Meditations is a series of personal writings by Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor 161-180 CE, setting forth his ideas on Stoic philosophy. These writings take the form of quotations varying in length from one sentence to long paragraphs. A central theme to "Meditations" is to analyze your judgment of self and others and developing a cosmic perspective. As he said "You have the power to strip away many superfluous troubles located wholly in your judgment, and to possess a large room for yourself embracing in thought the whole cosmos, to consider everlasting time, to think of the rapid change in the parts of each thing, of how short it is from birth until dissolution, and how the void before birth and that after dissolution are equally infinite.