklin, Plato, William Shakespeare, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Darwin, John Woolman, William Penn, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Francis Bacon, John Milton, Thomas Browne, Robert Burns, Saint Augustine, Thomas à Kempis, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Cicero, Adam Smith, Pliny the Younger, Plutarch, Virgil, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, John Bunyan, Izaak Walton, Anonymous, Aesop, Grimm Brothers, Hans Christian Andersen, John Dryden, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Oliver Goldsmith, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Browning, Lord Byron, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Christopher Marlowe, Dante Alighieri, Alessandro Manzoni, Homer, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Edmund Burke, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Pierre Corneille, Jean Racine, Molière, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Friedrich von Schiller, Michael Faraday, Hermann von Helmholtz, Lord Kelvin, Simon Newcomb, Sir Archibald Geikie, Benvenuto Cellini, Michel de Montaigne, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Ernest Renan, Immanuel Kant, Giuseppe Mazzini, Herodotus, Tacitus, Philiip Nichols, Francis Pretty, Walter Bigges, Edward Haies, Walter Raleigh, René Descartes, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes, Jean Froissart, Thomas Malory, Sir Thomas Malory, William Harrison, Niccolò Machiavelli, William Roper, Sir Thomas More, Martin Luther, John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume, Hippocrates, Ambroise Pare, William Harvey, Edward Jenner, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Joseph Lister, Louis Pasteur, Charles Lyell, Confucius, Christian, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, John Webster, Philip Massinger, Blaise Pascal, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Francis Bret Harte, Samuel L. Clemens, Edward Everett Hale, Henry James, Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, George Sand, Alfred de Musset, Alphonse Daudet, Guy de Maupassant, Gottfried Keller, Theodor Storm, Theodor Fontane, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ivan Turgenev, Juan Valera, Bjornstjerne Bjornson, Alexander L. Kielland & Charles Eliot](https://is1-ssl.mzstatic.com/image/thumb/Publication123/v4/50/92/1a/50921a1d-6c1e-aa9c-d2c9-b70c1c5271f0/1021533680.jpg/270x270bb.jpg)
Comments