Category: ANGER

  • Love is the center of a circle that broadens out in ever-widening circumference.

    Dante tells us in La Vita Nuova that the effect of his love for Beatrice was to open his heart to all and to sweeten all his life. He speaks of the surpassing virtue of her very salutation to him in the street. “When she appeared in any place, it seemed to me, by the hope of her excellent salutation, that there was no man mine enemy any longer; and such warmth of charity came upon me that most certainly in that moment I would have pardoned whomsoever had done me an injury; and if anyone should then have questioned me concerning any matter, I could only have said unto him ‘Love,’ with a countenance clothed in humbleness.” His love bred sweetness in his mind and took in everything within the blessed sweep of its range.

    The Art of Being a Good Friend
    Hugh Black

  • The strife-makers find in themselves, in their barren hearts and empty lives, their own appropriate curse. The blow they strike comes back upon them. Worse than the choleric temperament is the peevish, sullen nature. The one usually finds a speedy repentance for his hot and hasty mood; the other is a constant menace to friendship and acts like a perpetual irritant. The root of this temperament is selfishness, and it grows by what it feeds on.

    When offenses do come, we may indeed use them as opportunities for growth in gracious ways, and thus turn them into blessings on the lives of both. To the offended, it may be an occasion for patience and forgiveness; to the offender, an occasion for humility and frank confession; and to both, a renewing of love less open to offense in the future.

    The Art of Being a Good Friend
    Hugh Black

  • All anger is in danger of rationalization, but resentment more than anything perhaps can distort the truthfulness of our memory. As the saying goes, “The older I get, the more vividly I remember things that never happened.”

    Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies
    Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung

  • Perhaps we even lash out at others around us because we feel impotent shaking our fists at God. Often the real culprit in cases of wrath at the wrong object is our excessive expectations of what we deserve or the sort of treatment we are due.

    Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies
    Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung

  • “If you rebuke someone and do it with anger, you have allowed a passion to control you. You have not saved anyone and have destroyed yourself.”

    — St. Macarius the Great

  • “A harsh word makes the good bad, but a good [word] benefits everybody.”

    —Abba Macarius

    Give Me a Word: The Alphabetical Sayings of the Desert Fathers
    John Wortley

  • It’s impossible for a person to have a good, peaceful relationship with God and not enjoy peace with others.

    —Matthew the Poor, Words For Our Time: The Spiritual Words of Matthew the Poor

  • Observe such men, and you will note that within a short space of time they laugh to excess and rage to excess.

    —Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

  • From The Screwtape Letters—a fictional work written from a senior demon’s perspective, advising a junior tempter.

    They anger him because he regards his time as his own and feels that it is being stolen. You must therefore zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption ‘My time is my own’.

    The Screwtape Letters
    C. S. Lewis

  • From The Screwtape Letters—a fictional work written from a senior demon’s perspective, advising a junior tempter.

    It is the unexpected visitor (when he looked forward to a quiet evening), or the friend’s talkative wife (turning up when he looked forward to a tête-à-tête with the friend), that throw him out of gear.

    The Screwtape Letters
    C. S. Lewis