Stoic Snippets 239

Remember that this which pulls the strings is the thing which is hidden within: this is the power of persuasion, this is life, this, if one may so say, is man. 

In contemplating yourself never include the vessel which surrounds you and these instruments which are attached about it. For they are like to an axe, differing only in this, that they grow to the body. 

For indeed there is no more use in these parts without the cause which moves and checks them than in the weaver's shuttle, and the writer's pen, and the driver's whip. 

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 10.38 

IMAGE: Paul Gauguin, A Man with an Axe (1891)