#22: On Anger (De Ira)
Quotes that resonate, from ‘How to Keep Your Cool: An Ancient Guide to Anger Management’ by Seneca, selected, translated and introduced by James Romm.
[60]
It is more important to look at how many people have been injured by anger’s very nature. Many have burst their veins with excessive fury; their shouts, greater than they had strength for, have brought up blood, and the teardrops surging violently into their eyes have dimmed the sharpness of their sight; sick, they have slid back into disease. There is no swifter road to madness.
[61]
For a very great evil has seized them, one that exceeds all other vices; the others creep in little by little, but this one’s onrush is sudden and total. It ends by subjecting all other emotions to itself. It conquers the most passionate love, for the enraged have impaled the bodies of those they loved and then lain in the embraces of those they killed.
Even greed, the toughest and least malleable of evils, gets trodden down by anger, driven to scatter its wealth to the winds and to torch its house and heaped-up possessions?