Quote checked against the text
“Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.” — attributed to Marcus Aurelius
In substance, yes; in this wording, no. The idea is at Meditations, X, 16; George Long’s 1862 edition is quoted below, and the sentence as it circulates is not this translator’s.
In substance, yes. Book X, chapter 16 is one sentence, which Long gives in 1862 as: “No longer talk at all about the kind of man that a good man ought to be, but be such.” Neither “waste no more time” nor “arguing” is in his text; the version that circulates is a modern rewording we cannot attach to any named edition, and its second sentence, “Be one”, is a way of rendering “but be such”.
This is the rare case where the popular form and the old translation say the same thing in the same order: stop the talk, be the man. What changes is the register. Long’s “talk at all” is flatter than “waste no more time arguing”, and the chapter has no argument in it to stop; it is a bare instruction.
The chapter is in the app with its reference: Meditations, X, 16.
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 "waste no more time arguing" "what a good man should be" "but be such"
George Long, 1862 — Meditations · 12 books, 487 chapters (1 file)
"waste no more time arguing" 0 hits
"what a good man should be" 0 hits
"but be such" 1 hit
l. 6120 be, but be such.
$ node tools/seo/grep-quote.mjs --lang fr --author aurele "perds plus de temps" "sois-en un" "honnête homme ; sois-le"
Auguste Couat, 1904 — Pensées · 12 books, 487 chapters (IV, 19–20 and VII, 47–48 merged by the translator) (12 files)
"perds plus de temps" 0 hits
"sois-en un" 0 hits
"honnête homme ; sois-le" 1 hit
livre-10.txt l. 65 Ne discute pas sur ce que doit être un honnête homme ; sois-le.
Jules Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire, 1876 — Pensées · 12 books, 487 chapters — second French edition, shown beside Couat (12 files)
"perds plus de temps" 0 hits
"sois-en un" 0 hits
"honnête homme ; sois-le" 0 hitsThis sentence appears once in the list of circulating quotes we collected on 2026-08-09.
What the text says
No longer talk at all about the kind of man that a good man ought to be, but be such.
In the app
The passage of this chapter as Stoïque gives it, with its reference.
Stop talking altogether about what a good man should be; be one.
— MARCUS AURELIUS · MEDITATIONS, X, 16
After G. Long (1862), modernized
How to cite
The idea, not this wording, is at:
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, X, 16 (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.