“Know that a limit is set to the time of your life, and if you do not use it for your own enlightenment, it will vanish as you will vanish, and will never return”

“The present is all that one can lose, for it is the only thing one possesses, and no one loses what he does not possess”.

“You must always think of the world as a single being, with a single substance and a single soul”;

“Be like a rock: the waves break against it ceaselessly, yet it stands unmoved, and the troubled waters grow calm around it”;

“Always take the shortest road. The shortest is the road in accordance with nature: it lies in keeping to the truth in all your words and deeds”.

(From Marcus Aurelius Antoninus’s book “Meditations. Maxims”. Marcus Aurelius (121–180) was a Roman emperor of the Antonine dynasty and a philosopher.)

Marcus Aurelius was a representative of late Stoicism. Stoicism is a philosophical school that arose in Athens around 300 BC, in the early Hellenistic period, and retained influence until the end of the ancient world. Zeno of Citium is considered its founder.

Marcus Aurelius was a follower of Epictetus (50–138), the ancient Greek Stoic philosopher who was a slave in Rome and later a freedman. Epictetus founded a philosophical school at Nicopolis.

Marcus Aurelius is the last of the Five Good Emperors of the Antonine dynasty, who ruled the Roman Empire in succession: Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius. Their reigns (96–180 AD) were marked by stability and the absence of repression; the Roman Empire reached its highest, pre-sunset flowering.

Marcus Aurelius was portrayed by Alec Guinness in Anthony Mann’s “The Fall of the Roman Empire” (1964) and by Richard Harris in Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator” (2000).