Chapter 3 volume two

1. Say to yourself at the beginning of the day: I will meet busybodies, ungrateful people, arrogant people, deceitful people, envious people and withdrawn people.They are infected with these qualities because they do not know what is good and what is evil.But I, - as one who knows the nature of good and evil, and the former as beautiful and the latter as ugly; as those who know that they have done wrong are by nature like me, we not only have the same blood and skin, but share Men of the same reason and the same divinity - can never be harmed by any of them, because no one can impose evil on me, nor can I take my anger out on these like me, Or hate them.Because we are born to cooperate, like siblings, lips and eyelids.To oppose each other, then, is against nature, and is self-seeking and self-repelling.

2. Whoever I am is just a small body, breath, and dominion.Throw away your books; distract you no more, distractions are not allowed; but as if you were dying now, despise this flesh; it's only blood, bone, and a network, a nerve, a vein and arterial structure.Look also at the breath, what kind of thing is it?Air, not always the same air, but air that is expelled and rebreathed every moment.Then the third is the dominant part: think about it this way, you are an old man; don't let this be a slave anymore, don't do anti-social sports like a puppet on a string, don't be dissatisfied with your present destiny, or avoid the future .

3. All things that come from God are full of divine providence.That which comes from fate is not divorced from nature, and is not unrelated and connected with what God commands.All things flow from it; besides, there is a necessity, which is for the good of the whole universe, of which you are a part.But what is brought about by the nature of the whole is good for each part of the nature, and helps to preserve it.But now the universe preserves its existence through the changes of various elements and the things composed of these elements.Let these principles be strong enough for you, and let them always determine your opinion.Throw away your thirst for books, and you will die not complaining, but joyously, sincerely, in heartfelt gratitude to the gods.

4. Remember that you have put these things off long enough, that you have had enough opportunities from the gods, but you have not taken advantage of them.You must now finally come to grips with the universe of which you are only a part, the stewardship of that universe of which your existence is but a passage; will be gone, and you will be gone, and never to return. 5. Think firmly at every moment, like a Roman, like a man endowed with complete and simple dignity, who goes about what he has to do with a feeling of fraternity, liberty, and justice.You have to get rid of all other thoughts.If you act every act of your life as if it were the last, barring every indifference and violent distaste for the dictates of reason, all hypocrisy, self-love, and dissatisfaction with your share, You will set yourself free.You see how little a man can live a peaceful life, and it will be like a god; for as far as the gods are concerned, they ask no more from him who pays attention to these things.

6. You have mistreated yourself, you have mistreated yourself, my soul, and you will no longer have the opportunity to honor yourself.Everyone's life is enough, but yours is drawing to a close, and your soul does not take care of itself, but entrusts your happiness to other souls. 7. Are you distracted by external things you encounter?Give time to learn new and good things and stop walking in circles.But you must also avoid being led another way.For those who are exhausted by their own activities in life are also vagabonds, who have no purpose to guide every action, and in short all their thoughts are purposeless.

8. A person who does not pay attention to what is going on in other people's minds is seldom considered unhappy, but those who do not pay attention to their own inner workings are necessarily unhappy. 9. You must always keep this in mind: what is the nature of the whole, what is my nature, how are the two related, what nature is my nature a part of a whole; A thing of nature (of which you are a part). 10. Theophilastus speaks like a true philosopher when he compares the various vices (the comparison is as one makes a comparison according to the common concepts of mankind): Crimes are more reprehensible than those provoked by anger.For the man who sins out of anger appears to have lost his mind through some pain and involuntary disease, but the man who sins out of lust is overwhelmed with pleasure, and his crimes appear to be more indulgent and more violent. cowardly.He then goes on to say, in a manner worthy of philosophy, that sins committed from pleasure are more reprehensible than sins committed from pain; into anger; the former is driven by his own impulse to do evil, is led by desire.

11. Since it is possible for you to die at this time, regulate your every action and thought accordingly.If there are gods, leaving this world is not something to be afraid of, because the gods will not make you into evil; but if they really don't exist, or they don't care about human affairs, then living in a universe without gods or providence What does Zhong mean to you?But in fact they exist, they do care about human affairs, and they give man all the means to make man have to fall into real evil.As for other evils, if there were any, the gods would not make people fall into them.It is well within a man's power not to fall into evil.How can that which does not make a man bad, make a man's life bad?But it is possible for the nature of the universe to ignore these things, but not through ignorance, nor knowledge, nor power to prevent or correct them, nor can it be that it lacks power or art to commit such a crime. A big mistake - so that good and bad things happen to the good and the evil without distinction.But surely life and death, honor and disgrace, pain and pleasure, all these things happen equally to good and evil people, and they do not make us better or worse.Therefore, these things are neither good nor evil.

12. How quickly everything disappears!In the universe it is the disappearance of the objects themselves, but in time it is the disappearance of the memory of them.Such is the nature of all sensible things, especially those that accompanies the temptation of pleasure or the horror of pain, or of vain fame spread far and wide.How worthless, contemptible, dirty, rotten, and perishable they are!All of these are things that the intellectual faculty pays attention to.The intellectual faculties also pay attention to those who make a name for their opinions and speeches; to the fact of what death is: if a man observes death itself, and breaks down all the fancies of death into its parts by the power of reflective abstraction, he will Death is regarded as nothing more than an operation of nature; and whoever fears the operation of nature is only a child.In any case, death is not only an operation of nature, but also a thing that serves the purpose of nature.The intellectual faculty also pays attention to how man approaches God, through what part of him, and when that part of him does so.

13. There is nothing more tragic than this: a man spins through everything, inquires about the things under the earth as the poet said, guesses what his neighbors are thinking, does not know that as long as he focuses on the God in his heart and sincerely worships He is enough.Devotion to the god of the heart consists in keeping the heart pure from passions and worthless thoughts, and not being dissatisfied with that which comes from gods and men.For what is from the gods is worthy of our respect for its superiority; but what is from men is due to our esteem because of our kinship with them.Sometimes they even arouse our pity to a certain degree by their ignorance of good and evil, a defect no less than that of black and white.

14. Although you plan to live for three thousand years or tens of thousands of years, you still have to remember: what anyone loses is not any other life, but the life he is living now; what anyone lives is no other life, But just the life he lost now.The longest and shortest lives thus become one.Though the past is not the same, the present is the same for all.So what is lost appears to be a simple moment.For one cannot lose the past or the future -- what can be taken away from one who has not?So you have to keep these two things in mind: one is that all things from eternity are like forms, which come in circles, whether one sees the same thing in a hundred years or in two thousand years or infinite time It is one thing for him; the second is that the longest-lived and the dying lose the same thing.Because the only thing that can be taken away from a person is the present.If it is true that one has only the present, then one cannot lose something one does not have.

15. Remember that everything is an opinion.For the words of the Cynic Manimus are evident, and their use is evident, provided that one draws from them the truthful words. 16. The human soul does destroy itself, first of all when it becomes a lump in the universe, or, so far as it is possible, a growth.For to be troubled by what happens is to detach ourselves from the nature in which the nature of all other things is contained in some part.Second, the soul destroys itself when it is repulsed or even attacked with malice by someone, as does the soul of those who are angry.Thirdly, the soul destroys itself when it is overwhelmed by pleasure or pain.Fourthly, the soul destroys itself when it plays a role and acts insincerely.Fifthly, when it lets its actions aimless, and do things without consideration and without discernment of truth, for even the smallest thing is right only when done with reference to one, and the purpose of the rational animal is Follow reason and the laws of the oldest cities and governments. 17. In human life, time is a fleeting point, entities are in flux, perception is dull, the structure of the whole body is easy to disintegrate, the soul is a vortex, the mystery of fate is insoluble, and fame is not based on wisdom judgment.In a word, everything that belongs to the body is just a torrent, what belongs to the soul is just a dream, life is a war, a sojourn as a passerby, and the reputation behind him quickly falls into the river of forgetfulness.By what then is a man guided?Only philosophy.And this consists in keeping the God in one's heart unbroken, unharmed, free from pain and pleasure, free from purposeless things, free from hypocrisy and deceit, without feeling the need for others to do or not do anything, and besides , accepting all that happened to him, all his allotted shares, whatever they may be, as if they had come from there, from where he himself came; See death as nothing but the dissolution of the elements that make up all living things.And if the elements themselves are not damaged in the constant change of a thing, why should one worry about the change and dissolution of all these elements?For death is natural, and what is natural is not evil.