Meditations

Meditations is a series of personal writings by Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor 161?180 AD, setting forth his ideas on Stoic philosophy. The Meditations is divided into twelve books that chronicle different periods of Marcus's life. The style of writing that permeates the text is one that is simplified, straightforward, and perhaps reflecting Marcus's Stoic perspective on the text. A central theme to "Meditations" is to analyze your judgement of self and others and developing a cosmic perspective. As he said "You have the power to strip away many superfluous troubles located wholly in your judgement, and to possess a large room for yourself embracing in thought the whole cosmos, to consider everlasting time, to think of the rapid change in the parts of each thing, of how short it is from birth until dissolution, and how the void before birth and that after dissolution are equally infinite".