Look within. Within is the fountain of good, and it will ever bubble up, if you will ever dig." Meditations instructs and inspires through its calm and unblinking reckoning with the elemental difficulties of human life, and its emphasis on virtue rather than pleasure as the key to inner peace. Presented here in a specially modernized version of the classic George Long translation, one of the world's most famous and influential books, Meditations, by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 121–180), outlines a philosophy of commitment to virtue above pleasure and tranquility above happiness.