“Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.”

—  Mark Twain

Last update Sept. 27, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured." by Mark Twain?
Mark Twain photo
Mark Twain 637
American author and humorist 1835–1910

Related quotes

“It is misleading in a crucial way to view information as something that can be poured into an empty vessel, like a fluid or even energy.”

Anatol Rapoport (1911–2007) Russian-born American mathematical psychologist

Anatol Rapoport (1956) "The Promise and Pitfalls of Information Theory"; AS quoted in: Peter Corning (2010) Holistic Darwinism, p. 364
1950s

Marcus Aurelius photo

“And finally remember that nothing harms him who is really a citizen, which does not harm the state; nor yet does anything harm the state which does not harm law [order]; and of these things which are called misfortunes not one harms law. What then does not harm law does not harm either state or citizen.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

X, 33
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book X

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury photo

“Salisbury said two things which are more decided than any former utterances of his: that Russia at Constantinople would do us no harm: and that we ought to seize Egypt.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Salisbury to the Cabinet (16 June 1877), from John Vincent (ed.), The Diaries of Edward Henry Stanley, Fifteenth Earl of Derby (London: The Royal Historical Society, 1994), p. 410
1870s

Honoré de Balzac photo

“Life — is it anything more than a machine to which money imparts the motion?”

Honoré de Balzac book Gobseck

La vie n'est-elle pas une machine à laquelle l'argent imprime le mouvement?
p. 26, 1921 édition https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.31158007362832;view=1up;seq=63
Gobseck (1830)

“Those who do not find a fountain through which to pour their tears, do not cry.”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

No llora quien no encuentra uns fuente donde verter su llanto.
Voces (1943)

Bertrand Russell photo

“Many of the actions by which men have become rich are far more harmful to the community than the obscure crimes of poor men, yet they go unpunished because they do not interfere with the existing order.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Source: 1910s, Proposed Roads To Freedom (1918), Ch. V: Government and Law

George Eliot photo

“Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love…”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

Book I, ch. x
The Mill on the Floss (1860)

Stephen Fry photo

“Literary studies were no more than a series of autopsies performed by heartless technicians. Worse than autopsies: biopsies. Vivisection. Even movies, which I love more than anything, more than life itself, they even do it with movies these days.”

Stephen Fry book Making History

Source: Making History

“There is no consistent, integrated conception of the world which serves as the foundation on which our edifice of belief rests. And therefore… we are more naive than those of the Middle Ages, and more frightened, for we can be made to believe almost anything.”

Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)
Context: The world in which we live is very nearly incomprehensible to most of us. There is almost no fact... that will surprise us for very long, since we have no comprehensive and consistent picture of the world which would make the fact appear as an unacceptable contradiction.... in a world without spiritual or intellectual order, nothing is unbelievable; nothing is predictable, and therefore, nothing comes as a particular surprise.... The medieval world was... not without a sense of order. Ordinary men and women... had no doubt that there was such a design, and their priests were well able, by deduction from a handful of principles, to make it, if not rational, at least coherent.... The situation we are presently in is much different.... sadder and more confusing and certainly more mysterious.... There is no consistent, integrated conception of the world which serves as the foundation on which our edifice of belief rests. And therefore... we are more naive than those of the Middle Ages, and more frightened, for we can be made to believe almost anything.

Related topics