Being criticised or dismissed
When someone has criticized you
Someone said something about your work, or your idea, or you, and hours later it is still there. You have replayed it, corrected it, answered it in your head. The thing itself took ten seconds. What you have done with it since has taken the afternoon.
Marcus was criticized constantly, by senators, by soldiers, by his own tutors, and Meditations is partly the record of what he told himself about it. He does not say the criticism does not matter. He asks what, exactly, has happened.
Marcus Aurelius
Say nothing more to thyself than what the first appearances report. Suppose that it has been reported to thee that a certain person speaks ill of thee. This has been reported; but that thou hast been injured, that has not been reported. I see that my child is sick. I do see; but that he is in danger, I do not see. Thus then always abide by the first appearances, and add nothing thyself from within, and then nothing happens to thee. Or rather add something, like a man who knows everything that happens in the world.
Two things arrive together and he separates them. The first is a report: somebody spoke ill of you. The second is a conclusion: you have been injured. Only the first was delivered. The second you supplied, and his point is that you can decline to supply it. His own example is not a critic but a sick child, which is the case where declining is hardest, and he includes it on purpose.
Marcus Aurelius
If any man is able to convince me and show me that I do not think or act right, I will gladly change; for I seek the truth by which no man was ever injured. But he is injured who abides in his error and ignorance.
This is the other half, and it is easy to miss. He is not saying that criticism is always empty. He is saying that if it happens to be right, the person who told you has done you a service, and the only real loss would be to go on being wrong. The question is not whether it hurt but whether it is true.
Marcus Aurelius
Penetrate inwards into men’s leading principles, and thou wilt see what judges thou art afraid of, and what kind of judges they are of themselves.
And if it is not true, he suggests a plain check: who is judging, and by what standard? He is not sneering at them. He is noticing that the fear of a judge and the quality of a judge are two different things, and that the first is often set higher than the second deserves.
One question
What was actually said, on its own, before you added what it means about you?
Meditations is quoted from George Long's translation of 1862, which is in the public domain. The passages are chosen by hand, shown as written, and never paraphrased.