A Marcus Aurelius quote changed my life when I was a teenager. It was something like, "it is not dying that a man should fear, but a man should fear never having lived at all."

From that point, I pushed myself to live -- got seriously into primitive technology and wilderness survival, traveled to many parts of the world, and did many other things that I previously wasn't able to do. I just found my old copy of Meditations in a box yesterday and plan on reading it again.

Meditations easily has my highest rate of highlighted words in relation to total book length. Seems like every page (almost) has some eternal and profound in it.

I became interested in Marcus Aurelius when Hannibal admonished Agent Starling to read him.