"Marcus Aurelius" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... great obligations to M. H. MORGAN, Ph. D., of Harvard University, for the translation of Marcus Aurelius, and for the translation and selections from the Greek tragic writers. I am indebted to the kindness of Mr. DANIEL W. WILDER, of Kansas, for the quotations from Pilpay, with contributions from Diogenes Laertius, Montaigne, Burton, and Pope's Homer; to Dr. WILLIAM J. ROLFE for quotations from Robert ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... in the literature show us that the Stoicism is not sufficient for our generation, not satisfied with Marcus Aurelius's gospel, which was not sufficient even to that brilliant Sienkiewicz's Roman arbiter elegantiarum, the over-refined patrician Petronius. A nation which desired to live, and does not wish either to perish in the desert or be drowned ...
— So Runs the World • Henryk Sienkiewicz,
... Christianity we see a curious struggle between pagan and Christian belief upon this point. Near the close of the second century the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, in his effort to save the empire, fought a hotly contested battle with the Quadi, in what is now Hungary. While the issue of this great battle was yet doubtful there came suddenly a blinding storm beating ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... termed a journalistic instinct, scenes that he had witnessed, such as Aldhelm standing on the bridge instructing the people on Sunday afternoons; bits of philosophy; and such reflections as the following, which remind one of Marcus Aurelius:—"Desirest thou power? But thou shalt never obtain it without sorrows—sorrows from strange folk, and yet keener sorrows from thine own kindred." and "Hardship and sorrow! Not a king but would wish to be without these if ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... by a natural transition to a very noble book—the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.[16] The dispassionate gravity, the noble forgetfulness of self, the tenderness of others, that are there expressed and were practised on so great a scale in the life of its writer, make this book a book quite by itself. No one can read it and not be moved. ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... emperor (237-294). His full name was Marcus Aurelius Valerius Carausius, and as emperor of Britain he was accepted by Diocletian and Maximian; but after a vigorous reign of seven years he was assassinated by Allectus, who succeeded him as "emperor of Britain."—See Gibbon, Decline and Fall, etc., ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... morality you are far behind, my gentlemen. Judge further if such a man as Marcus Aurelius[579] finds out how wretched it [Illuminism] appears in Athens [Munich]; what a collection of immoral men, of whoremongers, liars, debtors, boasters, and vain fools they have amongst them. If he saw all ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... The temple of Marcus Aurelius is converted into the Dogana. That of Minerva Medica lies in the midst of a vineyard, and is built in the form of a rotunda. The ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... spoke in Greek and thought in Greek. In the days of Greek freedom to be a Greek had meant to be a citizen of a Greek canton; after Alexander it meant to have Greek culture. None of the great Stoics were natives of Greece proper; Zeno himself was a Semite. Of the later Greek writers, Marcus Aurelius was a Romanized Spaniard, Plotinus possibly a Copt, Porphyry and Lucian Syrians, Philo, St. Paul, and probably the Fourth Evangelist were Jews. These men all belong to the history of Greek culture. And if these were Greeks how shall we deny ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... line, that the descent from father to son was hardly ever blessed, and that those who were adopted by an emperor no way related to them succeeded the best. The children of the very greatest emperors—of a Marcus Aurelius, a Constantine, a Theodosius—have only brought shame on their parents and ruin on their empire. Again, if the youth of a Nero or a Caracalla ended in utter ignominy, the youth of an Alexander Severus produced the fairest of reigns, while it ended in his murder by an usurper. But strange ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... long period. Cicero, although a decided enemy to the Epicureans, gives a brilliant testimony to the probity both of Epicurus and his disciples, who were remarkable for the inviolable friendship they bore each other. In the time of Marcus Aurelius, there was at Athens a public professor of the philosophy of Epicurus, paid by that emperor, who was himself a stoic. Hobbes did not cause blood to flow in England, although in his time, religious fanaticism made a king perish on the scaffold. The poem ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... though. Ignorance is no plea that will stand, when people have the means of knowledge. But come on. Here is Marcus Aurelius; here, Rupert, Nos. 37 and 38. He was what the world calls a very great man. He was cultivated, and wise, and strong, a great governor, and for a heathen a good man; and how he treated the Christians! East and west, and at Rome here itself, how ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... cycle, began filling the old gaps, or really making new ones that these might be filled by a fresh poem. Hence arose the famous Epic Cycle, which has been preserved in a kind of summary supposed to have been written by Proclus, not the philosopher, but a grammarian of the time of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... Translated by Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Copyright, 1865 and 1890, by Little, Brown & Co. Epictetus has been valued not alone as an exposition of the Stoic philosophy, but as a specimen of Greek of the later or Silver Age. Marcus Aurelius, who in a later generation wrote in Greek himself, is said to have ranked Epictetus with Socrates as a teacher. Origen, the early Christian father, asserted that his writings had been of more value to the world's morals ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... best tools a minister can have. He should be read in the great literary and sermonic literature, the work of Bossuet, Massillon, Chrysostom, Augustine, Fenelon, Marcus Aurelius, mediaeval homilies, Epictetus, Pascal, Guyon, Amiel, Vinet, La Brunetiere, Phelps, Jeremy Taylor, Barrows, Fuller, Whitefield, Bushnell, Edwards, Bacon, Newman, Ruskin, Carlyle, Emerson, Davies, Law, Bunyan, Luther, Spalding, Robertson, Kingsley, Maurice, ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... "Nay—Marcus Aurelius Antoninus—a mighty wise old chap, if he was an Emperor. And I've got Niccolo Macchiavelli's seven books o' the Art o' War. When I'm weary of one I take to t' other, and between times I ride a tilt." He waved his hand toward a ring fastened on a tree, and a lance and horse-furniture ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... their ancient beauty. At the top of the steps are two colossal figures which represent as it is believed Castor and Pollux; then the trophies of Marius; then two milliary columns which served for the admeasurement of the Roman universe; and the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, noble and calm in the midst of these several recollections. Thus, the whole Roman history is here emblematically represented: The heroic age by the Dioscuri; the republic by the lions; the civil wars by Marius; and the golden age of the emperors ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... I lay down a proposition agreed to by all physicians; which was expressed by Hippocrates, the father of medicine, and then repeated in better phrase by Epictetus, the slave, to his pupil, the great Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, and which has been known to every thinking man and woman since: ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... There are a vast number of conflicting ideals of alternative characters, of incompatible civilisations; but all are wanted to give fulness and interest to life. Society would be very dull if every man resembled the highly estimable Marcus Aurelius or Adam Bede. The aim of Eugenics is to represent each class or sect by its best specimens; that done, to leave them to work out their common civilisation in ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... answer and a synthesis "in that far-off divine event to which the whole creation moves." So, for one, in these high matters, I must be content as a "masterless man" swearing by no philosopher, unless he be the imperial Stoic of the hardy heart, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... was supposed to come to the sufferer, in a belief based on the truth that dreams do sometimes, for those who watch them carefully, give many hints concerning the conditions of the body—those latent weak points at which disease or death may most easily break into it. In the time of Marcus Aurelius these medical dreams had become more than ever a fashionable caprice. Aristeides, the "Orator," a man of undoubted intellectual power, has devoted six discourses to their interpretation; the really scientific Galen has recorded how beneficently they had intervened in his own case, at certain turning-points ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... choose to encumber their splendid square with a monument. They evaded the condition by assigning the Campo in front of the Scuola di S. Marco, where also stands the Church of S. Zanipolo, to the purpose. Here accordingly the finest bronze equestrian statue in Italy, if we except the Marcus Aurelius of the Capitol, was reared upon its marble pedestal by ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... be as well to add here that the prevailing opinion of archaeologists now refers the arch to the reign of Marcus Aurelius, and that the name Marius has no reference to the conqueror of the Cimbri, as has been generally supposed. The supposition was brought about by the name Mario inscribed on a shield, among the many facsimiles adorning ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... portraits of ugly old men, of snub little boys, work which was clearly before its right time, and was swamped by idealized portraits, insipid, nay, inane, from the elegant revivalist busts of Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius down to the bonnet blocks of the lower empire. Of this Roman portrait art, of certain heads of half-idiotic little Caesar brats, of sly and wrinkled old men, things which ought to be so ugly and yet are so beautiful, we say, at least, perhaps unformulated, we think, "How ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... of nearly fifteen centuries, the Roman theatre at Orange—founded in the time of Marcus Aurelius and abandoned, two hundred years later, when the Northern barbarians overran the land—seems destined to arise reanimate from its ruins and to be the scene of periodic performances by the Comedie Francaise: the first dramatic company of Europe playing on the noblest stage ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... at the green shining figure of Marcus Aurelius on his horse riding between her and the ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... funny, 'I like both the Iliad and the Argosy.' The only thing I can't stand is literature that is unfairly and intentionally flavoured with vanilla. Confectionery soon disgusts the palate, whether you find it in Marcus Aurelius or Doctor Crane. There's an odd aspect of the matter that sometimes strikes me: Doc Crane's remarks are just as true as Lord Bacon's, so how is it that the Doctor puts me to sleep in a paragraph, while my Lord's essays keep ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... look so happy for three years. Indeed, my little sister, you have much for which to be grateful, and in the midst of your blessings try to recollect those grand words of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, 'The soul is a God in exile.' My child, look to it that your expatriation ends with ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... more divine than the things which cause the various effects, and, as it were, pull thee by the strings. What is that now in thy mind? is it fear, or suspicion, or desire, or anything of that kind?' Thus far Marcus Aurelius, in one of the most notable passages in any book. Here is a question worthy to be answered. What is in thy mind? What is the utterance of your inmost self when, in a quiet hour, it can be heard intelligibly? It is something beyond the compass of your thinking, ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... gods of the departed, and with tears and ejaculations testified their sorrow. Drusus came as far as Terracina, with Claudius the brother of Germanicus, and those of his children who had been left at Rome.[109] The Consuls, Marcus Valerius and Marcus Aurelius[110] (for they had now entered upon their office), the senate, and great part of the people, filled the road—a scattered procession, each walking and expressing his grief as inclination led him; in sooth, flattery was an utter stranger here, for ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... ladies to teach this child things right and proper for her to know. They tell her clever things that Julius Caesar said; observations made by Marcus Aurelius that, pondered over, might help her to become a beautiful character. She complains that it produces a strange buzzy feeling in her head; and her mother argues that perhaps her brain is of the creative order, ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... a celebrated philosopher, whose disciple Lucian had been. He flourished in the reign of Marcus Aurelius.—Trans. ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... physical, moral, and intellectual nature, together with all the conditions under which it had developed, and this, to the best of his ability, honestly and sincerely. The work which he avowedly took as his model—the 'Confessions' of Marcus Aurelius—he was able, hampered as he was by no stoical maxims, to surpass in this particular. He desires to spare neither himself nor others, and begins the narrative of his career with the statement that his mother tried, and failed, to procure abortion. It is worth ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... physician of Marcus Aurelius (in the second century of the Christian era), dissected living animals, and yet he is regarded as having merited his name (Galenus, "gentle") from the mildness of his character. Five centuries before him, under the Ptolemies, Egyptian experimenters had operated upon condemned ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 415, December 15, 1883 • Various
... hunted out an obscure Neapolitan, Marcus Aurelius Severino, and ascribed to him the originals of these translations. They are of course from the De Consolatione Philosophiae of Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, and are a continuation of the pieces already printed in Olor ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... now. Often he saw no one for weeks at a time. He prayed much, and the books he read were his Bible, his Prayer Book, Thomas a Kempis, and Marcus Aurelius. He wandered over the ground where the feet of the Master he served so well had trod before him. He was much in Jerusalem. He went to where the grey olives grow in the Garden of Gethsemane. His own Gethsemane was still ...
— The Story of General Gordon • Jeanie Lang
... being both by art and nature cut out and finished for the service of ladies. He spoke well and little: ever mixing his language with some illustration out of authors most in use, especially in Spanish, and among the Spanish he whom they called Marcus Aurelius—[ Guevara's Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus.]—was ordinarily in his mouth. His behaviour was gently grave, humble, and very modest; he was very solicitous of neatness and propriety both in his person and ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... and consider them. When the problem of carrying those volumes about faces me, it is a relief to discover how many of them lose their vital importance. Yet a depraved sense of duty, perhaps the residue of what such writers as Marcus Aurelius have done for me, refuses to allow every volume to be jettisoned. It imposes, as a hair shirt, several new and serious books which there has been no time to examine. They are books that require a close focus, a long and steady concentration, a silent immobility ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... the Sacra Privata were prepared by him for the use of the public. The Maxims were never meant to be printed, and have on that account, like a work of, doubtless, far deeper emotion and power, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, something peculiarly sincere and first-hand about them. Some of the best things from the Maxims have passed into the Sacra Privata; still, in the Maxims, we have them as they first arose; and whereas, too, in the Sacra Privata the writer speaks very often as one of the clergy, and as addressing ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... close and friendly alliances between the science and the art, the teachers and the practitioners of religion. Few things would be more ominous than to permit any further widening of the gulf which already exists between these two. Never more than now does the preacher need to be reminded of what Marcus Aurelius said: "Such as are thy habitual thoughts, such also shall be thyself; for the soul is dyed ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... may question the wisdom of putting out the Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to be used as a Reader by children in the schools. It may appear to them better suited to the mature mind. The principle, however, that has governed us in selecting reading for the young has been to secure the best that we could ...
— The Thoughts Of The Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius
... Roman civilization for three centuries, from the first to the fourth, but from the second century onwards the attitude of the Romans was defensive rather than offensive. The war against the Marcomanni under the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, in the second half of this century, was the turning-point. Rome was still victorious, but no territory was added to the empire. The third century saw the southward movement of the Germanic peoples, who took the place of the Celts. ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... shortly after the reign of Marcus Aurelius, living through the violent civil wars that succeeded the peace of the Antonines, surviving to witness the Decian persecution of the Church and in extreme old age to perceive the promise, though not the establishment, ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... her to realise this, as she appeared to me, in spite of having a genius for friendship, to be self-contained and lonely. She was responsive, and said many encouraging things to me. I said that somewhere or other I had read that Marcus Aurelius had begged us to keep our colour. I was not very sure of the correct text; but that the idea was that some of us were born red, some yellow, and others grey, but that however this might be, the point was to keep it; not so much by contrast or conflict with the other person, but to complement ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... been offended more than once in this legend, conceived by another race, under another sky, and in the midst of other social wants. There are virtues which, in some respects, are more conformable to our taste. The virtuous and gentle Marcus Aurelius, the humble and gentle Spinoza, not having believed in miracles, have been free from some errors that Jesus shared. Spinoza, in his profound obscurity, had an advantage which Jesus did not seek. By our extreme delicacy in the use of means ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... have said that. But Marcus Aurelius belonged to a race peculiarly insensitive to beauty. The Japanese stoics were also artists and poets. Their earliest painters were feudal lords, and it was feudal lords who fostered and acted the No dances. If Nietzsche ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... wearing out of the machine itself. The only previous civilization with which our modern civilization can be in any way compared is that period of Graeco-Roman civilization extending, say, from the Athens of Themistocles to the Rome of Marcus Aurelius. Many of the forces and tendencies which were then at work are at work now. Knowledge, luxury, and refinement, wide material conquests, territorial administration on a vast scale, an increase in the mastery of mechanical appliances and in applied science—all these mark our ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... told by his biographer that Marcus Aurelius had a face that never changed—for joy or sorrow, "being an adherent," he adds, "of the Stoic philosophy." The pose of superiority to emotion was not uncommonly held in those times to be the mark of a sage—Horace's "nil admirari". The writers of the Gospels do not conceal that ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... criminal. But because he was a crowned king, it was regarded as a patriotic duty then to make much of the {305} departed monarch, and to talk of him in the strain which would have been appropriate if he had been a Marcus Aurelius. The best, perhaps, that can be said of him is that, on the whole, all things considered, he might have been worse. It would be unfair to a George who has, at a long interval, to succeed him, to say that George the Second was ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... Courval formed a remarkable collection of mediaeval arms and armour, antique furniture, stained glass, medals and coins. This region is very rich not only in Roman remains, but in druidical stones and other vestiges of the races which dwelt here before Caesar came. Marcus Aurelius, Trajan, Hadrian, Alexander Severus, Probus, Gordian, Constantine and Constantius are all represented on the coins found in and around the property of M. de Courval; but one of his most interesting acquisitions was a silver coin bearing the name of Clovis, with the title ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... failed to accompany his mother once a day, as a concession due from son to mother. It was far from satisfying her. Indeed there was a dull, heavy ache at her heart whenever she looked at him, for however he might endeavour to conform, like Marcus Aurelius sacrificing to the gods, there was always a certain half- patronising, half-criticising superciliousness about his countenance. Yet, if he came for love of her, still something might yet strike him and win ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to be irrelevant), but in the light of Coralie's feelings. It seemed to me that the philosopher should have spared more consideration to this side of the matter. Had he reached such heights as to be indifferent not only to his own sufferings, but to being a cause of suffering to others? Perhaps Marcus Aurelius had attained to this; Coralie Mansoni, by the way, seemed most blessedly to have been born into it. To me it was a stone of stumbling. Pride came to me with insidious aid and admired while I talked of Clotho; ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... line; rain throws over the range a gauze veil of added softness; a mist makes them more wonderful, unreal, romantic; snow brings them to one's doors. At sunrise they are magical, a background for Malory; at sunset they are the lovely home of the serenest thoughts, a spectacle for Marcus Aurelius. Their combes, or hollows, are then filled with purple shadow cast by the sinking sun, while the summits and ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... it," she said. "Cherub angels!" and as she spoke she looked up into the ugly face of Marcus Aurelius; for they were standing at the moment under the figure of the great horseman on the Campidoglio. "I have seen them, and they are the children of innocence. If all the blood of all the Howards ran in their veins it could not make ...
— Mrs. General Talboys • Anthony Trollope
... for the company of and conversation with learned and witty men. William Chillingworth (author of the Religion of Protestants), Joh. Earle,[FB] Charles Gataker (son of Thomas Gataker [the Editor of Marcus Aurelius] and Anthony Wood thinks Chaplain to Lord Falkland); Thomas Triplet, a very witty man of Christ Church; Hugh Cressey, and others.[FC] Cressey wrote a number of theological works, and in one of them occurs the testimony to Earle ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... by outings down the river to Greenwich, by seats at the theatre or at state shows and pageants, to mitigate the rigours of school. Had it occurred to Oliver Vyell in later life to set down his "Reflections" in the style of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, he might have begun them in some such words as these: "From my mother, Lady Jane Vyell, I learned to be proud of good birth, to esteem myself a gentleman, and to regulate my actions by a code proper to my station in life. ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... sitting had somehow a different look to the rest. Old books and new, white vellum and card-board, were herded together without any apparent order, and with no respect of bindings. Here a splendid morocco "Novum Organum" was pushed in beside a cheap and much worn edition of Marcus Aurelius; there Emerson and Plato and Shakespeare jostled each other on the same shelf, while, just below, "Don Quixote" was pressed into the uncongenial society of Carlyle on one side and Confucius on the other. As she pulled out one book after another, she noticed that the greater part ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... Shelley or a Theocritus up here on your prairie," she went on, "or a Marcus Aurelius in the ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... bases truth on consciousness Uncertainty of physical inquiries in his day Superiority of moral truth Happiness, Virtue, Knowledge,—the Socratic trinity The "daemon" of Socrates His idea of God and Immortality Socrates a witness and agent of God Socrates compared with Buddha and Marcus Aurelius His resemblance to Christ in life and teachings Unjust charges of his enemies His unpopularity His trial and defence His audacity His condemnation The dignity of his last hours His easy death Tardy repentance of the Athenians; statue by ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... Bismarck, and the unpopularity which beset her during my former official term at Berlin, she had been kind to me and mine. At my presentation to her in those days, at Potsdam, when she stood by the side of her husband, afterward the most beloved of emperors since Marcus Aurelius, she evidently exerted herself to make the interview pleasant to me. She talked of American art and the Colorado pictures of Moran, which she had seen and admired; of German art and the Madonna painted by Knaus for ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... accused him, and the sagacious Erasistratus introduced his mild antiphlogistic treatment in opposition to the polypharmacy and antidotal practice of his time. It is significant that the large-minded Galen should have been the physician and friend of the imperial philosopher Marcus Aurelius. The Arabs gave laws in various branches of knowledge to those whom their arms had invaded, or the terror of their spreading dominion had reached, and the point from which they started was, as Humboldt acknowledges, ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... illusions left about himself. Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed much:-surely that may be his epitaph, of which he need not be ashamed, nor will he complain at the summons which calls a defeated soldier from the field; defeated, ay, if he were Paul or Marcus Aurelius!—but if there is still one inch of fight in his old spirit, undishonoured. The faith which sustained him in his lifelong blindness and lifelong disappointment will scarce even be required in this last ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... us by the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who adds, "In truth, we ought not to pray at all, or we ought to pray in ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... hip, which makes him a little uncertain how his hind legs are moving. He and Muldoon had been hauling gravel all the week for our new road. The Deacon you know already. Last of all, and eating something, was our faithful Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, the black buggy-horse, who had seen us through every state of weather and road, the horse who was always standing in harness before some door or other—a philosopher with the appetite of a shark and the manners of an archbishop. Tedda Gabler ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... valor of Horatious, tens of millions are inspired by the bravery of David; where one man's life is ennobled by the art in the Parthenon, scores of millions of lives are ennobled by the art in the sanctuary: where one man's life is guided by the moral maxims of Marcus Aurelius, hundreds of millions find their law of right and their rule for action in the Bible. It is read in more than two hundred and fifty languages, by four hundred millions of people living in every clime and zone of the globe. It constitutes the only literature, the only code of law and ethics, ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... Brewster's room to meet Archie, Mr. Brewster's general idea was that fortune had smiled upon him in an almost unbelievable fashion and had presented him with a son-in-law who combined in almost equal parts the more admirable characteristics of Apollo, Sir Galahad, and Marcus Aurelius. True, he had gathered in the course of the conversation that dear Archie had no occupation and no private means; but Mr. Brewster felt that a great-souled man like Archie didn't need them. You can't have everything, and Archie, according to Lucille's account, was practically a hundred ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... find between the covers of this little book words of extraordinary potency or accents of irresistible heroism. However humiliating for my self-esteem, I must confess that the counsels of Marcus Aurelius are not for me. They are more fit for a moralist than for an artist. Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also sincerity. That complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while it delivers one into the hands of one's enemies, is as likely ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... towards such an object—present and militant as that temper is in all the crowded centres of working life throughout modern Europe? The toiler of the world as he matures may be made to love Socrates or Buddha or Marcus Aurelius. It would seem often as though he could not be made to love Jesus! Is it the Nemesis that ultimately discovers and avenges the sublimest, the least conscious departure from simplicity and verity?—is it the last and most terrible illustration ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... is rather severe: besides the physicians, astronomers, and grammarians, among whom there were some very distinguished men, there were still, under Hadrian, Suetonius, Florus, Plutarch; under the Antonines, Arrian, Pausanias, Appian, Marcus Aurelius himself, Sextus Empiricus, &c. Jurisprudence gained much by the labors of Salvius Julianus, Julius Celsus, Sex. Pomponius, Caius, and others.—G. from W. Yet where, among these, is the writer of original genius, unless, perhaps Plutarch? or even of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... that his son was being graduated from college he sat in his room at the hotel—cheap room in a mediocre hotel; he had never learned to feel at home in the rich ones—reading Marcus Aurelius. But his hand as he turned the pages trembled as the hand of a very old man. At midnight some reporters came in to ask him what he thought of his son's oration. They wanted a statement ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... whereas the position of district prefect, like that of curator of roads, was usually held by a candidate that had only passed the praetorship. The inscriptions of these consular prefects begin not earlier than the end of the reign of Marcus Aurelius, perhaps not till Commodus, and extend to the time of Macrinus, while during this whole time (a period, that is, of about forty years) all trace of the district prefects vanishes. Under these circumstances ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol VI. • Cassius Dio
... because they make his gorge rise—to Don Quixote. If he carries a Horace, Pickering's little gem, in his waistcoat pocket, and sometimes pictures that genial Roman club-man in the Savile, he has none the less an appetite for Marcus Aurelius. The bookman has a series of love affairs before he is captured and settles down, say, with his favourite novel, and even after he is a middle-aged married man he must confess to one or two book friendships which are perilous to ...
— Books and Bookmen • Ian Maclaren
... amiably, who brought up the wicked queens, the profligate mistresses of kings. These ladies were easily disposed of between the two, and the public crimes of Bloody Mary, the private misdemeanours of Faustina, wife of the pure Marcus Aurelius, were very satisfactorily classified. If the influence of women in the past accounted for every act of virtue that men had happened to achieve, it only made the matter balance properly that the influence of men should ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... across my knees; but I did it in a calm and judicial spirit, because the club was obviously no good and I was going to get another one anyway. To lose one's temper at golf is foolish. It gets you nothing, not even relief. Imitate the spirit of Marcus Aurelius. "Whatever may befall thee," says that great man in his "Meditations", "it was preordained for thee from everlasting. Nothing happens to anybody which he is not fitted by nature to bear." I like to think that this noble thought came to him after he had sliced a couple ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... demeanor shall happen to be in their view and presence, they will interpret the whole in reference to androgynation." A story is told to the same point by Guevara, in his fabulous life of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. A young Roman gentleman encountering at the foot of Mount Celion a beautiful Latin lady, who from her very cradle had been deaf and dumb, asked her in gesture what senators in her descent from the top of the hill she had met with, going up thither. ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... it could not have evolved from ape sensations the noble virtue of a Marcus Aurelius, or the loving but manly ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... night, the stiff Tudor garden with its fountains, which filled up the quadrangle, was gaily illuminated under a bright moon; and amid all the varied colour of lamps, drapery, dresses, faces, the antique heads ranged along the walls of the corridor—here Marcus Aurelius, there Trajan, there Seneca—and the marble sarcophagi which broke the line at intervals, stood in ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Solomon is the most mournful fall recorded in history, thereby showing that no intellectual power can rescue a man from the indulgence of his passions and the sins of pride and vainglory. How immeasurably superior to him in self-control was Marcus Aurelius, who had the whole world at his feet! It was women who had estranged him from allegiance to God—the princesses of idolatrous nations. Although no mention is made of his repentance, the heart of the world will not accept his final impenitence; and we infer from the book of Ecclesiastes, ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... man. But how tragically insecure was Caesar! Wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority. Caesar was very perfect, but his perfection travelled by too dangerous a road. Marcus Aurelius was the perfect man, says Renan. Yes; the great emperor was a perfect man. But how intolerable were the endless claims upon him! He staggered under the burden of the empire. He was conscious how inadequate one man was to bear the weight of that Titan and too vast orb. ...
— The Soul of Man • Oscar Wilde
... prove one to be a bad critic but not a less good and less pious man. Yet my old creed enacted an affirmative result of this historical inquiry, as a test of one's spiritual state, and ordered me to think harshly of men like Marcus Aurelius and Lessing, because they did not adopt the conclusion which the professedly uncritical have established. It possessed me with a general gloom concerning Mohammedans and Pagans, and involved the whole course of history and prospects ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... interest, as Antoun would have had the power to do; but my vanity was not hurt. It was only my curiosity which suffered, for I wanted desperately to know whether the donkey had seriously jolted the lady's spine, or whether the news that Sir M. A. Lark was Marcus Antonius, not a more obvious Marcus Aurelius, had ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... total dearth of trees and verdure, combine to give a sombre aspect to this country, which strikes one almost with dread. In almost every village are either Grecian inscriptions, columns, or other remnants of antiquity; amongst others I copied an inscription of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Here, as in Hauran, the doors ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... Stoics began to decline in the beginning of the third century A.D. A fact often used as a help in fixing the date of Sextus is his mention of Basilides the Stoic,[4] [Greek: alla kai oi stoikoi, os oi peri ton Basileiden]. This Basilides was supposed to be identical with one of the teachers of Marcus Aurelius.[5] This is accepted by Zeller in the second edition of his History of Philosophy, but not in the third for the reason that Sextus, in all the work from which this reference is taken, i.e. Math. VII.-XI., mentions no one besides Aenesidemus, who lived later ...
— Sextus Empiricus and Greek Scepticism • Mary Mills Patrick
... Christians with wax and pitch, and then set them alight as torches; this, Tiberius, the man of Capraea; this, Domitian; this, Caracalla; this, Heliogabalus; that other is Commodus, who possesses an additional claim to our respect in the horrible fact that he was the son of Marcus Aurelius; these are Czars; these, Sultans; these, Popes, among whom remark the tiger Borgia; here is Philip, called the Good, as the Furies were called the Eumenides; here is Richard III, sinister and deformed; here, with his broad face and his great paunch, Henry VIII, who, of five ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... meditations. Like Marcus Aurelius did. Why not go in for Sunday Books? Telegraph to Popgood and Groolly (my publishers, who have been in treaty with me for two years about Typ. Developments), ...
— Happy-Thought Hall • F. C. Burnand
... titled donkey, some lauded lubber, in whose honor he could print a few well-turned lies on the fly-leaf. If you wish to know the degradation of literature, read the dedication written by Lord Bacon to James I., in which he puts him beyond all kings, living and dead—beyond Caesar and Marcus Aurelius. In those days the literary man was a servant, a hack. He lived in Grub Street. He was only one degree above the sturdy vagrant and the escaped convict. Why was this? He had no money and he lived in an age ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... was as true as his thoughts were noble, but he had fallen on an evil age, which needed for its reform, not a new philosophy, but a new inspiration of divine life. This steady current downward darkened the pure soul of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, of whom Niebuhr says,[304] "If there is any sublime human virtue, it is his." He adds: "He was certainly the noblest character of his time; and I know no other man who combined such unaffected kindness, mildness, and humility with ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... The historical? What finer history than Titian's Paul III., Raphael's Leo X., Albert Duerer's head of himself? What finer than the Pericles, the Marcus Aurelius of the Capitol, the Demosthenes of the Vatican, Chantrey's Scott, Houdon's Voltaire, Powers's Jackson?—Heroic? what more heroic than the Lateran Sophocles, the Venetian Colleoni, or Rauch's statue of Frederick the Great?—Poetical? ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... statesman! Well, then, I should be hanged, perhaps, which is a consideration; then Madame de Maintenon would be regent of France! What a joke! What then, indeed! To think that a philosophic prince should utter such naivetes! Oh, Marcus Aurelius! was it not he who said, 'Populos esse demum felices si reges philosophi forent, aut philosophi reges?' Here is ...
— The Regent's Daughter • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... themselves, instead of abjectly understudying some one else! Of course, there are supers on the stage of life as on the real stage. It is proper that these should dress and speak and think alike. These one courteously excepts from the generalisation that the composer of the play, as Marcus Aurelius calls him, has given each of us a certain part to play—that part simply oneself: a part, need one say, by no means as easy as it seems; a part most difficult to study, and requiring daily rehearsal. So difficult is ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... in the possession of the count de Gubernatis, who has a country-house upon the spot. The other, found near the same place, is in praise of the praeses Marcus Aurelius Masculus. ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... Laertius[822] and Cicero[823] for an insight into their system. The Hymn of Cleanthes sheds some light on their Theology, and their moral principles are exhibited in "The Fragments" of Epictetus, and "The Life and Meditations" of Marcus Aurelius. ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... The essayists of antiquity were the most vagariously garrulous people imaginable. There was not one of them who, to our small acquaintance with them, kept to his proposition or ended anywhere in sight of it. Aristotle, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Plutarch, they talk of anything but the matter in hand, after mentioning it; and when you come down to the moderns, for instance, to such a modern as Montaigne, you find him wandering all over the place. He has no sooner stated his subject than he begins to ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... hand, The Magister Artium et Physices Goes forth from the school like a lord of the land. And now, as we have the whole morning before us, Let us go in, if you make no objection, And listen awhile to a learned prelection On Marcus Aurelius Cassioderus. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... melancholy which must have come to Psyche when she lost her god. In the corners of the mouth, in the droop of the eyelids, in the moulding of the chin, you may see that rarity—beauty and intellect in one—and with it the heightening shadow of an eternal regret. Before her Marcus Aurelius, her husband, stands, decked with the purple, with all the splendor of the imperator, his beard in overlapping curls, his questioning eyes dilated. Beyond is her daughter, Lucille, less fair than the mother, a healthy girl of the dairymaid type. Near by is the son, Commodus. Across the hall is ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... ounce of what she eats, but she won't starve you; and I am glad to think, Sheila, that you have brought a remarkably good and sensible appetite with you from the Lewis. Oh, by the way, take care you say nothing against Marcus Aurelius." ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... among us who would deprive himself, like Julian, Antoninus and Marcus Aurelius, of all the delicacies of our flabby and effeminate lives? who would sleep as they did on the ground? who would impose on himself their frugality? who, as they did, would march barefoot and bareheaded at the head of the armies, exposed now to the heat of the sun, now to the hoar-frost? ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... resemblances; but it will be more convenient to do this when we have also examined the doctrines of those two other great representatives of spiritual enlightenment in Pagan souls, Epictetus the slave and Marcus Aurelius ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... special dishes or drinks. Another would be impressed by his library with its teak panelling, by the books which he read and the questions which he asked, by his love for Gibbon and Plutarch, by his interest in Marcus Aurelius and other writers on high themes. Others again tell us of his relations to his fellow-men, how recklessly generous he was to young and old, to British and Dutch, and how his generosity was abused: how his ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... its happy accidents. Despotism has its happy accidents. Yet we are not disposed to abolish all constitutional checks, to place an absolute master over us, and to take our chance whether he may be a Caligula or a Marcus Aurelius. In whatever way the House of Commons may be chosen, some able men will be chosen in that way who would not be chosen in any other way. If there were a law that the hundred tallest men in England should ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... for in the one we can grumble, and from the other learn more of our neighbors than we care to know. John Smith's autobiography is commonly John Smith's design for an equestrian statue of himself,—very fine, certainly, and as much like him as like Marcus Aurelius. Saint Augustine, kneeling to confess, has an eye to the picturesque, and does it in pontificalibus, resolved that Domina Grundy shall think all the better of him. Rousseau cries, "I will bare my heart to you!" and, throwing open his waistcoat, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... glad to escape from this turmoil to the calmer atmosphere of the philosophical and literary clock department. For persons with a taste for antique moralizing, the sayings of Plato, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius had here, so to speak, been set to time. Modern wisdom was represented by a row of clocks surmounted by the heads of famous maxim-makers, from Rochefoucauld to Josh Billings. As for the literary clocks, ...
— With The Eyes Shut - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... Marcus Aurelius, must have cut this road through the rocks about the year 173 A.D. But there is another inscription higher up, with arrow-headed characters and several other tablets. They are Assyrian and Egyptian. One of the Assyrian tablets was cut by Sennacherib ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup
... were two statues of Roman workmanship, supposed to be those of Marcus Aurelius and Severus, ancient, but evidently of ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... to such writings as these for moral dignity or moral energy. They have no place in that nobler literature, from Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius downwards, which lights up the young soul with generous aims, and fires it with the love of all excellence. Yet the most heroic cannot do without a dose of circumspection. The counsels of old Polonius to Laertes are less sublime than Hamlet's soliloquy, but they have their place. Bacon's ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... behaving themselves according to their accustomed habits, the best of them would be fortunate if they got there before they were tarred and feathered by an outraged public. Socrates, Seneca, and the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, form the stock specimens trotted out of the stables of heathen morality, for the admiration and reverence of Christians in this nineteenth century. But it has been well remarked of Socrates, that no American lady would live with him a year ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... It must be remembered that no thinker had any means of knowing how near to the end of his cycle the present hour might be. The most influential school of the later Greek age, the Stoics, adopted the theory of cycles, and the natural psychological effect of the theory is vividly reflected in Marcus Aurelius, who frequently dwells on it in his Meditations. "The rational soul," he says, "wanders round the whole world and through the encompassing void, and gazes into infinite time, and considers the periodic destructions and rebirths of the universe, and reflects that ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... that Caesar was evolved from the currents in the air about the Roman Capitol, that Marcus Aurelius was a blend of Plato and Cleanthes, Charlemagne a graft of Frankish blood on Gallic soil, William I. a rill from Rollo filtered in Neustrian fields, Hildebrand a flame from the altar of the mediaeval church, Barbarossa a plant grown to masterdom in German ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... literature best it seems unreasonably well equipped with these inverted Midases—though the fact that all Anglo-American writing during the last century has been so exclusively of the middle classes, by the middle classes and for the middle classes must count for something. Still Rome had her Marcus Aurelius, and we may be sure that platitudes would have obscured the slanting sides of the pyramids had stone-cutting in the reign of Cheops been as disastrously easy as is printing to-day. The addition of the typewriter to the printing-press has given a new and horrible impetus to the spread of half-baked ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... pestilence raged in Rome at this time, but it is unlikely that Galen would have deserted his patients for that reason. Probably he disliked Rome, and longed for his native place. He had been in Pergamos only a very short time when he was summoned to attend the Emperors Marcus Aurelius and L. Verus in Venetia. The latter died of apoplexy on his way home to Rome, and Galen followed Marcus Aurelius to the capital. The Emperor soon thereafter set out to prosecute the war on the Danube, and Galen was allowed to remain in Rome, as he had stated that such was the will of AEsculapius. ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... in a palace, life may be led well! So spake the imperial sage, purest of men, Marcus Aurelius. But the stifling den Of common ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... Athens. The brave Sabinus made an attempt to shake off the Roman yoke, and his virtuous and heroic wife, by her devotion, shines among the heroines of her country. (See Thierry's "Histoire des Gaulois.") Besancon was made capital of Sequania, and embellished, under the reign of Marcus Aurelius with amphitheatre, forum, triumphal arch, theatre, &c. Christianity made its first appearance in the country. Two emissaries of Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, suffered martyrdom in the Theatre of Besancon, 212 A.D. Sequania, including ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... had been of knightly rank, and in the reign of Marcus Aurelius he had been in the service of Avidius Cassius, his fellow-countryman, the illustrious governor of Asia as 'procurator ab epistolis'. As holding this high post, he found himself involved in the conspiracy of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Antoninus Pius), and presented him as his successor to the Senators assembled around his bed. At the same time he obliged him to adopt L. Commodus Verus, the son of the former Verus, and also M. Annius Verus, the future Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Ill health seems now to have fatally affected the mind and disposition of Hadrian. He became morose and cruel. He put many eminent nobles to death, and is said to have sunk into debauchery at his Tiburtine ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... Thus the historian sums up the conditions in Rome in the days of the good emperor, Marcus Aurelius. By this he meant that while population and wealth were increasing, manhood had failed. There were men enough in the streets, men enough in the camps, menial laborers enough and idlers enough, but of good soldiers there were too few. For the business of the state, which in those days was ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... dignity to the Senate, and visited in person nearly all the provinces of his empire, impartially administered justice, magnificently patronized art, and encouraged the loftiest form of Greek philosophy. Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius set, in their own lives, examples of the sternest virtue, although they were deceived in the character of those to whom they delegated their powers, and were even ruled by unworthy favorites. Marcus Aurelius was, after all, the finest character of antiquity who was intrusted ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... these absurd dogmas, the offspring of fear and error, whose influence on the human mind has been so steadily destructive, will be known only to be despised.... It will not be long before the religion of Socrates, of Marcus Aurelius and Cicero will be the religion of ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine |
