Q0040

Marcus Aurelius

A verified English rendering from the curated archive.

English

Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is in your power, be good.
Thinker Marcus Aurelius
School Stoicism
Source Meditations IV.17
Theme Philosophy
Another quotation More from this thinker

Source context

This English passage is associated with Meditations IV.17, within the tradition of Stoicism. The wording below is a verified rendering prepared for careful reading rather than a claim of unique translation authority.

A short reading

Read in the register of philosophy, the sentence asks the reader to test an assumption rather than to collect a slogan. In Marcus Aurelius's wider work, similar claims are usually offered as prompts for judgment: what would have to be true for the sentence to hold, and what would follow if it did?

How to cite this quotation

APA: Marcus Aurelius. (n.d.). Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is in your power, be good. In Philosophy Blind Box. https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0040

MLA: Marcus Aurelius. “Do not act as if you were going….” Philosophy Blind Box, https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0040.

Chicago: Marcus Aurelius. “Do not act as if you were going….” Philosophy Blind Box. Accessed 2026. https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0040.

Same thinker

More from Marcus Aurelius

  1. Your mind will take the shape of what you frequently hold in thought, for the soul is dyed by its impressions.
  2. The universe is change; life is opinion.
  3. Begin the morning by saying to yourself: Today I shall meet the busybody, the ungrateful, the arrogant…
  4. If you are distressed by anything external, it is not the thing itself that disturbs you, but your own judgment about it.
  5. What is not good for the hive is not good for the bee.

All quotations by Marcus Aurelius

Same theme

More on philosophy

  1. It is through wonder that people both now begin and first began to philosophize.
  2. A person's character is their destiny.
  3. What is opposed brings together; from what differs comes the finest harmony.
  4. Death is nothing to us: for what has been dissolved has no sensation, and what has no sensation is nothing to us.
  5. Pleasure is the beginning and end of the happy life — not the pleasures of profligates, but freedom from pain in the body and from disturbance in the soul.

Browse the philosophy theme