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Marcus Aurelius Quotes on Love

Marcus Aurelius's reflections on love, gathered here from the Meditations, give the theme a distinctly Stoic shape. Love, for Marcus, is bound up with the acceptance of one's circumstances and companions: a saying associated with him counsels accepting the things to which fate binds you and loving the people with whom fate brings you together, and doing so with all your heart. He admired in others, and sought in himself, an affection purified of turbulent emotion, to be, as he put it, free of passion and yet full of love. Consistently, he distinguished such love from the disordered love of pleasure, against which he set the virtue of temperance. Drawn from his private notes, these passages present love less as romantic feeling than as steady goodwill toward the human beings fate places alongside us, and as care free of craving.

Quotes

  • Attributed to Marcus Aurelius:

    “Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together, and do so with all your heart.”

  • “Of Fronto, to how much envy and fraud and hypocrisy the state of a tyrannous king is subject unto, and how they who are commonly called [Eupatridas Gk.], i.e. nobly born, are in some sort incapable, or void of natural affection.”

    I, 8

  • “Not to display anger or other emotions. To be free of passion and yet full of love. (Hays translation)”

    I, 9

  • “Doth perfect beauty stand in need of praise at all? Nay; no more than law, no more than truth, no more than loving kindness, nor than modesty.”

    Meditations, Book IV | IV, 20

  • “Observe always that everything is the result of a change, and get used to thinking that there is nothing Nature loves so well as to change existing forms and to make new ones like them.”

    Meditations, Book IV | IV, 36

  • “In the constitution of that rational animal I see no virtue which is opposed to justice, but I see a virtue which is opposed to love of pleasure, and that is temperance .”

    Meditations, Book VIII | VIII, 39

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