Look down from above on the countless herds of men and their countless solemnities, and the infinitely varied voyagings in storms and calms, and the differences among those who are born, who live together, and die. And consider, too, the life lived by others in olden time, and the life of those who will live after thee, and the life now lived among barbarous nations, and how many know not even thy name, and how many will soon forget it, and how they who perhaps now are praising thee will very soon blame thee, and that neither a posthumous name is of any value, nor reputation, nor anything else.
This is not "everyone dies, so nothing matters." It is the opposite. The scale clears away the noise. What is left, when the praise and the blame are stripped, is the work of being good — which is precisely what is up to you, and which is precisely the only thing the view from above does not diminish.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 9.30 · trans. George Long (1862)
Context
Marcus Aurelius's version of the cosmic perspective practice — what Hadot calls la vue d'en haut. It runs through the entire Meditations but is articulated most directly here. The function is to deflate the apparent size of the present anxiety or grievance by re-locating it in the actual scale of things.