Anger Quotes

Shakespeare leads, ahead of Audre Lorde, Seneca, the fantasy novelist Sheri S. Tepper and Marcus Aurelius. Blake’s four-line poem from Songs of Experience (1794) is the one that holds up best, about telling a friend your wrath and ending it, and not telling a foe and letting it grow. Congreve’s The Mourning Bride (1697) is the source of the line about Hell having no fury like a woman scorned, and it says a little more than the shortened version. Henry Ward Beecher, in 1858, advised never forgetting what a man has said to you when he was angry.

Flagged: “To anger a conservative, lie to him. To anger a liberal, tell him the truth,” credited to Theodore Roosevelt and marked misattributed; Publilius Syrus on the anger of lovers and a Dryden couplet about Shadwell, both disputed.