29. Blot out imagination. Check the brutal impulses of the passions. Confine your energies to the present time. Observe clearly all that happens either to yourself or to another. Divide and analyse all objects into cause and matter. Take thought for your last hour. Let another’s sin remain where the guilt lies.
30. Apply your mind to what is said. Penetrate all happenings and the causes thereof.
31. Rejoice yourself with simplicity, modesty, and indifference to all things that lie between good and bad. Love mankind, and obey God. “All things,” says someone, “go by law and order.” But what if there be naught beyond the atoms? Even if that be so, suffice it to remember that all things, save very few, are swayed by law.
32. Concerning death: If the Universe be a concourse of atoms, death is a scattering of these; if it be an ordered unity, death is an extinction or a translation to another state.
33. Concerning pain: Pain which cannot be borne brings us deliverance. Pain that lasts musts needs be bearable. The mind can abstract itself from the body, and the soul takes no hurt. As to the parts which suffer by pain, let them, if they can, make their own protest.
34. Concerning glory: Consider the understanding of men, what they shun, and what they pursue. And reflect that, as heaps of sand are driven one upon another, and the later drifts bury and hide those that went before, so, too, in life the former ages are soon buried by the next.
35. This from Plato: “‘To the man who has true grandeur of mind, and who contemplates all time and all being, can human life appear a great matter?’ ‘Impossible,’ says the other. ‘Can then such a one count death a thing of dread?’ ‘No, indeed.’”
36. It is a saying of Antisthenes, that it is the part of a king to do good and reap reproach.
37. It is a shameful thing that the countenance should obey the mind, should compose and order itself as the mind bids it, while the mind cannot compose and order itself as it wills.
38. Vain is all anger at external things
For they regard it nothing.—