Plain
Seneca — The Senator

Just because vices sometimes produce good results doesn't mean we should accept them as normal. Fevers can help cure certain diseases, but it's still better to avoid fevers entirely. It's a terrible way to get healthy — needing sickness to make you well. The same goes for anger. Like poison, falling off a cliff, or getting shipwrecked, anger might accidentally help sometimes. But that doesn't make it healthy. After all, poisons have often been good medicine too.

On Anger, Book 1, Section 12 Book 1 · 38 of 69
Calm Your Mind Knowing Yourself
Seneca — The Senator Original

In the next place, vices ought not to be received into common use because on some occasions they have effected somewhat: for so also fevers are good for certain kinds of ill-health, but nevertheless it is better to be altogether free from them: it is a hateful mode of cure to owe one’s health to disease. Similarly, although anger, like poison, or falling headlong, or being shipwrecked, may have unexpectedly done good, yet it ought not on that account to be classed as wholesome, for poisons have often proved good for the health.

On Anger, Book 1, Section 12 Book 1 · 38 of 69
Seneca — The Senator

Getting angry on behalf of your friends doesn't show love — it shows weakness. What's truly admirable is standing up for your parents, children, friends, and fellow citizens because duty calls you to do so. You act by your own choice, with careful thought, planning ahead. You don't act on impulse or in a frenzy. No emotion wants revenge more than anger does. And that's exactly why anger fails to get revenge. Being too hasty and wild — like most strong desires — it gets in its own way. Anger has never been useful in peace or war. It makes peace feel like war. And when you're actually fighting, anger forgets that fortune can favor either side. It makes you fall into the enemy's power because you've lost control of yourself.

On Anger, Book 1, Section 12 Book 1 · 37 of 69
Calm Your Mind Facing Hardship
Seneca — The Senator Original

To feel anger on behalf of one’s friends does not show a loving, but a weak mind: it is admirable and worthy conduct to stand forth as the defender of one’s parents, children, friends, and countrymen, at the call of duty itself, acting of one’s own free will, forming a deliberate judgment, and looking forward to the future, not in an impulsive, frenzied fashion. No passion is more eager for revenge than anger, and for that very reason it is unapt to obtain it: being over hasty and frantic, like almost all desires, it hinders itself in the attainment of its own object, and therefore has never been useful either in peace or war: for it makes peace like war, and when in arms forgets that Mars belongs to neither side, and falls into the power of the enemy, because it is not in its own.

On Anger, Book 1, Section 12 Book 1 · 37 of 69
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Ancient philosophy, in plain English.

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