Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor, in his Meditations:
“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own – not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural.”
I sometimes wonder whether Marcus Aurelius was as amazing a person as his writing indicates. Or was he your usual emperor-type who threw peacocks at the personnel if the bath towels weren’t pre-warmed, but was full of good thoughts.
I’m sure historians know the answer since he must have been closely tracked, being an emperor and all, but I’ve never read enough history to find out the answer.
In any case, he certainly was one extraordinary philosopher.