100 Things I Learned in 10 Years and 100 Reads of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations

Ryan Holiday frames Meditations as a book that kept changing with repeated reading. He says it shaped his habits, his work, and his way of handling frustration, success, loss, and public opinion, while also pushing him to balance reading with action.

Reading notes

#

• The book’s opening passages helped him as a lazy college student by pushing him to get out of bed and seize the day.
• Later he preferred the line about seeking tranquility by doing less.
• He marked the idea that life can only be ruined if character is ruined.
• Gregory Hays’s introduction led him to the Stoic disciplines of perception, action, and will.
• He connects Marcus with other readers like Alexander Pope, Goethe, and William Alexander Percy.
• He reads Marcus’s comments on doctors, plotters, and strategists as a reminder that cleverness does not last.
• He takes “embrace and resist our nature” to mean strengthening what is good and fighting what is selfish or petty.
• He uses Marcus’s warning about other people’s recognition to reject the outer scorecard.
• He applies the passage on sparring to personal conflict by noting harm and moving on without hatred.
• He says Meditations teaches that mastering life matters more than mastering reading and writing.
• The line about loving ourselves more than others but caring more about their opinion hit him hard during the fallout from a book snub.
• He remembers mortality reminders like “You could leave life right now” as early and important lessons.
• He highlights the morning warning about dealing with meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly people.
• He values the advice to accept without arrogance and let go without attachment.
• He says philosophy is medicine, not an academic subject.
• He notices stillness in Marcus and sees it as a Stoic goal.
• He treats Book Nine’s focus on judgment, action, and acceptance as a compact summary of Stoicism.
• He says buying the Hays translation mattered because a better translation can change the reading experience.
• He likes Marcus’s phrase “the clacking of tongues” for public praise.
• He notes that injustice can lie in what you fail to do.
• He values the contrast between the boxer and the fencer for how wisdom should be owned, not merely picked up.
• He uses Marcus’s instruction to winnow thoughts as a test of whether thought has become too scattered.
• He reads each role as a possible place to practice philosophy.
• He sees old copies of Meditations as reminders of mortality and of how future readers may do the same with his own books.
• He thinks the receipt in his wife’s copy of the book marks an early connection between them.
• He connects rereading Marcus with Bill Clinton’s habit of yearly rereading.
• He treats Marcus’s life under absolute power as evidence that discipline can resist corruption.
• He reads the warning not to await Plato’s Republic as advice to work with reality as it is.
• He notes that Meditations was originally written to himself, not for an audience.
• He says honesty, respect, and straightforwardness should be defaults, not prefaced virtues.
• He reads the obstacle passages as proof that bad situations still leave room for virtue.
• He sees the book as a journal of daily self-correction rather than abstraction.
• He takes Brodsky’s line that if Meditations is antiquity, we are the ruins as a comment on decline.
• He uses Marcus’s rhetorical exercise about shameless people to get over frustrating encounters.
• He says reading the same book repeatedly reveals it in other books and places.
• He practices Marcus’s contemptuous expressions to strip away prestige from luxury and status objects.
• He values the short lines that call for dropping misperceptions and staying in the present.
• He says translation is more flexible than he first assumed.
• He credits Hadot with clarifying the idea of turning obstacles upside down.
• He connects Marcus’s repeated focus on the passage of time with the fame that fades from emperors and readers alike.
• He learned Heraclitus through Marcus and kept using the river quote.
• He moved from Marcus to Epictetus and Seneca and sees himself as still early in that journey.
• He values the survival of Marcus’s journal and letters as an accident of history.
• He connects the logos to Frankl’s logotherapy and to the dog-and-cart analogy.
• He says self-criticism in Marcus is constructive, not self-destruction.
• He used the passage about the rude person beside him on a plane to let go of anger.
• He keeps a marble bust of Marcus on his desk and 3D printed busts in his library as physical reminders.
• He rejects the claim that Marcus wrote under opium and says the out-of-body perspective is a Stoic exercise.
• He adds his own standards to Marcus’s list of upright, modest, straightforward, sane, cooperative, and disinterested traits.
• He sees revenge as best refused by refusing to act like the person who wronged you.
• He notices how translation choices shape meaning, including the line about wanting things so passionately.
• He reads Marcus’s warning about imperialization as a warning against being corrupted by office.
• He treats the monkey line as evidence of Marcus’s knowledge of the world around him.
• He points to Marcus appointing Lucius Verus co-emperor as a sign of magnanimity.
• He likes the image of gaining nothing by going up and losing nothing by coming back down.
• He reads the warning not to complain about public life as a reminder that chosen roles come with duties.
• He values Marcus’s habit of reading carefully and not agreeing too quickly.
• He says he learned Stoicism from teachers who pointed him to books, just as Marcus learned from Rusticus.
• He connects Marcus’s repeated “don’t complain” posture to a simple discipline of restraint.
• He notes the Stoic focus on self-talk and on thoughts shaping character.
• He uses the test of whether a private act would embarrass you if exposed to judge behavior.
• He takes Marcus’s claim that if one person did it, it is humanly possible as encouragement.
• He treats gratitude as an antidote to jealousy.
• He repeats Marcus’s warning that anger and grief only deepen bad situations.
• He keeps returning to the present moment and to the job in front of him.
• He ends by saying Marcus finally pushes the reader to stop wandering, stop collecting advice, and act so that words become works.