This governs the part of a life that no circumstance can reach: what you judge, what you attend to, and how you behave when other people are difficult and the situation is not going your way. Its single claim is that nothing external injures you, only your verdict about it does, and the verdict is always in your own hands. A large share of the book is about dissolution and being forgotten, which is not a task and never turns into one, so it sits below under Hold, where each item is a position you take rather than an action you perform.

Do

Rehearse the day's difficult people before the day starts. Marcus opens by naming who he expects to meet (the busybody, the ungrateful, the arrogant, the deceitful) and deciding in advance that they act out of not knowing better, so their behavior cannot actually injure him. The point is to load the tolerance before the provocation arrives, not to summon it afterward. [Source: "Book Two: The Morning Rehearsal"]

Define the thing plainly before you react to it. The method he gives himself is specific: describe what the thing is in its substance, what it is made of, and what it dissolves back into. This is a deliberate stripping technique meant to stop a thing from acquiring emotional weight it has not earned. [Source: "Book Three: The Cost of Delay"]

Run the same stripping on whatever currently impresses you. He does it at his own dinner table: the meat is a dead fish, the expensive wine is grape juice, the imperial purple is sheep's wool dyed in shellfish blood. Outward show is what he calls a wonderful perverter of the reason, and the counter is to name the ingredients. [Source: "Book Six: Do Not Become a Caesar"]

Separate what happened from your verdict on it. Say to yourself no more than the first appearance actually reported. That someone spoke ill of you has been reported. That you have been injured has not been reported; you added it, and you can strike it out now. [Source: "Book Eight: Everyone You Outlived Also Died"]

Work a fixed list when someone wrongs you, instead of improvising. Book Eleven is unusually procedural for this text: remember people are made for one another, picture their whole life rather than the offending minute, remember nobody does wrong on purpose, remember your own faults, admit you cannot actually know their motive, remember your judgment rather than their act is what disturbs you, and remember the anger costs you more than the original act did. [Source: "Book Eleven: Nine Rules for Not Hating Anyone"]

Change what you ask for. Instead of asking not to lose the person you love, ask not to be afraid of losing them. Instead of asking to get what you want, ask to stop wanting it. The object of the request moves from the outcome, which is not yours, to the disposition, which is. [Source: "Book Nine: Praying for the Wrong Things"]

Get up and do the work your own nature is for. He argues with himself about leaving a warm bed and loses the argument: the ants and the bees and the birds do their proper work without needing to be convinced, and craftsmen exhaust themselves at arts far less important than the work of being a decent person. [Source: "Book Five: Getting Out of Bed"]

Speak to the runaway imagination directly and dismiss it. He addresses his own imagination out loud, tells it he is not angry with it, and asks it to leave the same way it came. Paired with the rule he borrows from Epicurus: pain is neither unbearable nor permanent as long as you do not add anything to it in imagination. [Source: "Book Seven: The View From Above"]

Write down, by name, who taught you what. The opening book is an inventory of roughly sixteen people and the single specific trait he took from each, ending in a long study of his adoptive father. This is the least abstract thing in the whole work and the most directly copyable: virtue arrives through particular people, so keep the list. [Source: "Book One: Debts and Lessons"]

Don't

Don't spend attention on what other people are doing or scheming. He treats this as theft from himself rather than as a social failing: every stretch of attention spent wondering about someone else's business is attention not spent on his own ruling faculty, and the opportunity to do something is simply lost. [Source: "Book Three: The Cost of Delay"]

Don't demand a world without bad actors in it. Is it possible that shameless people should not exist? It is not. So do not require the impossible. This is one of the few places he genuinely prohibits something, and what he prohibits is the expectation, because the expectation is what generates the anger. [Source: "Book Nine: Praying for the Wrong Things"]

Don't repay in kind. His formulation is that the best revenge is not to become like the person who wronged you. The gymnasium version is more practical: when a training partner scratches or headbutts you by accident, you get out of the way without suspicion or hatred, and you do not make it a grievance. [Source: "Book Six: Do Not Become a Caesar"]

Don't wait for better conditions before governing yourself. Everything he has been circling for eleven books is available immediately, he says, if he stops taking the circuitous road to it. The urgency underneath this is not that life is short but that the faculty needed to use it can fail before the body does. [Source: "Book Twelve: Everything You Wanted Is Already Available"]

Don't manage the reputation you have already lost. He admits outright that it is no longer possible for him to have lived his whole life as a philosopher, and that this is plain to others as well as to himself. Rather than spend another hour defending the record, he drops the question of how he seems and asks only how a person does the thing now. [Source: "Book Eight: Everyone You Outlived Also Died"]

Don't let self-reproach stand in for discipline. His short list of things to catch in yourself has four items, and he flags the fourth, reproaching yourself, as the worst of them, because it is a sign the better part is losing ground rather than a sign it is working. [Source: "Book Eleven: Nine Rules for Not Hating Anyone"]

Hold

Praise is not information about quality. Anything beautiful is beautiful in itself and terminates there: an emerald is not improved by being admired or damaged by being ignored, and he argues a good act works the same way. Holding this is what lets you finish work nobody will clap for. Refusing it makes an audience a precondition for doing anything well, which hands your standards to whoever happens to be watching. [Source: "Book Four: Retreat Into Yourself"]

Nothing you are currently dealing with is new. His claim is that forty years of watching human life teaches the same thing ten thousand would, because the pattern repeats: from high enough up you see assemblies, armies, farming, marriages, treaties, births and deaths all at once, and none of it is a first. Held, this drains the emergency out of a recurrence. Not held, every repetition arrives as an unprecedented event that has to be met from scratch. [Source: "Book Seven: The View From Above"]

Outliving someone is not an exemption. Book Eight makes its argument by repetition rather than by reasoning: Lucilla saw Verus die, and then Lucilla died; Antoninus saw Faustina die, and then Antoninus died; Celer saw Hadrian die, and then Celer died. He scales the same move up to the entire court of Augustus, and then to family lines that end on the epitaph "the last of his race." Holding it removes the survivor's private sense of having been passed over. Not holding it means reading every year you are still here as evidence you will go on being here. [Source: "Book Eight: Everyone You Outlived Also Died"]

Dissolution is a stage of a body's life, not an interruption of it. He puts it on the same list as being young, growing old, growing teeth and a beard and grey hair, conceiving, being pregnant, giving birth. Held, death stops being a category apart and becomes something to await the way you await any other biological event. Not held, one stage of every life stays permanently marked as an outrage, and the arithmetic of a life can never come out. [Source: "Book Nine: Praying for the Wrong Things"]

A life is complete wherever it stops. A dance or a play is ruined by being cut short, but he insists the rational soul is not built like a performance: wherever it is stopped, what was set before it is whole. Holding this takes the unfinished plan out of the reckoning of an early death. Refusing it means every life, including yours, ends as a failure to complete something, and length becomes the verdict. [Source: "Book Eleven: Nine Rules for Not Hating Anyone"]

A handful of words are yours only for as long as you keep deserving them. Good, modest, true, rational, even-tempered, magnanimous: he treats these as a working vocabulary that can lapse, and defines each one precisely enough that he can tell when it has. His image for clinging to a life after they lapse is a mauled arena fighter, wounded and bloodied, still asking to be kept alive for one more day of the same claws. What this changes is what is at stake in a longer life: the quality of what remains rather than the quantity. [Source: "Book Ten: Names You Cannot Afford to Lose"]

Fear, grief and anger are desertions, not weather. He stretches the word for a runaway to cover all three: yielding to any of them is breaking from a post, not something that merely passed through you. There is nothing to perform here, only a reclassification. Refusing it costs you the three states you are most often actually in, because leaving them filed as involuntary events puts them outside your responsibility and therefore outside your reach. [Source: "Book Ten: Names You Cannot Afford to Lose"]

What is assigned to you is treatment, not persecution. He compares hardship to a prescription from the god of healing, cold water or hard riding, disagreeable in the moment and aimed at health, and puts disease, mutilation and loss on that same footing. Held, you can accept a situation without also conceding that you earned it. Not held, every misfortune arrives as an accusation that has to be answered, and answering it consumes the attention the situation itself needs. [Source: "Book Five: Getting Out of Bed"]

Only one of your three parts is actually yours. He reduces a person to a body, a breath and an intelligence, and says only the third is genuinely his, the work being to separate that ruling faculty from what sense impressions, memory and anxiety about the future have attached to it. Holding this tells you which losses are losses. Not holding it means defending all three with the same urgency and spending yourself on the two you were never given. [Source: "Book Twelve: Everything You Wanted Is Already Available"]

The one line

Nothing outside your own judgment has the power to injure you, that judgment is the one thing always within reach, and it is on a shorter clock than you are living as though it is.