In the morning, when you feel loth to rise, I apply the aphorism, 'I am rising for man's work.' Why make a grievance of setting about that for which I was born, and for sake of which I have been brought into the world? Is the end of my existence to lie snug in the blankets and keep warm?' — 'It is more pleasant so.' — 'Is it for pleasure you were made? not for doing, and for action? Look at the plants, the sparrows, the ants, spiders, bees, all doing their business, helping to weld the order of the world. And will you refuse man's part? and not run the way of nature's ordering?'
“I do not think altogether the worse of a book for having survived the author a generation or two. I have more confidence in the dead than the living.” — Hazlitt
4 December 2014
Rise and Shine
Marcus Aurelius, To Himself 5.1, tr. Gerald H. Rendall (London: Macmillan, 1914), p. 45: