Meditations - 02
The gods did all they could———through their gifts, their help,
their inspiration———to ensure that I could live as nature demands.
And if I’ve failed, ★it’s no one’s fault but mine. Because I didn’t
pay attention to what they told me———to what they taught me,
practically, step by step.
That when I became interested in philosophy I didn’t fall into the hands
of charlatans江湖骗子, and didn’t get bogged陷入 down in writing
treatises文章, or become absorbed by logic-chopping诡辩, or
preoccupied专注于 with physics.
---Book 2 ON THE RIVER GRAN, AMONG THE QUADI---
1. When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal
with today will be meddling干预的, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous,
and surly阴沉的.
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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作恶者 has a nature related to my own———not of the same blood or
birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine.
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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阻碍 each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your
back on him: these are obstructions.
★★★
3. What is divine is full of Providence★天意/天道. Even chance is not divorced
from nature, from the inweaving and enfolding包裹 of things governed by
Providence. Everything proceeds from it. And then there is necessity and
the needs of the whole world, of which you are a part.
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Whatever the nature of the whole does, and
whatever serves to maintain it, is good for every part of nature. The
world is maintained by change—in the elements and in the things they
compose构成. That should be enough for you; treat it as an axiom公理.
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Discard丢弃 your thirst for books, so that you won’t die in
bitterness, but in cheerfulness and truth, grateful
to the gods from the bottom of your heart.
5. Concentrate every minute like a Roman———like a man———on doing
what’s in front of you with precise and genuine seriousness, tenderly温和地,
willingly, with justice.
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And on freeing yourself from all other distractions.
Yes, you can———if you do everything as if it were the last thing you were
doing in your life, and stop being aimless, stop letting your emotions
override what your mind tells you, stop being hypocritical伪善的,
self-centered,irritable急躁的.
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You see how few things you have to do to
live a satisfying and reverent life? If you can manage this, that’s all
even the gods can ask of you.
