Meditations, Book 9, Section 1

Marcus Aurelius — The Emperor

Those who want to live according to nature must be equally indifferent to these things, just as nature is. Anyone who is not indifferent to pleasure and pain, death and life, honor and dishonor is clearly going against the natural order. Nature uses all these things without preference in running the world.

When I say nature uses them without preference, I mean they happen randomly in the normal course of events. These things follow necessarily from the original plan of Providence. From the very beginning, Providence decided to create this kind of world. It carried within itself the seeds and patterns for everything that would happen — all the subjects, changes, and sequences, exactly as they are and in just these numbers.

Marcus Aurelius — The Emperor Original

they that will live according to nature, must in those things (as being of the same mind and disposition that she is) be as equally indifferent. Whosoever therefore in either matter of pleasure and pain; death and life; honour and dishonour, (which things nature in the administration of the world, indifferently doth make use of), is not as indifferent, it is apparent that he is impious. When I say that common nature doth indifferently make use of them, my meaning is, that they happen indifferently in the ordinary course of things, which by a necessary consequence, whether as principal or accessory, come to pass in the world, according to that first and ancient deliberation of Providence, by which she from some certain beginning, did resolve upon the creation of such a world, conceiving then in her womb as it were some certain rational generative seeds and faculties of things future, whether subjects, changes, successions; both such and such, and just so many.