"Marcus Aurelius" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to classroom duties, taking up, in the history course, the life and works of Marcus Aurelius, a character for whom I have ever entertained the liveliest sentiments of regard and respect, for did he not, in an age of licentiousness and loose living, deport himself with such rectitude as to entitle him to the encomiums and the plaudits of all ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... Man, first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen," The immortal phrase was by Colonel Henry Lee, the father of General Robert E. Lee. President Adams, in response to a letter from the Senate of the United States, used the less happy phrase, "If a Trajan found a Pliny, a Marcus Aurelius can never ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer
... Italian as readily as English; French and the modern Greek with a little more difficulty; and could read in Greek, Latin, and Spanish. His books were the "Meditations" of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, and Dante's "Divine Comedy," with the "Aeneis," Ariosto, and some old Spanish romances next in order. I do not think he cared greatly for any English writers but Donne and Izaak Walton, of whose "Angler" ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... has merely and mischievously encouraged superstition.' All ghosts, brownies, lutins, are mere bugbears of children; here Maitre Chopin quotes Plato, and Philo Judaeus in the original, also Empedocles, Marcus Aurelius, Tertullian, Quintilian, Dioscorides. Perhaps Bolacre and his family suffer from nightmare. If so, a physician, not a solicitor, is their man. Or again, granting that their house is haunted, they should appeal to the clergy, ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... capitals, plinths, and other fragments disentombed from the Forum, etc. The three palaces which comprise the principal buildings of the modern Capitol were designed by Michael Angelo, and form three sides of a square. In the centre stands the noble equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius. The open side faces the modern part of Rome. The palace on the left side, or Capitoline Museum, as it is called, contains one of the finest collections of sculpture in Italy. It is quite a day's work ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... reared for the worship of himself, and, through all the ages since, the remains of one of these temples (at Angora) has remained, and inscribed upon a great stone lintel is the significant word: "To THE GOD AUGUSTUS." Near by, in the same district, is a kindred inscription, "To MARCUS AURELIUS . . . . by one most devoted to his Godhead." Nero and Domitian, fiends of blood and lust, were styled, while they lived, "GOD," and ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... taken their place in the rank of British classics. It is the highest praise that can be given to a work of this character to say that it may be placed on the bookshelf side by side with Jeremy Collier's "Marcus Aurelius," Leland's "Demosthenes," and the "Montaigne" of Charles Cotton. It embalms the genuine spirit and life of an Oriental poem in the simple yet tasteful form of English narrative. The blending of verse and prose is a happy expedient. If we may use the metaphor of Horace, we ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... eldest son to marry the daughter of Plautianus; and would often maintain Plautianus, in doing affronts to his son; and did write also in a letter to the senate, by these words: I love the man so well, as I wish he may over-live me. Now if these princes had been as a Trajan, or a Marcus Aurelius, a man might have thought that this had proceeded of an abundant goodness of nature; but being men so wise, of such strength and severity of mind, and so extreme lovers of themselves, as all these were, it proveth ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... wait for an 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
... were in German, consisting of two tiny volumes of Goethe and Schiller; Kermit's were in Portuguese; mine, all in English, included the last two volumes of Gibbon, the plays of Sophocles, More's "Utopia," Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus, the two latter lent me by a friend, Major Shipton of the regulars, our ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... its general tendency, not by happy accidents. Every form of government has 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
... the gens Cornelia, the eleven Farsuleia, and dozens of Numitoria, Pompeia, and Scribonia, all in perfect condition, as if fresh from the die. Besides these, he has some large medals of the greatest rarity; the Marcus Aurelius with his son on the reverse side, Theodora bearing the globe, and above all the Annia Faustina with Heliogabalus on the reverse side, an incomparable treasure, of which there is only one other example, and that an imperfect one, in the world—a marvel ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... an apology addressed to Marcus Aurelius (176 A.D.). In it he uses written and unwritten tradition, testing all by the Old Testament which was his only authoritative canon. He makes no reference to the Christian documents, but adduces words of Jesus with the verb "he says." ...
— The Canon of the Bible • Samuel Davidson
... "considering the way people interpret events, it might be supposed that they had given some hours of each day to the study of analysis." It is he who, two days after the 20th of June, extolled the red cap in which the head of Louis XVI. had been muffled. "That crown is as good as any other. Marcus Aurelius would not have despised it."[2208]—Such is the discernment and practical judgment of the leaders; from these one can form an opinion of the flock. It consists of novices arriving from the provinces and bringing with them the principles and prejudices of the newspaper. So remote ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... and the course of history for a hundred years previous, it is not difficult to trace the genesis of Nero's crimes to the greed of the Roman people (especially of its merchants) for conquest and plunder; and Nero was the price which they were finally called on to pay for this. Marcus Aurelius, a noble nature reared under favorable conditions for its development, became the Washington ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... in the spring of A.D. 161 by his adopted son, Marcus Aurelius, who at once associated with him in the government the other adopted son of Antoninus, Lucius Verus. Upon this, thinking that the opportunity for which he had been so long waiting had at last arrived, Volagases marched his troops suddenly ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... inclined some Jewish thinkers, to the denial of the existence of the reward. Panaetius, the founder of Roman stoicism, maintained that the soul perished with the body, and his opinion was followed by Epictetus and Cornutus. Seneca contradicted himself on the subject. Marcus Aurelius never rose beyond a vague and mournful aspiration. Those who believed in a future world believed it faintly and uncertainly, and even when they accepted it as a fact, they shrank from proposing it as a motive. The whole ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... advice, or whisper confidences. The great carved oak mantel held on the broad space above the blazing logs the graven motto, "Esse Quod Opto." The walls were lined with books from floor half-way to ceiling, and from the tops of the cases Plato, Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, and the Sage of Concord looked down with benignant wisdom. The table in the centre was covered with a methodical litter of pamphlets and magazines, and a soft light came from the fire and ...
— Polly Oliver's Problem • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... does not criticise unjustly, nor gossip about her friends. Marcus Aurelius, in his meditations, says, "A man must learn a great deal to enable him to pass a correct judgment on another man's acts." And Arthur Helps, in his essay, "On the Art of Living with Others," exclaims, "If you would be loved as a companion, ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... her most was the fact that I belonged to a union, and that I had read a good deal of political economy. Well, at Christmas time I got a box of books without any clew as to the sender, but of course I knew who sent them. They were Plato and Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus and John Stuart Mill, and books of that kind. After that she began to talk to me, right before her friends or her father, of my studies. I read at the books, at first to please her and to have something ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... when Leonardo put the question, he felt some hesitation as to the answer. Among his very numerous drawings I have not been able to find a single study from the antique, though a drawing in black chalk, at Windsor, of a man on horseback (PI. LXXIII) may perhaps be a reminiscence of the statue of Marcus Aurelius at Rome. It seems to me that the drapery in a pen and ink drawing of a bust, also at Windsor, has been borrowed from an antique model (Pl. XXX). G. G. Rossi has, I believe, correctly interpreted Leonardo's feeling towards the antique in the ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... Research 70. Long's Translation of the Thoughts of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus 72. Lyell's Geological Evidences of the Antiquity ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... short time Hadrian passed away, and Aurelius Antoninus was crowned Emperor of Rome, and Marcus Verus, aged seventeen, slim, slender and studious, took the name, Marcus Aurelius. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... Marcus Aurelius, Rome's soldier philosopher, spoke of his love for the man who "could be humorous in an agreeable way." No reader of Grant's Memoirs (one of the few truly great autobiographies ever written by a soldier) could fail to be impressed by his light touch. A ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... now, and the gospel was not yet the spring of hope it is in modern life. In our time the very enemies of the cross are living in its light, and drawing at their pleasure from the well of Christian hope. It was not yet so in that age. Brave men like Marcus Aurelius could only do their duty with hopeless courage, and worship as they might a God who seemed to refuse all answer to the great and bitter cry of mankind. If he cares for men, why does he let them perish? The less he ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... 169 until after 180. His apology, consisting of three books addressed to an otherwise unknown Autolycus, has alone been preserved of his works. Fragments attributed to him are of very doubtful authenticity. The date of the third book must be subsequent to the death of Marcus Aurelius, March 17, 180, which is mentioned. The first and second books may be somewhat earlier. The distinction made in the following between the Logos endiathetos and the Logos prophorikos was subsequently ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... circle of Lavender's friends, and doubtless in due time it reached the ears of his aunt. At all events, Mrs. Lavender sent a message to Ingram, asking him to come and see her. When he went he found the little, dry, hard-eyed woman in a terrible passion. She had forgotten all about Marcus Aurelius and the composure of a philosopher, and the effect of anger on the nervous system. She was bolstered up in bed, for she had had another bad fit, but she was brisk enough in her manner and fierce enough in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... centuries since Marcus Aurelius observed the fretful disquiet of Rome, which must have been strikingly like our fretful disquiet to-day, and proffered counsel, unheeded then as now: "Take pleasure in one thing and rest in it, passing from one social act to ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... startled frown Helene Churchill jerked back out of reach. "What's the matter with you, Rae?" she quizzed sharply, and then turning round quite casually to her book-case began to draw from the shelves one by one her beloved Marcus Aurelius, Wordsworth, Robert Browning. "Oh, I did so want to go to China," she confided irrelevantly. "But my family have just written me that they won't stand for it. So I suppose I'll have to go into tenement work here in the city instead." With a visible effort she jerked her mind back again ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... did not matter; that truth from Shakespeare, Epictetus, or Aristotle was quite as valuable as from the Scriptures. We were on common ground now. He mentioned Marcus Aurelius, the Stoics, and their blameless lives. I, still pursuing the thought ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... in Concord is evidence of his universality, not of his parochialism. He was so universal that he did not need to travel around the world to PROVE it. "I have more of God, they more of the road." "It is not worth while to go around the world to count the cats in Zanzibar." With Marcus Aurelius, if he had seen the present he had seen all, from eternity ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... a rule, elaborate compliments take the place of personal confessions; and, while Voltaire is never tired of comparing Frederick to Apollo, Alcibiades, and the youthful Marcus Aurelius, of proclaiming the rebirth of 'les talents de Virgile et les vertus d'Auguste,' or of declaring that 'Socrate ne m'est rien, c'est Frederic que j'aime,' the Crown Prince is on his side ready with an equal flow of protestations, which sometimes rise to singular ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... of the 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, ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... hard-working, conscientious 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 ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... of Roman workmanship, and seem to have come from the Roman city of Corstopitum, at Corbridge. An inscription on one of these old stones in the crypt takes us back some centuries before even Wilfrid's time, for it commemorates the Emperor Severus and his two sons, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (Caracalla) and Publius Septimius Geta, and has the name of the latter erased, as was done on all similar inscriptions throughout the Empire, by order of the inhuman Caracalla, after his murder ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry
... and renew the ideals of Greek heroism, virtue, and religious faith, so far as they seemed to have permanent ethical value. The popular mores were never touched by this effort. In fact, it is impossible for us to know whether the writings of Seneca, Plutarch, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and Pliny represent to us the real rules of life of those men, or are only a literary pose. In the Renaissance, and since then, men educated in the classics have been influenced by them ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... Charlemagne himself, going to bed with his slate under his pillow in order to practice in the watches of the night that art of writing which he never mastered; what have they in common with Julius Caesar and Marcus Aurelius and that great Julian called the Apostate? They sum up in their very persons the whole wide gulf that ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... 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 children of innocence. If all the blood of all the Howards ran in their veins it could not make ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... the winding way that leads from the Forum to the Piazza of the Campidoglio on the summit of the Capitoline Hill. They stood awhile to contemplate the bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius. The moonlight glistened upon traces of the gilding which had once covered both rider and steed; these were almost gone, but the aspect of dignity was still perfect, clothing the figure as it were with an imperial robe of light. It is the most ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 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 the ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... 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, ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... [he pats the hand of the Younger Miss Wetherell]. Couldn't have a better sign. [He smiles from one to the other.] Brain disturbance, caused by futile opposition to the inevitable, evidently abating. One page Marcus Aurelius every morning before breakfast. "Adapt thyself," says Marcus Aurelius, "to the things with which thy lot has been ...
— Fanny and the Servant Problem • Jerome K. Jerome
... occurs to show that his thoughts had yet been turned to religion. It is as free from all reference to the teachings of Christianity as the maxims of Marcus Aurelius. ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... departure from the previous Gothic style in vogue, he brought architects of eminence to Rome, and gave employment to Mino da Fiesole, the sculptor, and to Giuliano da San Gallo, the wood-carver. The arches of Titus and Septimius Severus were restored at his expense, together with the statue of Marcus Aurelius and the horses of Monte Cavallo. But Paul showed his connoisseurship more especially in the collection of gems, medals, precious stones, and cameos, accumulating rare treasures of antiquity and costly masterpieces of Italian and Flemish gold-work in his cabinets. This ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... contends that the time has now come for a total departure from the last pagan tradition. Christianity has passed its allotted time, and is now in its death-pangs. Material interests claim minute attention. All we want is the assertion of a pure, rational religion. It was a great misfortune that Marcus Aurelius did not popularize the theism which he expressed in his writings. It would not then have been possible for Constantine to establish the Christian religion, and the world would have been spared the irruption of the barbarians, and the many ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... and violence, there was a considerable growth of lofty and tender, and often impracticable, sentiments. Moralists urged men to avoid anger, to bear blows with dignity, to greet all men as brothers, even to love their enemies. Plato and Epictetus and Plutarch and Seneca and Marcus Aurelius urged these maxims as forcibly as Christ did. The Stoic religion or philosophy, which guided Emperors and lawyers, and had a very wide influence in the Roman world, was intensely and quite modernly humanitarian. Its principal ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... say that, while we can shelter ourselves from the demands that assail our physical being, no defence has been found against the bitter blasts which batter against our mental and spiritual structure—no defence, only endurance, in hope and faith and endeavour after Marcus Aurelius's "Equanimitas," and the knowledge that the higher man's mental and moral capacity the greater is his capacity for suffering.... And nobody has shown more than you do in "Psalms of the West" that sorrow is not all sorrow, but has a heavenly sacredness ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... to me once, without meaning to be 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 ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... in truth miracle and mystery, I do not know how to explain what each one knows so well; I do not know how there is developed within us that sublime state known and described under different names by Socrates, Plato, Plotinus, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, St. Paul, St. Augustine, Tauler, the author of the 'Imitation,' Shelley, Emerson, Tolstoy: but I know that such a state, which we all know by experience, merits alone the name of positive morality.... Well then, history shows that what is true of each ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... with no ornament but a statue of a monk in a niche over the door, and above that a small black flag. But in its crypt lie several of the great dead of the House of Habsburg, among them Maria Theresa and Napoleon's son, the Duke of Reichstadt. Hereabouts was a Roman camp, once, and in it the Emperor Marcus Aurelius died a thousand years before the first Habsburg ruled in Vienna, which was six hundred ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... has no more to say about his excursion in Fairyland after his return. He goes on to talk about the substitutes which people have invented for Christianity. The Inner Light theory has vitriol sprayed upon it. Marcus Aurelius, it is explained, acted according to the Inner Light. "He gets up early in the morning, just as our own aristocrats leading the Simple Life get up early in the morning; because such altruism is much easier than stopping the games in the amphitheatre or ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... Marcus Aurelius was the PHILOSOPHER of the Empire. His tastes were quiet; he was unassuming, and intent on the good of the people. His faults were amiable weaknesses; his virtues, those of a hero. His Meditations have made him ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... 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, ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... 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 cold, ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... citizen 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 ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... has given an admirable illustration of one way in which we may examine ourselves in this matter. He has grouped together a number of precepts from the writings of some of the great heathen moralists, such as Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, and then has urged the question how far we who profess to be the disciples of a loftier faith are true even to these ancient heathen ideals.[38] Perhaps, however, this is not a method of self-examination which is open to us all. But this, at least, ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... of life and urged 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 ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... Constantinople. Many of the slaves, and some of the nephews of Caesar, now know how to govern themselves, to live independently, and being unconcerned with all affairs, they enjoy boundless happiness. Many of them have revived, in their own person, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. But if it were true that virtue were for ever extinguished upon the earth, in what way would the loss of it affect my happiness, since it did not depend on me whether it existed or perished? Only ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... 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 ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... make, or whatever our behavior, carriage, or 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 ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... 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 ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... the other, and correlative, conception is that of a single society of all the human race. The equality of men, and the universality of the city of God in which they are all contained, are conceptions which were no less present to Marcus Aurelius than they were to St. Augustine. They are conceptions which made the instinctive Platonism of the mediaeval Church even more soaring than that of Plato. While the Republic of Plato had halted at the stage of a civic society, ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... a palace, life may be led well! So spake the imperial sage, purest of men, Marcus Aurelius. But the stifling den Of common life, where, ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... disadvantages under which they lived. They were really barbarians who posed as civilised people. Charlemagne and Otto the Great were called "Roman Emperors," but they had as little resemblance to a real Roman Emperor (say Augustus or Marcus Aurelius) as "King" Wumba Wumba of the upper Congo has to the highly educated rulers of Sweden or Denmark. They were savages who lived amidst glorious ruins but who did not share the benefits of the civilisation which their fathers and grandfathers had destroyed. They knew nothing. They ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... Great Tew and sometimes to Oxon, 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 ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... was born on April 20, 121 A.D. Having been adopted by Antoninus Pius, whose daughter Faustina he married, he succeeded him as emperor in 161, but freely shared the imperial throne with Lucius Verus, who also had been adopted by Pius. Marcus Aurelius reigned until his death, on March 17, 180, in almost uninterrupted conflict with rebellious provinces, and often heavily burdened with the internal troubles of Rome. But the serenity of this august mind, and his ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... made us dislike them, I mean admonitions, reprimands, and a severe exactness in restraining the passions of an imprudent and inconsiderate age, is expressly the very thing which should make us esteem and love them. Thus we see that Marcus Aurelius, one of the wisest and most illustrious emperors that Rome ever had, thanked the gods for two things especially—for his having had excellent tutors himself, and that he had found the like for ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... 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
... 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
... continued Dorothea obstinately, "that he was the best-looking, the most interesting, the cleverest, the most companionable man in the house-party, or for that matter in the universe. You don't ask the last name of Orlando, or Benedick, or Marcus Aurelius, or Albert ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... young women. Yet he finally went there himself, for the sake of an interview with the most distinguished of his admirers, the Emperor of Brazil. This magnificent monarch, who may even be called the Marcus Aurelius of modern times, openly declared that there was nothing in North America that he wished so much to see as the poet Whittier. A meeting was accordingly arranged, and no sooner had Dom Pedro caught sight of Whittier (whom he recognized from the pictures he possessed) ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... and more continuous. Before Rome fell, the Romans were evolving humanitarian and compassionate ideas quite unlike their old-time callousness. And no, it was not the influence of Christianity; we see it in the legislation of Hadrian for example, and especially in the anti-Christian Marcus Aurelius. These feeling grow up in ages unscarred by wars and human cataclysms; every war puts back their growth. The fall of Rome and the succeeding pralaya threw Europe back into ruthless barbarity. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries humanism began to grow ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... Rossini composed an opera, and Liszt was a wizard in music. At the age of sixteen Victor Hugo was known throughout France; at seventeen Mozart had made a name in Germany, and Michael Angelo was a rising star in Italy. At eighteen Marcus Aurelius was made a consul; at nineteen Byron was the "amazing genius" of his time; at twenty Raphael had finished some of his most famous paintings, Faraday was attracting the attention of his country, and two years later was admitted to the ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... Americans will not want a group, but just the fact; the portrait of Washington riding straight onward, like Marcus Aurelius, or making an address, or lifting his sword. I do not know about that,—it is a matter of feeling. This winged figure not only gives a poetic sense to the group, but a natural support and occasion for action to the horse and rider. Uncle Sam ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... 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
... 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 Andrea Verocchio ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... free from superstition and hypocrisy; a kind, just, and considerate ruler; a consummate diplomat; and a bold, original statesman, economist, and administrator. The anecdotes and sayings of Tsz-ch'an are as numerous and as practical as those about Julius Caesar or Marcus Aurelius. ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... The older chronicles provide them with what seems an unbroken line of descent from the second century, when Irenaeus preached in Lyons and Vienne. Christian fugitives from those cities during the persecution of Marcus Aurelius may, it is alleged, have taken refuge in the not distant Dauphine mountains, and have transmitted to their descendants the primitive faith they had received. But modern criticism has so seriously undermined, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... was just what the sovereign, whether called Emperor or King, allowed it to be. A self-willed and arbitrary monarch, like Caligula or Domitian, would reduce its functions to a nullity. A wise and moderate Emperor, like Trajan or Marcus Aurelius, would consult it on all important state-affairs, and, while reserving to himself both the power of initiation and that of final control, would make of it a real Council of State, a valuable member ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... the multitude—I should be sorry indeed if he had no testimonials of his merits, save such as arise from the mad and thoughtless exclamations of popular applause.' In the same gallant style (Jan. 26, 1826) he votes for Marcus Aurelius, in answer to the question whether Trajan has any equal among the Roman emperors from Augustus onwards. Another time the question was between John Hampden and Clarendon. 'Sir, I look back with pleasure to the time when we unanimously declared our disapprobation of the ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... Philosophy of three hundred and thirty pages. He also printed in the same year the second and third editions of a sermon preached by William Leechman before the Synod of Glasgow and Ayr, The Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, and editions of Cicero and Phaedrus. All these were in duodecimo or small octavo, printed in a clear readable type, that probably came from Urie's foundry. On the 31st March 1743, Robert Foulis was appointed printer to the University ...
— A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898 • Henry R. Plomer
... great many epigrams, biographies of the meanest and most meagre description, a sham philosophy which was the bastard progeny of the union between Hellas and the East? Only in Plutarch, in Lucian, in Longinus, in the Roman emperors Marcus Aurelius and Julian, in some of the Christian fathers are there any traces of good sense or originality, or any power of arousing the interest of later ages. And when new books ceased to be written, why did hosts of grammarians and interpreters flock in, who never attain to any sound notion either of grammar ...
— Phaedrus • Plato
... at which this point will be reached will vary, not only with the race and the age, but with the individual. A Marcus Aurelius in a palace of gold and marble was able to retain his simplicity and virility as completely as though he had lived in a cow-herd's hut; while on the other hand, it is quite possible for the wife of a savage chief who ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... I am critical, carping, conventional, and a tyrant, everything you say, but just because I am those things, you ought to be able to see, dear Aurora—because I am those things and know it, they are the things least to be feared in me. Do you suppose Marcus Aurelius was really calm and philosophical? Because he, on the contrary, was anxious and passionate, he wrote those maxims to try to live by. When you would go and be a negress, did I make a scene? I gnashed my teeth and ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... the ancient philosophers, Aristotle, Albertus Magnus, Plotinus, Marcus Aurelius, Pascal, Socrates, Plato, Aspasia, and others, all of whom had glimpsed, if not fully attained, cosmic consciousness, we come to a consideration of those cases in our own day and age, in which this superior consciousness has found expression through ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... 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
... early days of 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 into the faces of the Quadi, and this gave the ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... 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, their number and variety were endless. All the great authors were represented. ...
— With The Eyes Shut - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... and philosophies. Every thoughtful man born with a conscience must know a code of right and of pity to which he ought to conform; but without the motive of Christianity, without love, he may be the purest altruist and yet be as sad and as unsatisfied as Marcus Aurelius. ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... 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 Thoughts Of The Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius
... the green shining figure of Marcus Aurelius on his horse riding between her and the ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... 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 of a great axiom: ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... names are enshrined in the page of history, or whose features are preserved to us in the repositories of art, one alone seems still to haunt the Eternal City in the place and the posture most familiar to him in life. In the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, which crowns the platform of the Campidoglio, Imperial Rome lives again.... In this figure we behold an emperor, of all the line the noblest and the dearest, such as he actually appeared; we realize in one august ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... interposed to prevent the flight of their husbands and sons, but, in desperate emergencies, themselves engaged in battle. This happened on Marius's defeat of the Cimbri (hereafter to be mentioned); and Dio relates, that when Marcus Aurelius overthrew the Marcomanni, Quadi, and other German allies, the bodies of women in armor ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... the horizon; we had breakfasted below Fischeramend under a grove of birch trees roaring in the wind; and had then swept on the tearing current past Orth, Hainburg, Petronell (the old Roman Carnuntum of Marcus Aurelius), and so under the frowning heights of Theben on a spur of the Carpathians, where the March steals in quietly from the left and the frontier is ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... with ships in full sail, suggestive of upward progress of world. Similar spiral on Column of Trajan and Column of Marcus Aurelius, in Rome. ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... and earthly passion, but a service prompted by some elementary knowledge of the true God, gained by contemplation of his works in nature or from the needs of his own soul revealed in conscience. Surely there was truth and sincerity in the worship of Socrates, of Epictetus, of Marcus Aurelius. The patriarchs had knowledge of God and walked with God, long before Christ came. And Scripture itself declares that in every nation he that fears God and works righteousness is accepted by him. David Brainerd found among the American Indians a man who for ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... page of knowledge, as Grey tells us, is "rich with the spoils of time," and these are ours for the price of a theatre ticket. You may command Socrates and Marcus Aurelius to sit beside you and discourse of their choicest, hear Lincoln at Gettysburg and Pericles at Athens, storm the Bastile with Hugo, and wander through Paradise with Dante. You may explore darkest Africa with Stanley, penetrate the human heart with Shakespeare, chat with Carlyle about ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... proceed, from his ignorant Paphlagonians, to the enlisting of votaries, even among the Grecian philosophers, and men of the most eminent rank and distinction in Rome: nay, could engage the attention of that sage emperor Marcus Aurelius; so far as to make him trust the success of a military ...
— An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding • David Hume et al
... 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 ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... 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 ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... body—in dreams, for instance;—incoherently and 'madly', I grant you, but still it is mind, and much more mind than when we are awake. Now that this should not act 'separately', as well as jointly, who can pronounce? The stoics, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, call the present state 'a soul which drags a carcass,'—a heavy chain, to be sure; but all chains being material may be shaken off. How far our future life will be 'individual', or, rather, how far it will at all ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... good opinion, and he was always ready to come to her aid when she became entangled in chronological or historical difficulties, or seasoned her versions of Desmotes' speeches with reminiscences of Plato or Marcus Aurelius, or when her invention failed altogether. On such occasions, if objectors grew troublesome, the Bishop would thunder, "Brethren, I smell a heresy!" and no more was said. One minor trouble both to Prometheus and Elenko was the affection they were naturally expected to manifest ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... armour" 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 ...
— The Story of General Gordon • Jeanie Lang
... first Divi fratres, the two adoptive brethren—Lucius Commodus Verus, son to AElius Verus, who delighted much in the softer kind of learning, and was wont to call the poet Martial his Virgil; and Marcus Aurelius Antoninus: whereof the latter, who obscured his colleague and survived him long, was named the "Philosopher," who, as he excelled all the rest in learning, so he excelled them likewise in perfection of all royal virtues; insomuch as Julianus the emperor, in his book entitled Caersares, ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... intimate with something below the face-value of public men, and he used the language that Providence made for maxims. But, above all, he had the acid or tang of poison needed to make the true, the medicinal maxim. His present editor compares him with Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Bacon—great names, but gnomic philosophers rather than authors of maxims proper. Nor were the splendid figures of the eighteenth century, who wrote so eloquently about love, virtue, and humanity, real ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... 5, and we find it true. 'Tis a common disease, and almost natural to us, as [1699]Tacitus holds, to envy another man's prosperity. And 'tis in most men an incurable disease. [1700]"I have read," saith Marcus Aurelius, "Greek, Hebrew, Chaldee authors; I have consulted with many wise men for a remedy for envy, I could find none, but to renounce all happiness, and to be a wretch, and miserable for ever." 'Tis the beginning of hell in this life, and a passion not to be excused. [1701]"Every ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... read about. I can't realize that the Epistle to the Romans was written to the people who lived down there. Just back of that new building is the very spot where Romulus would have lived if he had ever existed. On those very streets Scipio Africanus walked, and Caesar and Cicero and Paul and Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus and Belisarius, and Hildebrand and Michelangelo, and at one time or another about every one you ever heard of. And how many people came to get emotions they couldn't get anywhere else! There ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... 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 it, indeed, that most people throw up the part, and join the ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... kingdom, in order that he might shape its polity to high and noble ends, educe from tragic imperfection some approach to perfection, and, in short, make the best of a bad business. We should thus have (let us say) Marcus Aurelius claiming a proconsulate under Nero, and, with very limited powers, gradually substituting order and humanity for oppression and rapine. This fairy-tale is not unlike Mr. Wells's; but I submit that it has the advantage of placing the Invisible ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer
... Capitolinus stood—owes its present picturesque scheme largely to Michael Angelo. The fascination of the long flights of steps leading from the Piazza Aracoeeli to the Capitoline, where the ancient bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius forever keeps guard, is indescribable. The historic statues of Castor and Pollux mark the portals; on either hand there are seen the Muses of ancient sculpture, the Palazzo Senatoriale and the Palazzo dei Conservatori. There is in the entire world no more ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... ([Greek: sidaeros Indikos kai stomoma]) are mentioned in the Periplus as imports into the Abyssinian ports. Ferrum Indicum appears (at least according to one reading) among the Oriental species subject to duty in the Law of Marcus Aurelius and Commodus on that matter. Salmasius notes that among surviving Greek chemical treatises there was one [Greek: peri baphaes Indikou sidaerou], "On the Tempering of Indian Steel." Edrisi says on this subject: "The Hindus ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... sense; in its emphasis upon individual responsibility and duty; above all, in its advocacy of a common humanity and its belief in the relation of each human soul to God, Roman Stoicism, as revealed in the writings of a Seneca, an Epictetus, and a Marcus Aurelius, not only showed how high Paganism at its best could reach, but proved in a measure a preparation for Christianity, with whose practical truths it ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... the sufferings, of the Christians of this period, is also referred to by Epictetus, who imputes their intrepidity to madness, or to a kind of fashion or habit; and about fifty years afterwards, by Marcus Aurelius, who ascribes it to obstinacy. "Is it possible (Epictetus asks) that a man may arrive at this temper, and become indifferent to those things from madness or from habit, as the Galileans?" "Let this preparation of the ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... attained its greatest splendor, and after him, there was a progressive decline in the arts, since the public taste was corrupted. Still successive emperors continued to adorn the city. Marcus Aurelius, the wisest and best of all the emperors, erected a column similar to that of Trajan, to represent his wars with the Germanic tribes, and this still remains; he also built a triumphal arch. Septimius Severus erected the most beautiful of the triumphal arches, of ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... are many books which we can thankfully and reverently place by the side of the Bible, as ethical and spiritual motors, there are none which any of us would think of substituting for it. The Discourses and the Manual of Epictetus, the Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius, the Dialogues of Plato, and the kindred words of wisdom of the ancients, are indeed full of inspiration to earnest natures. To dip into these writings for a few minutes, amid the duties of the day, is a soul bath, most cleansing and invigorating. The ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... moral sympathies of the human mind along with them, in abstractions separated from the good or evil condition of the state, from the quality of actions, and the character of the actors. None of us love absolute and uncontrolled monarchy; but we could not rejoice at the sufferings of a Marcus Aurelius or a Trajan, who were absolute monarchs, as we do when Nero is condemned by the Senate to be punished more majorum; nor, when that monster was obliged to fly with his wife Sporus, and to drink puddle, were men affected in the same manner as when ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... (Marcus Aurelius calls it 'the good ordering of the mind') is the keynote of technical control. Together with the principle of relaxation it provides the player with the most effective means of establishing precise and sensitive cooeperation between mental and physical processes. Muscular relaxation at ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... elsewhere in Rome, tolerated in the general destruction of ancient sculpture—like the "Wolf of the Capitol," allowed by way of heraldic sign, as in modern Siena, or like the equestrian figure of Marcus Aurelius doing duty as Charlemagne,—like those, but like very few other works of the kind, the Spinario remained, well-known and in honour, throughout the Middle Age. Stories like that of Ladas the famous runner, who died as he reached the goal in ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... the just man. The life of Epictetus 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 such conscientiousness and severity towards himself." "If ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... give 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, ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... cheek, a ring on his 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
... life went hard with me, I have betaken myself to the Stoics, and not all in vain. Marcus Aurelius has often been one of my bedside books; I have read him in the night watches, when I could not sleep for misery, and when assuredly I could have read nothing else. He did not remove my burden; his proofs ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... a Shelley or a Theocritus up here on your prairie," she went on, "or a Marcus Aurelius in ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... who do not know the Concord philosopher Emerson, and the great names of antiquity, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and Plato, have ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... contemptuous of the French, because of their manner of pronouncing classical names. What can you expect of a nation, says he, for whom Titus Livy is no better than a "tom-tit-liv-ing" in a hedge, and Marcus Aurelius, the Emperor philosopher, becomes "Mark O'Rail," a ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... the systematizer of their knowledge. Meanwhile, in the West, Rome never became a true culture-centre. The great genius of the Roman was political; the Augustan Age produced a few great historians and poets, but not a single great philosopher or creative devotee of science. Cicero, Lucian, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, give us at best a reflection of Greek philosophy. Pliny, the one world-famous name in the scientific annals of Rome, can lay claim to no higher credit than that of a marvellously industrious collector of facts—the compiler of an encyclopaedia which contains ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... these shores, looks as though it were sloughing away. Where stones fall, there they lie. In the centre of the town is a marble triumphal arch in honour of Marcus Aurelius. Age would account for much of its ruin, but not all; yet it still stands cold, haughty, austere, though decrepit, in Tripolitan mud, with mean stucco and plaster buildings about it. The arch itself is filled in, and is used as a dwelling. Its tenant is a greengrocer, ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... 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 ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... 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 all knew how real was the joy, how ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various
... the "Description of Greece." Pausanias was a Greek traveler and geographer who lived in the second century A.D.—in the time of the Roman emperors, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... (born A.D. 121, died A.D. 180) is Paley's last support, as he urges that fortitude in the face of death should arise from judgment, "and not from obstinacy, like the Christians." As no one disputes the existence of a sect called Christians when Marcus Aurelius wrote, this testimony is ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... be few 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 ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hair, and often, when she bathed, naked, he would bring water, to his lady, in a silver ewer." Several of the emperors attempted to correct these evils by executive order and legislation, Hadrian (Spartianus, Life of Hadrian, chap. 18) "he assigned separate baths for the two sexes"; Marcus Aurelius (Capitolinus, Life of Marcus Antoninus, chap. 23) "he abolished the mixed baths and restrained the loose habits of the Roman ladies and the young nobles," and Alexander Severus (Lampridius, Life of Alex. Severus, ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... 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, ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... experienced in a minor degree, by any one, in the siesta part of a Turkish bath. But this particular golden glow of the faculties is only felt at its fulness after severe and prolonged exertion in the open air. "A man ought to be seen by the gods,'' says Marcus Aurelius, "neither dissatisfied with anything, nor complaining.'' Though this does not sound at first hearing an excessive demand to make of humanity, yet the gods, I fancy, look long and often for such a sight in these unblest days of hurry. If ever seen at all, 'tis when after ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... hearty reception which teachers are giving this book has led me to desire to make still further improvements in it. Accordingly, I have added brief sketches of the Sophists, Plutarch, Marcus Aurelius, Rollin, and Jacotot. The space available is all too limited to warrant such treatment as the subjects deserve. All that can be expected is that the reader may become interested and seek further information ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... 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 ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... own manhood, actions and efforts thus ascribed as a vital part of their very origin. Hence the inspiration that gave the name of Fenian, in the late nineteenth century, to a band of men who sought to achieve by arms the freedom of Ireland. The law of the Fenian of the days of Marcus Aurelius was the law of the Fenian in the reign of Victoria—to give all—mind, body, and strength of purpose—to the defense of his country, "to speak truth and harbor no greed ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... I know 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 their birth ...
— Mrs. General Talboys • Anthony Trollope
... 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 shoulders ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... withdrew from the Catholic clergy the salaries which the State had hitherto paid. The elementary schools were laicized. The Declaration of Rights, the articles of the Constitution, and republican morality were taught instead of religion. An enthusiast declared that "the religion of Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, and Cicero would soon be the ...
— A History of Freedom of Thought • John Bagnell Bury
... creative act—a proper preliminary to his supernatural relation. Who will deny that there were men not a few among the heathen in whom Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance were highly exemplified? They knew well enough what right reason demanded. Such men as Socrates, Plato, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius had by the natural light of reason a knowledge of what their nature required of them. They had faults, great ones if you please; at the same time they knew them to be faults, and they had the natural virtues in greater ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... standard books you find about are scandalously few. The Bible, Shakespeare, John Milton; Polly has Dante; Julia has "Barclay's Apology," with ever so many marks in it; one George has "Owen Felltham," and the other is strong on Marcus Aurelius. Well, no matter about these separate things; the uniform books besides those I named, in different editions but in every house, are the "Arabian Nights" and "Robinson Crusoe." Hackmatack has the priceless first edition. Haliburton has Grandville's (the English Grandville). ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... lectures, because the students had a very poor knowledge of physics and were utterly ignorant of meteorology. They are readily carried away by the influence of the last new writers, even when they are not first-rate, but they take absolutely no interest in classics such as Shakespeare, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, or Pascal, and this inability to distinguish the great from the small betrays their ignorance of practical life more than anything. All difficult questions that have more or less a social character (for instance the migration question) they settle by studying monographs on the ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Roman minds. He felt that they could have done the deed; and he felt rightly, madman as he was. They could have done it then, if physical power and courage were all that was needed, in the days of the Allman war. They could have done it a few years before, when the Markmen fought Marcus Aurelius Antoninus; on the day when the Caesar, at the advice of his augurs, sent two lions to swim across the Danube as a test of victory; and the simple Markmen took them for big dogs, and killed them with their clubs. From that day, indeed, the Teutons began to ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... 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 |
