“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
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Marcus Aurelius400
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
“Time has no meaning,
Love will endure..”
Jude Deveraux (1947) American writer
“Everything that man esteems
Endures a moment or a day.”
W.B. Yeats book The Tower
II, st. 2 <br class="br">The Tower (1928), Two Songs From a Play http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1741/ <br class="br">Context: Everything that man esteems<br>Endures a moment or a day.<br>Love’s pleasure drives his love away,<br>The painter’s brush consumes his dreams.
“Everything is relative in this world, where change alone endures.”
Leon Trotsky (1879–1940) Marxist revolutionary from Russia
“Nothing happens to anyone that he can't endure. (Hays translation)”
Marcus Aurelius book Meditations
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
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), V : The Rationalist Dissolution
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) German Lutheran pastor, theologian, dissident anti-Nazi
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.