This is a real line of the Meditations — Book 4, section 35, which Marcus Aurelius wrote in Koine Greek as a private note to himself. The memorable English wording, however, belongs to his translator: it is Maxwell Staniforth’s 1964 Penguin Classics rendering, as documented by Quote Investigator ↗. Earlier translators put the same thought very differently.
“All of us are creatures of a day; the rememberer and the remembered alike” Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 4.35, translated by Maxwell Staniforth (Penguin Classics, 1964)
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In context
Evoking the world of Marcus Aurelius — Roman emperor & Stoic philosopher. Theme: "All of us are creatures of a day; the rememberer and the remembered alike". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Minimalist
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Provenance
The source
Work
Meditations, Book 4, section 35
Written
In Koine Greek, during Marcus Aurelius's reign, c. AD 161–180
Translation
Maxwell Staniforth, Penguin Classics (Penguin Books, 1964), p. 72 — the source of this exact wording
Public-domain rendering
George Long, 1862: “Everything is only for a day, both that which remembers and that which is remembered.”
All of us are creatures of a day; the rememberer and the remembered alike.
That is the whole of Book 4, section 35 — there is no fuller context to quote, because the section is a single sentence. The wording above is Staniforth’s 1964 translation. For comparison, George Long’s public-domain 1862 version ↗ renders the same sentence as: “Everything is only for a day, both that which remembers and that which is remembered.”
c. AD 161–180 — Marcus Aurelius keeps a private notebook in Koine Greek during his reign; it survives as the twelve books of the Meditations ↗. Book 4, section 35 is a single sentence on the symmetry of being forgotten.
1958 — Ivar Lissner’s The Caesars: Might and Madness uses 7:21 and 12:21 as chapter epigraphs, each cited to its own section ↗ — 7:21 at page 199, 12:21 at page 206. Nothing is stitched together here.
1964 — Maxwell Staniforth’s Penguin Classics translation ↗ renders the same section as “All of us are creatures of a day; the rememberer and the remembered alike” — the wording that would travel. It was reprinted in The Oxford Book of Aphorisms in 1983.
2015 — A four-sentence composite of 4.35, 7.21 and 12.21 opens Irvin Yalom’s Creatures of a Day, presented as one continuous Marcus Aurelius passage. Quote Investigator untangles it ↗ in 2022. Lissner’s 1958 wording matches the composite’s last two sentences verbatim, which suggests but does not prove the lines travelled that way — Quote Investigator draws no link between the two, and neither do we.
Attribution and copyright are separate questions here, and they land differently. Marcus Aurelius’s Greek original is ancient and long in the public domain, as is George Long’s 1862 translation ↗. But this specific English wording is Maxwell Staniforth’s, first published by Penguin in 1964 ↗ — well after 1931 — so the sentence as quoted remains under copyright as a translation. Quote it with the translator credited; if you need a freely reusable version, use Long’s.
Fact-check
What's actually wrong with how it's quoted
The name on this quote is right — which makes the errors around it easy to miss. Two things routinely go wrong: the words are credited to Marcus Aurelius when they are his translator’s, and the line is usually served inside a longer “passage” that does not exist in the Meditations.
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The wordingMaxwell Staniforth, not Marcus Aurelius translation
“Creatures of a day” is Staniforth’s 1964 English, not a literal echo of the Greek. George Long’s public-domain 1862 translation of the same section reads: “Everything is only for a day, both that which remembers and that which is remembered” ↗. Same thought, no memorable phrase — which is a fair measure of how much of this quote’s fame the translator earned.
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The passageThree sections stitched into one composite
The four-sentence version opening Irvin Yalom’s Creatures of a Day (2015) is not continuous text. Quote Investigator ↗ traces it to Book 4–35, Book 7–21, and Book 12–21 — and its first two sentences are two different translations of the very same section, 4.35.
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The trailNobody knows who ran them together unknown assembler
The oldest source Quote Investigator cites for the composite’s third and fourth sentences is Ivar Lissner’s The Caesars: Might and Madness (1958) — where the wording is verbatim identical to the modern composite. Lissner himself did nothing wrong: he cited each line to its own section, 7:21 at page 199 and 12:21 at page 206 ↗. Quote Investigator does not say who first ran them together, and neither will we.
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The creditQuoted as bare "Marcus Aurelius" no translator
Even careful users drop the translator. Yalom’s own publisher page ↗ gives it as simply “wrote Marcus Aurelius,” with no edition or section — and in a slightly clipped form (“rememberer and remembered alike”).
✓Marcus Aurelius genuinely wrote this thought, at Meditations 4.35 — but the sentence people love is Maxwell Staniforth’s 1964 English, and the longer passage it usually appears in was assembled by someone else entirely, from three separate sections of the book ↗.
Context
A note to himself, not a line for us
The Meditations is not a book Marcus Aurelius wrote; it is a book he kept. Composed in Koine Greek during his reign — much of it, apparently, on campaign — it was a private ledger of self-correction, never addressed to a reader. That is why so much of it lands as blunt self-address rather than polished aphorism.
Book 4, section 35 is one of the shortest entries in the whole work: a single sentence, complete in itself. Its point is the one Marcus returns to obsessively — that oblivion is symmetrical. Being forgotten is not the tragedy, because the person doing the remembering is just as temporary as the person remembered. The consolation and the sting are the same sentence.
Oblivion is symmetrical: the one who remembers is as temporary as the one remembered.
The curious case of one section quoted twice
The four-sentence passage that circulates online — and that opens Irvin D. Yalom’s 2015 book Creatures of a Day — is not a passage of the Meditations at all. Quote Investigator ↗ traces it to three separate sections: Book 4–35, Book 7–21, and Book 12–21.
The oddest wrinkle: its first two sentences are the same section twice. “All of us are creatures of a day; the rememberer and the remembered alike” is Staniforth’s 4.35; “All is ephemeral, both memory and the object of memory” is Martin Hammond’s 2006 rendering (p. 43) of that identical line. Whoever assembled the epigraph read two translations of one sentence as two consecutive thoughts.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus ruled Rome from AD 161 until his death in 180, the last of the so-called Five Good Emperors. Through plague, war on the Danube frontier, and revolt, he kept a private notebook in Greek — never intended for publication — that survives as the Meditations. Its recurring subject is his own smallness: the certainty of death, the vanity of fame, and the brevity of being remembered at all.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source — Chicago
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. Maxwell Staniforth, Penguin Classics (London: Penguin Books, 1964), bk. 4, sec. 35, p. 72. Cf. Marcus Aurelius, The Thoughts of the Emperor M. Aurelius Antoninus, trans. George Long (London: Bell and Daldy, 1862), bk. 4, sec. 35, p. 53. Translation history documented in "Quote Origin: All of Us Are Creatures of a Day; the Rememberer and the Remembered Alike," Quote Investigator, November 12, 2022.
MLA (9th ed.)
Aurelius, Marcus. Meditations. Translated by Maxwell Staniforth, Penguin Books, 1964, p. 72.
APA (7th ed.)
Aurelius, M. (1964). Meditations (M. Staniforth, Trans.). Penguin Books. (Original work published c. 161–180 CE)
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘All of us are creatures of a day; the rememberer and the remembered alike’?” Last verified 14 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/all-of-us-are-creatures-of-a-day-the-rememberer-and-the