“Everything that happens is either endurable or not. If it's endurable, then endure it. Stop complaining. If it's unendurable . . . then stop complaining. Your destruction will mean its end as well.”
Hays translation
Source: Meditations (c. AD 121–180), Book X, 3
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Marcus Aurelius 400
Emperor of Ancient Rome 121–180Related quotes
“Stop complaining about the price of your gas. Be thankful your car doesn't run on bottled water.”
David A. Ridenour, "If Your Car Ran on Bottled Water, You'd be Paying $6.40 a Gallon," Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, July 1, 2006
Source: There Will Be Time (1972), Chapter 11 (p. 124)
“Everything that man esteems
Endures a moment or a day.”
II, st. 2
The Tower (1928), Two Songs From a Play http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1741/
Context: Everything that man esteems
Endures a moment or a day.
Love’s pleasure drives his love away,
The painter’s brush consumes his dreams.
“Everything is relative in this world, where change alone endures.”
“Nothing happens to anyone that he can't endure. (Hays translation)”
Nothing happens to anybody which he is not fitted by nature to bear.
Οὐδὲν οὐδενὶ συμβαίνει ὃ οὐχὶ ἐκεῖνο πέφυκε φέρειν.
V, 18
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book V
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), V : The Rationalist Dissolution
Source: Discipleship (1937), Revenge, p. 142.
Context: Jesus bluntly calls the evil person evil. If I am assailed, I am not to condone or justify aggression. Patient endurance of evil does not mean a recognition of its rights. That is sheer sentimentality, and Jesus will have nothing to do with it. The shameful assault, the deed of violence and the act of exploitation are still evil. … The very fact that the evil which assaults him is unjustifiable makes it imperative that he should not resist it, but play it out and overcome it by patiently enduring the evil person. Suffering willingly endured is stronger than evil, it spells death to evil.