Quote checked against the text
“Death hangs over thee. While thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good.” — attributed to Marcus Aurelius
Yes. The sentence is in the text, at Meditations, IV, 17; George Long’s 1862 edition is quoted below.
Yes, word for word. Book IV, chapter 17 reads, in Long’s 1862 translation: “Do not act as if thou wert going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over thee. While thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good.” The quotation that circulates is the second and third sentence of the chapter, sometimes with the first.
This one has a number, and the older English of “thee” and “thou livest” is a sign that it was copied from a public-domain translation rather than rewritten. Modern renderings shift the words but keep the three movements: the illusion of a long life, the nearness of death, the present as the only time to be good.
The chapter is in the app with its reference: Meditations, IV, 17.
What we searched
Each fragment is searched, normalized, in every file of the editions below. The block is the search and its result, replayed at each build.
The wording was searched in Long 1862 (12 books, 487 chapters) and, in French, Couat 1904 and Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire 1876 (12 books each).
$ node tools/seo/grep-quote.mjs --lang en --author aurele "death hangs over thee" "while it is in thy power, be good"
George Long, 1862 — Meditations · 12 books, 487 chapters (1 file)
"death hangs over thee" 1 hit
l. 3138 17. Do not act as if thou wert going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over thee. While thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good.
"while it is in thy power, be good" 1 hit
l. 3139 hangs over thee. While thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good.
$ node tools/seo/grep-quote.mjs --lang fr --author aurele "vivre dix mille ans" "tant que tu vis"
Auguste Couat, 1904 — Pensées · 12 books, 487 chapters (IV, 19–20 and VII, 47–48 merged by the translator) (12 files)
"vivre dix mille ans" 1 hit
livre-04.txt l. 74 Ne fais pas comme si tu devais vivre dix mille ans. La nécessité est suspendue au dessus de toi ; tant que tu vis, tant que tu le peux encore, sois un homme de bien.
"tant que tu vis" 1 hit
livre-04.txt l. 74 Ne fais pas comme si tu devais vivre dix mille ans. La nécessité est suspendue au dessus de toi ; tant que tu vis, tant que tu le peux encore, sois un homme de bien.
Jules Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire, 1876 — Pensées · 12 books, 487 chapters — second French edition, shown beside Couat (12 files)
"vivre dix mille ans" 0 hits
"tant que tu vis" 0 hitsThis sentence appears 2 times in the list of circulating quotes we collected on 2026-08-09.
What the text says
Do not act as if thou wert going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over thee. While thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good.
In the app
The passage of this chapter as Stoïque gives it, with its reference.
Don't behave as though ten thousand years were yours. Death hangs over you. Be good while you are alive and still able.
— MARCUS AURELIUS · MEDITATIONS, IV, 17
After G. Long (1862), modernized
How to cite
The passage, in the edition quoted above:
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, IV, 17 (trans. George Long, 1862)
Other sentences checked
All sentences attributed to Marcus AureliusAll quote checks
Every passage in Stoïque carries its reference. The 166 passages of Marcus Aurelius are free in the app, each with its book and chapter.