Search for Marcus Aurelius and the word control and you will mostly find the same recycled one-liners — several of which he never actually wrote. This guide does something different: it collects twelve passages from Meditations that deal directly with control, quotes each one verbatim from George Long’s public-domain translation, gives the exact book and section number, and explains in plain language what each passage means and how to use it.
If you only remember one idea from this page, make it this: for Marcus Aurelius, control begins and ends with your own judgment. Events, other people and even your own body sit outside it. That single distinction organises everything below.
Why control is the central theme of Meditations
Marcus Aurelius ruled Rome from 161 to 180 CE, through plague, war on the Danube frontier and political betrayal. Meditations was his private notebook — written in Greek, addressed to himself, never intended for publication. That context matters: these are not polished maxims for an audience but reminders a man under enormous pressure wrote to keep his own mind steady.
The Stoic idea he returns to most often is what later readers call the dichotomy of control: our opinions, intentions and responses are up to us; nearly everything else is not. The twelve passages below are the places where he states that idea most clearly.
The twelve passages, explained
All quotations are verbatim from George Long’s 1862 translation, which is in the public domain — the archaic “thou” and “thy” are part of that text. Book and section numbers follow the standard numbering, so you can check every passage yourself.
1. Pain comes from your judgment, and the judgment is yours (8.47)
“If thou art pained by any external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs thee, but thy own judgment about it. And it is in thy power to wipe out this judgment now.”
Meditations 8.47, trans. George Long
This is the clearest statement of the whole doctrine. Marcus does not deny that painful things happen; he locates the disturbance in the opinion we attach to them. The practical claim is in the second sentence: because the judgment is yours, it can be revised — not someday, but “now.” This passage is also the closest genuine source of a famous quote he never wrote; see the attribution notes at the end.
2. You are allowed to have no opinion (6.52)
“It is in our power to have no opinion about a thing, and not to be disturbed in our soul; for things themselves have no natural power to form our judgments.”
Meditations 6.52, trans. George Long
Modern readers often assume Stoicism means forcing a positive interpretation onto everything. Marcus offers something easier: declining to judge at all. Not every headline, insult or delay requires a verdict from you. Opting out of an opinion is itself an exercise of control — often the most efficient one available.
3. Remove the complaint and you remove the harm (4.7)
“Take away thy opinion, and then there is taken away the complaint, ‘I have been harmed.’ Take away the complaint, ‘I have been harmed,’ and the harm is taken away.”
Meditations 4.7, trans. George Long
A two-step argument in miniature. Harm, in the Stoic sense, is damage to your character — and only your own judgments can do that. An event becomes an injury the moment you file it as one. Marcus is not asking you to pretend a loss did not happen; he is asking whether the label “I have been harmed” is doing you any good.
4. The mariner and the calm bay (12.22)
“Consider that everything is opinion, and opinion is in thy power. Take away then, when thou choosest, thy opinion, and like a mariner who has doubled the promontory, thou wilt find calm, everything stable, and a waveless bay.”
Meditations 12.22, trans. George Long
Written near the end of the book, this is the same doctrine as 8.47 but with an image attached: rounding a headland out of rough water into shelter. The storm is not abolished — it is simply no longer where you are sailing. For Marcus, dropping a judgment is not repression; it is navigation.
5. The trouble was inside all along (9.13)
“To-day I have got out of all trouble, or rather I have cast out all trouble, for it was not outside, but within and in my opinions.”
Meditations 9.13, trans. George Long
Notice the self-correction in the middle of the sentence — “or rather.” Marcus catches himself describing escape as luck and rewrites it as an action: cast out, not got out. It reads like a diary entry after a hard day, which is exactly what it probably was. The grammar itself models taking responsibility for your inner state.
6. Locate where “bad” actually lives (4.39)
“What is evil to thee does not subsist in the ruling principle of another; nor yet in any turning and mutation of thy corporeal covering. Where is it then? It is in that part of thee in which subsists the power of forming opinions about evils.”
Meditations 4.39, trans. George Long
Two candidates are ruled out: other people’s minds (“the ruling principle of another”) and your own body (“thy corporeal covering”). What remains is the faculty that forms opinions. Marcus, who suffered chronic ill health, is not being glib about bodies — he is pointing out that even illness only becomes misery through the verdict we pass on it.
7. The obstacle becomes the way (5.20)
“… the mind converts and changes every hindrance to its activity into an aid; and so that which is a hindrance is made a furtherance to an act; and that which is an obstacle on the road helps us on this road.”
Meditations 5.20, trans. George Long
You may know this passage as “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way” — that wording is Gregory Hays’s modern translation, not the original phrasing (see the notes below). The idea survives in any translation: obstacles cannot block your disposition, because your disposition can always make the obstacle its new material. A blocked plan becomes an exercise in patience, ingenuity or acceptance.
8. Either you can bear it, or it will not last (10.3)
“Everything which happens either happens in such wise as thou art formed by nature to bear it, or as thou art not formed by nature to bear it. If, then, it happens to thee in such way as thou art formed by nature to bear it, do not complain, but bear it …”
Meditations 10.3, trans. George Long
A deliberately exhaustive either/or, built to leave complaint with nowhere to stand. Marcus adds a twist directly after the quoted lines: we are in fact formed to bear far more than we assume, because opinion — again — decides what counts as endurable. The passage is less about toughness than about closing the escape hatch of self-pity.
9. Rehearse the day’s difficult people in advance (2.1)
“Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil.”
Meditations 2.1, trans. George Long
The most practical passage in the book. You cannot control how colleagues, relatives or strangers behave today — so Marcus pre-loads the expectation and, crucially, an explanation (ignorance, not malice) that keeps anger from getting a foothold. Read the rest of 2.1 and you will find the conclusion: none of them can implicate you in anything ugly without your consent.
10. Control over effort, not over comfort (5.1)
“In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present, — I am rising to the work of a human being. Why then am I dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist and for which I was brought into the world?”
Meditations 5.1, trans. George Long
An emperor arguing with his alarm clock. The comfort of staying in bed is not up to you to keep; the decision to get up and do your work is. We picked this same passage as the opener of our short Monday motivation quotes for work, because eighteen centuries later nobody has improved on it.
11. The retreat you always have with you (4.3)
“… it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself. For nowhere either with more quiet or more freedom from trouble does a man retire than into his own soul.”
Meditations 4.3, trans. George Long
The passage begins with Marcus teasing people (himself included) who dream of escaping to the countryside or the sea. Vacations depend on money, weather and calendars — all outside your control. The retreat into your own settled principles is the only one that is never fully booked. This is the ancient ancestor of every modern breathing exercise.
12. The only thing you can actually lose (2.14)
“For the present is the only thing of which a man can be deprived, if it is true that this is the only thing which he has, and that a man cannot lose a thing if he has it not.”
Meditations 2.14, trans. George Long
The endpoint of the whole argument. Past and future are not in your possession, so they cannot be taken from you; only the present moment is yours, and it is also the only place where judgment, effort and attention — everything you do control — actually operate. Control and the present tense turn out to be the same territory.
How to actually use these passages
- Morning: read 2.1 and 5.1 before checking your phone — one prepares you for people, the other for effort.
- In the moment: when something stings, run 8.47 as a question: “What exactly is the judgment here, and do I want to keep it?”
- Evening: 9.13 works as a one-line journal template: what trouble did I carry today that was “within and in my opinions”?
Frequently asked questions
Did Marcus Aurelius say “You have power over your mind — not outside events”?
Not in those words. That popular sentence does not appear in any published translation of Meditations; it is a modern paraphrase, and the closest genuine passage is 8.47, quoted above. The idea is authentically his — the wording is not.
Which translation of Meditations should I read?
George Long (1862) is accurate, free and public domain — it is what we quote here. Gregory Hays (2002) is the most readable modern version but is under copyright. If a quote you find online sounds smooth and contemporary, it is usually Hays or a paraphrase.
What is the “dichotomy of control”?
The Stoic distinction between what is up to us (judgments, intentions, responses) and what is not (events, other people, outcomes, reputation, the body). It is stated most explicitly by Epictetus, whose teaching strongly influenced Marcus Aurelius.
Sources and attribution notes
- All quotations: Marcus Aurelius, Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, translated by George Long (1862), via Project Gutenberg eBook #15877. Book and section numbers follow the standard numbering; every passage above was checked verbatim against this edition.
- “You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength” is widely shared but appears in no published translation; treat it as a paraphrase of 8.47.
- “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way” is Gregory Hays’s 2002 rendering of 5.20 (Modern Library). We quote Long’s public-domain wording instead and cite Hays here for transparency.
- How we handle quotations sitewide is described on our quote attribution and copyright page.
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