“You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realize this and you will find strength.”

Investigating the source of the the quote

This is my absolute favorite quote.

Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius left us his Meditations, a deeply personal journal and one of the central philosophical texts. It says so much about Stoicism, the ancient method for coming to terms with what you can’t control.

Yet he likely never wrote this particular line. It’s a bit of a mystery, likely a victim of the kind of cumulative misattribution that happens from time to time. I’ve even seen it attributed to Einstein.

I opened my book with the quote only to find out it probably doesn’t exist. Since then, I’ve tried to track it down. Reddit fell short in terms of conclusiveness. Google turns up little. And goodreads lists it, but doesn’t attribute it, which does us little good.

A little detective work turns up three possibilities for linking the popular quote to a specific passage in the Meditations:

B ook V.1

Multiple redditors pointed to the opening passage of Book V, but I found this to be a dead end.

Many of the quotes read like a collage of various phrases from disparate parts of the Meditations. This is not anyone’s fault, but speaks to how misattribution spreads and are sometimes even incorporated into translations which, without proper documentation, become ‘accurate’. There is the possibility that another translation of V.1 reads differently. But it seems more likely that we’re looking in the wrong part of the book.

What do we actually have in V.1? The Hays translation of the passage paints a different, although still lovely, picture:

At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work — as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for — the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm? — But it’s nicer here. . . . So you were born to feel “nice”? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands?

Aurelius discusses human nature — doing what your nature demands of you as a rational being — and how to motivate yourself in the morning, but we don’t have any of the focus on internal versus external events that the quote we’re looking for has.

No such luck at getting to the quote we need, at least in Book V.1.

Book V.16

Another possibility, a bit further in Book V at passage 16:

The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts

Other translations take the last bit as ‘your soul becomes dyed by the color of your thoughts’, which draws a parallel to the delightfully disgusting depiction of the royal robes dyed purple with shellfish blood, to say nothing of the embarrassingly physical nature of sexual intercourse (VI.13).

Back to the task at hand. V.16 has the bent on mental discipline, as well as thought as an influence on character.

The element of control — here implied through ‘the things you think about’, something that is always within our control to direct — maps cleanly onto the usage of the word ‘power’ in the original quote i.e. ‘you have power over your mind’.

It lacks, however, the important distinction of control between internal and external events, which is essentially the crux of the original quote: inner strength stems from fully realizing and assenting to this distinction.

Book IV.3

That things have no hold on the soul. They stand there unmoving, outside it. Disturbance comes only from within — from our own perceptions.

That things, meaning all external things, need not affect you at all. All things are external to you, to your soul, and all that matters is internal. Disturbance can only intrude if you allow it, if you choose to perceive the world as such. And to experience a complete lack of this disturbance is what it means to find true inner strength.

The original, popularized faux-translation once again:

You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realize this and you will find strength.

This has to be it. While this translation is not an exact match, it’s safe to conclude the quote we’re looking for once stemmed from this spot in the text, some other translation of Book IV, passage 3.

It was all along, of course, but how interesting it was to figure it out!

Zachary G. Augustine

philosophyforanylife.com

*I have quoted the 2002 Hays translation.