These are mostly just quotes from the book. The book itself is structured as Aurelius's notes to himself, I'm not sure that it was ever meant to be reproduced, which probably made them better. He wrote these notes towards the end of his life, and he lived about 2 millennium ago. The quotes seem to get better towards the end, as he develops his voice.

"He was aware that social life must have its claims: his friends were under no obligation to join him at his table or attend his processes, and when they were detained by other engagements it made no difference to him." = speaking of his father

"so submissive, so loving, and so artless" = speaking of his wife

"being each day be telling yourself: today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness--all of them due to the offender's ignorance of what is good or evil. But for my part I have long perceived the nature of good and its nobility, the nature of evil and its meanness, and also the nature of the culprit himself, who is my brother (not in the physical sense, but as a fellow-creature similarly endowed with reasons and a share of the divine); therefore none of those things can injure me, for nobody can implicate me in what is degrading."

"Man has but one life; already thine is nearing its close, yet still hast thou no eye to thine own honour, but art staking thy happiness on the souls of other men." = happiness

"We should apprehend, too, the nature of death; and that if only it be steadily contemplated, and the fancies we associate with it be mentally dissected, it will soon come to be thought of as no more than a process of nature (and only children are scared by a natural process) -- or rather, something more than a mere process, a positive contribution to nature's well-being." = death

p. 20 "Hippocrates cured the ills of many, but himself took ill and died. The Chaldeans foretold the deaths of many, but fate caught up with them also. Alexander, Pompey, and Julius Caeser laid waste whole cities time and again, and cut down many thousands of horse and foot in battle, but the hour came when the too passed away. Heraclitus speculated endlessly on the consumption of the universe by fire, but in the end it was water that saturated his body, and he died in a dung-plaster. Democritus was destroyed by vermin; Socrates by vermin of another kind. And the moral of it all? This. You embark; you make the voyage; you reach port: step ashore, then." = death

"He confines his operations to his own concerns." "Avoid talkativeness, avoid officiousness."

"One whose chief regard is for his own mind, and for the divinity within him and the service of its goodness, will strike no poses, utter no complaints, and crave neither for solitude nor yet for a crowd."

"Letting go all else, cling to the following few truths. Remember that man lives only in the present, in this fleeting instant: all the rest of his life is either past and gone, or not yet revealed. This mortal life is a little thing, lived in a little corner of the earth; and little, too, is the longest fame to come--dependent as it is on a succession of fast-perishing little men who have no knowledge even of their own selves, much less of one long dead and gone."

"Men seek for seclusion in the wilderness, by the seashore, or in the mountains--a dream you have cherished only too fondly yourself. But such fancies are wholly unworthy of a philosopher, since at any moment you choose you can retire within yourself." = being alone

"Remember the doctrine that all rational beings are created for one another; that toleration is a part of justice; and that men are not intentional evildoers." = blame

Editor notes Hamlet (Act II, scene 2): "There's nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so."

"That men of a certain type should behave as they do is inevitable. To wish it otherwise were to wish the fig-tree would not yield its juice. In any case, remember that in a very little while both you and he will be dead, and your names will quickly be forgotten."

"Most of what we say and do is not necessary, and its omission would save both time and trouble."

"Always think of the universe as one living organism, with a single substance and a single soul; and observe how all things are submitted to the single perceptively of this one whole, all are moved by its single impulse, and all play their parts in the causation of every event that happens. Remarry the intricacy of the skein, the complexity of the web." = Buddhism, butterfly effect, oneness

"You will never be remarkable for quick-wittedness." He joins other great thinkers in that respect.

"Unless things pertain to a man, as man, they cannot properly be said to belong to him. They cannot be required of him; for his nature neither promises them, nor is perfected by them. Therefore they cannot represent his chief end in life, nor even the "good" which is the means to that end." = fight-club like line

"Reflect often upon the rapidity with which all existing things, or things coming into existence, sweep past us and are carried away."

"Think of all the totality of all Being, and what a mite of it is yours; think of all Time, and the brief fleeting instant of it that is allotted to yourself; think of Destiny, and how puny a part of it you are."

"Press on steadily, keep to the straight road in your thinking and doing, and your days will ever flow on smoothly."

his paradigm = "Either the world is a mere hotch-potch of random cohesions and dispersions, or else it is a unity of order and providence. If the former, why wish to survive in such a purposeless and chaotic confusion; why care about anything, save the manner of the ultimate return to dust; why trouble my head at all; since, do what I will, dispersion must overtake me sooner or later? But if the contrary be true, then I do reverence, I stand firmly, and I put my trust in the directing Power."

"Flux and change are for ever renewing the fabric of the universe, just as the ceaseless sweep of time is for ever renewing the face of eternity."

"What is no good for the hive is no good for me."

"Think it no shame to be helped. Your business is to do your appointed duty, like a soldier in the breach. How, then, if you are lame, and unable to scale the battlements yourself, but could do it if you had the aid of a comrade?"

"Soon you will have forgotten the world, and soon the world will have forgotten you."

"Vex not thy spirit at the course of things, they heed not thy vexation."

"Remember that the needs of a happy life are very few."

"Banish any thoughts of how you might appear to others."

"That which dies does not drop out of the world. Here it remains; and here too, therefore, it changes and is resolved into its several particles; that is, into the elements which go to form the universe and yourself. They themselves likewise undergo change, and yet from them comes no complaint."

"The whole earth is itself no more than the puniest dot." p. 96

"If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment. If the cause of the trouble lies in your own character, set about reforming your principles; who is there to hinder you? If it is the failure to take some apparently sound course of action that is vexing you, then why not take it, instead of fretting? "Because there is an insuperable obstacle in the way." In that case, do not worry; the responsibility for inaction is not yours. "But life is not worth living with this thing undone." Why then, bid life a good-humored farewell; accepting the frustration gracefully, and dying like any other man whose actions have not been inhibited." = good response to any complaint or silly worry.

"As your breathing partakes of the circumfluent air, so let your thinking partake of the circumfluent Mind. For there is a mental Force which, for him who can draw it to himself, is no less ubiquitous and all-pervading than is the atmosphere for him who can breathe it."

"A man does not sin by commission only, but often by omission."

"Work yourself hard, but not as if you were being made a victim, and not with any desire for sympathy or admiration. Desire one thing alone: that your actions or inactions alike should be worthy of a reasoning citizen." = stoicism

"For the thrown stone there is no more evil in falling that there is good in rising."

"Soon earth will cover us all. Then in time earth, too, will change; later, what issues from this change will itself in turn incessantly change, and so again will all that then takes its place, even unto the world's end. To let the mind dwell on these swiftly rolling billows of change and transformation is to know a contempt for all things mortal."

"But if you feel yourself drifting and unable to hold your course, pluck up heart and make for some quiet haven where you will be able to hold your own; or even bid farewell to life altogether, not in a passion but simply, freely, and unassumingly, with at least this one success in life to your credit, a seemingly departure from it." = more suicide

"Begin the day by asking yourself, Can the just and right conduct of another make any difference in myself? It cannot."

"Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one."

"Either you go on living here, to which custom has sufficiently seasoned you by now; or you remove elsewhere, which you do of your own free election; or you die, which means that your service is at an end. Other choice there can be none; so put a good face on it." = death, change

"Extinction, dispersal, or survival."

Phocion, Athenian general, put to death by the people, accused of treachery. Last words: "Only that I have no grudge against the Athenians."

"You have only to have done with the past altogether, commit the future to providence, and simply seek to direct the present hour aright into the paths of holiness and justice; holiness, by a loving acceptance of your apportioned lot, since Nature produced it for you and you for it: justice in your speech a frank and straightforward truthfulness, and in your acts by a respect for law and for every man's rights." = Buddhism

"How small a fraction of all the measureless infinity of time is allotted to each one of us; an instant, and it vanishes into eternity."

Last lines = "Pass on your way, then, with a smiling face, under the smile of him who bids you go."