“Blot out vain pomp; check impulse; quench appetite; keep reason under its own control.”
IX, 7
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book IX
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Marcus Aurelius 400
Emperor of Ancient Rome 121–180Related quotes

“Love is a universal migraine.
A bright stain on the vision
Blotting out reason.”
"Symptoms of Love," lines 1-3, from More Poems (1961).
Poems

"Father Severyan", in November 1916: The Red Wheel: Knot II (1984; translation 1999).
Context: At no time has the world been without war. Not in seven or ten or twenty thousand years. Neither the wisest of leaders, nor the noblest of kings, nor yet the Church — none of them has been able to stop it. And don't succumb to the facile belief that wars will be stopped by hotheaded socialists. Or that rational and just wars can be sorted out from the rest. There will always be thousands of thousands to whom even such a war will be senseless and unjustified. Quite simply, no state can live without war, that is one of the state's essential functions. … War is the price we pay for living in a state. Before you can abolish war you will have to abolish all states. But that is unthinkable until the propensity to violence and evil is rooted out of human beings. The state was created to protect us from evil. In ordinary life thousands of bad impulses, from a thousand foci of evil, move chaotically, randomly, against the vulnerable. The state is called upon to check these impulses — but it generates others of its own, still more powerful, and this time one-directional. At times it throws them all in a single direction — and that is war.

“The lintel low enough to keep out pomp and pride:
The threshold high enough to turn deceit aside.”
For the Friends at Hurstmont. The Door
Undated

“Keep your passions in check, but beware of giving your reason free rein.”
Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half Truths (1976)

“Evil, however powerful it seemed, could be undone by its own appetite.”
Source: The Thief of Always

Source: Prince Lucifer (1887), Abdiel in Act III, sc. iii; p. 80.