What Cannot Harm the Life
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Ὃ χείρω αὐτὸν ἑαυτοῦ ἄνθρωπον οὐ ποιεῖ, τοῦτο οὐδὲ τὸν βίον αὐτοῦ χείρω ποιεῖ οὐδὲ βλάπτει οὔτε ἔξωθεν οὔτε ἔνδοθεν.
What does not make a man worse than he was in himself does not make his life worse either, nor harm it, whether from outside or from within.
A test for harm: whatever does not make a person morally worse cannot make his life worse either — no external or internal event injures him unless it corrupts his character.
Marcus offers a criterion for what can count as real harm. The only thing that can genuinely damage a person is what makes him χείρων, worse — and "worse" here means worse in character, in the one thing that is properly his own. An event that leaves his integrity intact has not injured him, however unpleasant it may be, because it has not touched the self. This follows directly from the Stoic conviction that the sole good is virtue and the sole evil vice: what is neither cannot be a harm.
The closing phrase, "neither from outside nor from within" (οὔτε ἔξωθεν οὔτε ἔνδοθεν), quietly covers both fronts. External misfortunes — loss, pain, other people’s hostility — cannot reach the moral self uninvited; but Marcus also names the inner front, the disturbances that arise from one’s own reactions. Neither can harm the life so long as they do not make the man worse. Read alongside 4.7, the two chapters form a pair: 4.7 locates harm in the judgment, and 4.8 draws the consequence — since only self-corruption is real damage, nothing that befalls you is an injury unless you let it deform your character.
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Meditations 4.8 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/meditations-greek/4.8/