The Transience of All Things
Everything in the world is temporary; clinging to impermanent things causes suffering that accepting impermanence eliminates.
Marcus Aurelius meditated regularly on the impermanence of all things: emperors forgotten, cities ruined, philosophies abandoned. This contemplation was not pessimistic but liberating — if all things pass, only virtue (which is within one's power now) matters. Impermanence strips away false values and reveals the real.
Time is a river of vanishing moments.
Stoic impermanence parallels Buddhist anicca as a contemplative practice for liberation from attachment — convergent wisdom across traditions.
Meditations
Written about in
- What Stoicism says about death
Cities fall, reputations vanish, philosophies are abandoned. Marcus Aurelius used the thought to strip away false values rather than to sink under it.