Marcus Aurelius on the Individual and the Whole

"Either an ordered universe, or a stew of mixed ingredients, yet still coherent order.  Otherwise, how could a sort of private order subsist within you, if there is disorder in the Whole?"


--Meditations, 4:27



"Suppose you had made yourself an outcast from the unity of nature—you were born a part of it, but now you have cut yourself off. Yet here lies the paradox—that it is open to you to rejoin that unity. No other part has that privilege from god, to come together again once it has been separated and cut away. Just consider the grace of god's favor to man. He has put it in man's power not to be broken off from the Whole in the first place, and also, if he has broken off, to return and grow back again, resuming his role as a member."


--Meditations, 8:34