Ahsan Ali

“ If you had a stepmother and a real mother, you would pay your respects to your stepmother, yes… but it’s your real mother you’d go home to. The court… and philosophy: Keep returning to it, to rest in its embrace. It’s all that makes the court - and you - endurable. ” - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations - Ahsan Ali

“ Even if you’re going to live three thousand more years, or ten times that, remember, you cannot lost another life than the one you’re living now, or live another one than the one you’re losing. The long amounts to the shortest. The present is the same for everyone; its loss is the same for everyone; and it should be clear that a brief instant is all that is lost. For you can’t lose either the past or the future; how could you lose what you don’t have? Remember two things: i - that everything has always been the same, and keeps recurring, and it makes no difference whether you see the same things recur in a hundred years or two hundred, or in an infinite period; ii - that the longest-lived and those who will die soonest lose the same thing. The present is all that they can give up, since that is all you have, and what you do not have, you cannot lose. ” - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations - Ahsan Ali

“ In a sense, people are out proper occupation. Our job is to do them good and put up with them. But when they obstruct our proper tasks, they become irrelevant to us - like sun, wind, animals. Our actions may be impeded by them, but there can be no impeding our intentions or our dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. ” - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations - Ahsan Ali

“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: the people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own - not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are unnatural.” - Meditations, Marcus Aurelius - Ahsan Ali

“It was probably what had made him rob the bank. Back home the idea probably never would have occurred to him. Over here different standards seemed to apply. One behaved— differently. As if nobody was looking, as if foreigners—Americans at least—could get away with anything they pleased. Virtually all tourists felt this. They had been released from the strictures placed on them inside their own societies. Their personalities seemed to change. Some merely became boorish and loud. Some committed acts formerly unthinkable.” - The Dangerous Edge by Robert Daley - Ahsan Ali