Marcus Aurelius acknowledges his debt to the Stoic tradition of emotions and endorses both the analysis of emotions as value judgements, the ideal of apatheia, i.e. the eradication of ‘passions’, and the promotion of ‘good feelings’. By emotions, he means all kinds of emotional reactions to everything that reaches us from the outside, i.e. pleasure and pain as well as anger, love, fear, etc. Every impression being twofold (what the object is and of what value it is to us), Marcus develops a strategy to eradicate the second judgement. But there is a positive side to the reshaping of desire and aversion, a joy resulting from the gifts of nature and the fulfilment of our human relations. Such emotions are reserved for the Sage in ancient Stoicism, but they become more accessible to Marcus, who does not reject any emotion from human life but values the appropriate ones.