Of Anger

There is no passion that so much unsettles the judgment as anger. In anger we do not see better — we see only larger, hotter, more sharply colored. The wrong that provokes us appears enormous; our own righteousness appears absolute. This is precisely the condition in which we should not act, and it is precisely when we feel most compelled to. I have made most of the errors I regret in states of anger — not raving, frantic anger, but the colder, more deliberate kind that mistakes its own clarity for reason.

The great men who have been destroyed by their rage make a long list. Alexander, drunk with it at Cleitus’s table; Valentinian, who died of fury in the middle of a sentence; many a petty lord and household tyrant whose anger, fed for years, became the only thing he was. Power makes this worse, because power removes the natural checks. A common man who shouts and strikes will be shouted and struck at in return; a king who does the same thing has no one to correct him. The throne is a furnace for this particular vice.

He who conquers his anger conquers a stronger enemy than he who takes a city.

For myself, I was not always as composed as perhaps I now appear in these pages. I was hot in my youth, and quick. Experience taught me — slowly and through some embarrassments — that rage satisfied in the moment costs considerably more afterward than the provocation was worth. My practice, when I feel the heat rising, is to remove myself from the situation if I can, and to speak nothing of consequence until I am cool. I have found this more effective than any resolution or moral argument. The passions are not reasoned away; they are outlasted. A man who can wait out his own fury has learned the better half of wisdom.