Meditations - 03
Yes, keep on degrading貶低 yourself, soul. But soon your chance at
dignity will be gone. Everyone gets one life. Yours is almost used up,?
and instead of treating yourself with respect, you have entrusted your?
own happiness to the souls of others.
★★★
Do external things distract you? Then make time for yourself to learn
something worthwhile; stop letting yourself be pulled in all directions. But
make sure you guard against the other kind of confusion.?
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People who labor all their lives but have no purpose to?
direct every thought and impulse toward are wasting their?
time—even when hard at work.
Don’t ever forget these things:
The nature of the world.
My nature.
How I relate to the world.
What proportion of it I make up.
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That you are part of nature, and no one can prevent you from
speaking and acting in harmony with it, always.
The angry man seems to turn his back on reason out of a kind of?
pain and inner convulsion驚厥. But the man motivated by desire, who?
is mastered by pleasure, seems somehow more self-indulgent自我放縱的,
less manly剛勇的 in his sins.
Nothing is more pathetic than people who run around in circles,“delving鉆研?
into the things that lie beneath” and conducting investigations into
the souls of the people around them, never realizing that ★all you have to do
is to be attentive留心的 to the power inside you and worship it sincerely.?
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To worship it is to keep it from being muddied泥濘的 with turmoil and?
becoming aimless and dissatisfied with nature—divine and human.?
Everything has always been the same, and keeps recurring, and it
makes no difference whether you see the same things recur in a?
hundred years or two hundred, or in an infinite period;
The longest-lived and those who will die soonest lose the same
thing. ★The present is all that they can give up, since that is?
all you have, and what you do not have, you cannot lose.
Human life.
Duration: momentary. Nature: changeable. Perception: dim暗淡的. Condition
of Body: decaying衰減的. Soul: spinning around. Fortune: unpredictable.?
Lasting Fame: uncertain. Sum Up: The body and its parts are a river, the?
soul a dream and mist, life is warfare and a journey far from home,?
lasting reputation is oblivion遺忘.
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Then what can guide us?
Only philosophy.
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Which means making sure that the power within stays safe and free
from assault, superior to pleasure and pain, doing nothing randomly or
dishonestly and with imposture欺詐, not dependent on anyone else’s doing
something or not doing it.?