Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. But I who have seen the nature of the good, that it is beautiful, and of the bad, that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is akin to me, not only of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in the same intelligence and the same portion of the divinity, I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him. […]
Two moves in one passage. First, the rehearsal: you will meet bad behaviour today; do not be astonished. Second, the reframe: bad behaviour comes from ignorance of the good, and the person doing it shares the same logos as you do — the Stoic doctrine of oikeiōsis, kinship, extended to the difficult colleague. The result is neither outrage nor indifference but a kind of patient kinship.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 2.1 · trans. George Long (1862)
Context
The opening lines of Book 2 of the Meditations. Marcus Aurelius is preparing himself for the day in office, knowing he will meet courtiers, petitioners, and senators behaving badly. The point is not misanthropy but anticipation — the surprise that breeds anger is removed when you have already seen the day's shape.