Did Marcus Aurelius really say "You have power over your mind"?

No. Not in his words. The line as it circulates appears in no published translation of the Meditations. It is an internet composite, a modern paraphrase that got a Roman emperor's name attached somewhere along the way. Marcus Aurelius did write something close, and the real passage is sharper than the paraphrase. It is below.

The version going around

Here is the quote as it appears on posters, quote sites, and social feeds:

"You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength." — attributed to Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

It sounds like him. That is why it spreads. If you have shared it, you were sharing a real Stoic idea in words Marcus never used. No harm done. But the receipt matters, so here it is.

The verdict, with the receipt

We searched three complete public-domain translations of the Meditations, front to back, for this wording and every distinctive fragment of it.

• George Long, 1862 (the standard Victorian translation, full text on Wikisource): the phrases "power over your mind," "not outside events," "realize this," and "you will find strength" appear zero times. Long renders the whole book in "thou" and "thy," so the modern "you have power over your mind" cannot appear even by accident.
• Meric Casaubon, 1634 (the first English translation, Project Gutenberg ebook #2680): zero matches for any fragment of the circulating wording.
• George W. Chrystal, 1902 (Project Gutenberg ebook #55317): zero matches.

Three translations spanning nearly three centuries, and the sentence is in none of them. Quote sites list it without a book or section number, which is usually the tell. The wording is a compression of a real thought from Book 8, smoothed into motivational-poster English by unknown hands.

What Marcus Aurelius actually wrote

The real passage is Meditations 8.47. Here is the opening of it, byte-exact from George Long's public-domain translation:

"If thou art pained by any external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs thee, but thy own judgment about it. And it is in thy power to wipe out this judgment now. But if anything in thy own disposition gives thee pain, who hinders thee from correcting thy opinion?" Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 8.47, translated by George Long (1862)

The passage continues from there into a hard little dialogue about obstacles and action. Read the whole section if you can. Notice what the paraphrase loses. The fake version says you have power over your mind, full stop. The real version says something more useful: the pain is not the event, it is your judgment about the event, and you can revise a judgment right now, today, the way you would correct any other mistake. That is not a slogan about strength. It is an instruction you can actually follow before breakfast.

Why we check

Every quote in Lumoro's morning texts is verified against a primary source before it sends. Translator, edition, book and section number, checked against the actual text, every time. If a line cannot be traced to a real page, it does not go out. A morning practice built on words should start with words someone actually wrote.