One Thing You Learn Reading Quotes From Seneca: Anger Is Not On Your Side.
By: Adrian Pablo
Tags: Stoicism, Anger, Anger Management, Philosophy, Seneca

One Thing You Learn Reading Quotes From Seneca: Anger Is Not On Your Side.

Reading quotes from Seneca has given me peace many times. Throughout the years he has been considered by many people as a source of wisdom for a better living. He is one of the most representative philosophers of the Stoic school, and among his many teachings and quotes, he makes great emphasis on not giving up to anger. Adrian Pablo Aug 20, 2020·6 min read

Lucius Annaeus Seneca was a Roman philosopher, who lived during the first decades of the Current Era. Séneca was born in the province of the Roman Empire known as Hispania. The city of Cordoba would be his cradle in what is now southern Spain. He was raised in the city of Rome from early childhood, where later he became a prominent politician and also a high-ranking financial clerk under the orders of the Roman emperor.

Seneca is a polemic figure, a great thinker and one of the most notable figures of Stoic philosophy. You can find quotes from Seneca on many themes, and none of them will leave you without a touch of stoic wisdom.

“Sickness comes, captivity, disaster, conflagration, but none of them is unexpected, I always knew in what disorderly company Nature had confined me” Seneca

He was advisor to a Roman emperor; nothingless but Nero, the same who ordered the great Roman fire. He was exiled a number of times, and finally condemned to a tragic death by Nero himself. But his life was not all tragedy, he was also very rich and hand to hand with power at the highest level. Among a number of things his life teaches us is that everything has a cost, including being congruent with one’s philosophy on life, and also that nothing is permanent, and life’s circumstances can change radically in a few days or months, that this time is enough to pass from being on the top feasting with the powerful, to barely eating the simplest of foods in an isolated island condemned to exile.

Seneca belongs to that special group of people whose thoughts and wisdom have transcended the centuries and geographies letting us have a better understanding of our human condition, and from this understanding, give shape to our aspirations to a better life experience in a time of crisis. When we wake up to days confronting us to a pandemic, violence, corruption; to a world that apparently moves too fast in a chaotic trajectory; it’s good to know we can still find peace if we just take a moment to look inside ourselves armed with the wisdom of the many quotes that Seneca gave us to cherish .

Very few other schools of Philosophy in our history have expressed in such a profound and at the same time understandable way a set of values and ideas suitable for a productive and well spent life as Stoicism. They taught the four great virtues as the core of what they considered a philosophy of life, these were: Wisdom, Justice, Courage and Temperance. It’s thanks to the teachings of Stoic thinkers like Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the great roman philosopher, that we can have a look inside this great school of thought with ideas that have been source of inspiration of such notable figures the size of Erasmus, Francis Bacon, Pascal, Montaigne; and even for Christianity. I think very few would object about how valuable these ideas are, and that they deserve to be present in the discussions and thoughts of the great public.

Among the many themes Seneca touches with his thinking and reflections about life, there is one that captures his attention and that he considers of special importance. This is the very human phenomenon of anger. A mental state that we all should avoid and constantly be aware of not falling into his traps as we cruise in our daily lives. Anger is a reaction that should never transform into a feeling, we should never foster it. Once we open the door to anger we can lose our minds very easily. So it is always better to stop it at once.

“Anger, if not restrained, is frequently more hurtful to us than the injury that provokes it.” Seneca

Stoics considered reason as the main compass in our lives. They gave our brain’s capacity for analysis, and our rational nature supreme importance for our well being. People as Seneca considered this unique characteristic of the human beings as the main indicative separating us from nature’s animals. We are not beings guided by bold instincts who can only react to stimuli making us, run, hide or fight. We can contemplate the stimuli, analyze what is provoking our reactions and decide what is the best course of action.

“Ungoverned anger begets madness.” Seneca

This is the basis of what Seneca recommends when dealing with anger. We should commit ourselves to be observers of our own reactions, and never let stimuli overshadow our rational capacity. As we go on living in a complicated world, life has never been easy for anyone in any age, there will be swarms of stimuli coming to us in many forms, and some of them will be specially bothering. A bad neighbor, a careless spouse, a crying baby, that stupid request from the clerk, a driver that cuts in our way, etc. All of them, things and situations with the potential to make us creak in anger if we are not careful enough to contain our initial reaction to these stimuli.

“No one keeps himself waiting; and yet the greatest cure for anger is to wait, so that the initial passion it engenders may die down, and the fog that shrouds the mind may subside, or become less thick.” Seneca

Considering this, we should have a strategy to deal with the common initial onsets of anger that we will encounter in practically all of our daily activities. As Seneca quotes, anger once unleashed will become a form of madness, so we must be very careful. This is why we must keep it at bay always. The best practice Seneca recommends is that of delay, once we become conscious that we are only reacting and not thinking we have won the first battle against anger. Then, if we wait for a few seconds before surrendering to a reaction coming from anger we would have won the second battle. There is even a recommendation in some cultures in those cases when one feels that anger starts to set in we should start “counting to ten” before having any reaction.

According to Seneca anger ranks in the highest spots for the vices. It deprives us of our rational mind, and turns us into crazy people with foul intentions, we wish the harming of others and not only of ourselves. We explode, we project our rage outward and once in this mood, things can very easily get out of control, anger has seized our behavior, and from that moment on anything can happen. Consequences will be obscured by our frenzy until we have regained our rational mind, often too late and usually with the ugly consequences in front of us.

A fiery reaction mounted on anger will never be a proof of character as some people still think. The control of anger by a rational mind is. Seneca knew very well when he recommended us to restrain anger and govern ourselves. This is never too easy, we all fail, but we must strive to be better next time. At the end, I think that’s what growing is all about, becoming a better self than the one we were yesterday.

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