Meditations
- Guide

- Aug 15, 2022
- 1 min read
Updated: Jan 25, 2024
Meditations
by Marcus Aurelius (Author), Gregory Hays (Translator)

Nearly two thousand years after it was written, Meditations remains profoundly relevant for anyone seeking to lead a meaningful life.
Your ability to control your thoughts—treat it with respect. It’s all that protects your mind from false perceptions—false to your nature, and that of all rational beings.
A series of spiritual exercises filled with wisdom, practical guidance, and profound understanding of human behavior, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations remains one of the greatest works of spiritual and ethical reflection ever written. With bite-size insights and advice on everything from living in the world to coping with adversity and interacting with others, Meditations has become required reading not only for statesmen and philosophers alike, but also for generations of readers who responded to the straightforward intimacy of his style.
In Gregory Hays’s translation—the first in nearly four decades—Marcus’s thoughts speak with a new immediacy. In fresh and unencumbered English, Hays vividly conveys the spareness and compression of the original Greek text. Never before have Marcus’s insights been so directly and powerfully presented.
With an Introduction that outlines Marcus’s life and career, the essentials of Stoic doctrine, the style and construction of the Meditations, and the work’s ongoing influence, this edition makes it possible to fully rediscover the thoughts of one of the most enlightened and intelligent leaders of any era.
Buy the book at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0812968255/
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Discussion Leader
John Robinson
Discussion
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As Marcus Aurelius stated, "If you aren't careful, you can waste away your whole life reading about everything under the sun but experiencing none of it firsthand, and accomplishing even less," this book was fantastic in discussing how we take this 2000-year-old wisdom and apply it to our practical lives in practice. John did a great job leading us through the writing of the Philosopher Emporer.