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Meditations · Book X · 17Meditations

Book X · 17

Constantly contemplate the whole of time and the whole of substance, and consider that all individual things as to substance are a grain of a fig, and as to time the turning of a gimlet.

Continually picture to thyself Time as a whole, and Substance as a whole, and every individual thing, in respect of substance, as but a fig-seed and, in respect to time, as but a twist of the drill.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations X.17. Translated by George Long (1862). The Stoic Library.