Meditations - 03

Yes, keep on degrading贬低 yourself, soul. But soon your chance at

dignity will be gone. Everyone gets one life. Yours is almost used up, 

and instead of treating yourself with respect, you have entrusted your 

own happiness to the souls of others.

★★★

Do external things distract you? Then make time for yourself to learn

something worthwhile; stop letting yourself be pulled in all directions. But

make sure you guard against the other kind of confusion. 

-

People who labor all their lives but have no purpose to 

direct every thought and impulse toward are wasting their 

time—even when hard at work.

Don’t ever forget these things:

The nature of the world.

My nature.

How I relate to the world.

What proportion of it I make up.

-

That you are part of nature, and no one can prevent you from

speaking and acting in harmony with it, always.

The angry man seems to turn his back on reason out of a kind of 

pain and inner convulsion惊厥. But the man motivated by desire, who 

is mastered by pleasure, seems somehow more self-indulgent自我放纵的,

less manly刚勇的 in his sins.

Nothing is more pathetic than people who run around in circles,“delving钻研 

into the things that lie beneath” and conducting investigations into

the souls of the people around them, never realizing that ★all you have to do

is to be attentive留心的 to the power inside you and worship it sincerely. 

-

To worship it is to keep it from being muddied泥泞的 with turmoil and 

becoming aimless and dissatisfied with nature—divine and human. 

Everything has always been the same, and keeps recurring, and it

makes no difference whether you see the same things recur in a 

hundred years or two hundred, or in an infinite period;

The longest-lived and those who will die soonest lose the same

thing. ★The present is all that they can give up, since that is 

all you have, and what you do not have, you cannot lose.

Human life.

Duration: momentary. Nature: changeable. Perception: dim暗淡的. Condition

of Body: decaying衰减的. Soul: spinning around. Fortune: unpredictable. 

Lasting Fame: uncertain. Sum Up: The body and its parts are a river, the 

soul a dream and mist, life is warfare and a journey far from home, 

lasting reputation is oblivion遗忘.

-

Then what can guide us?

Only philosophy.

-

Which means making sure that the power within stays safe and free

from assault, superior to pleasure and pain, doing nothing randomly or

dishonestly and with imposture欺诈, not dependent on anyone else’s doing

something or not doing it.