90 Quotes About Managing Anger

In the fast-paced world we live in, managing anger effectively is an essential skill for maintaining peaceful and productive relationships. Whether it's a misunderstanding at work, a disagreement with a loved one, or the frustrations that daily life can bring, unaddressed anger can lead to stress and unhappiness. By seeking wisdom from various sources, we can learn to navigate our emotions better. In this post, we've gathered a thoughtful selection of 90 quotes to provide insight and inspiration on how to manage anger with grace and clarity. These quotes not only offer perspective but also encourage reflection, helping you to transform anger into a force for positive change.

1. “Poetry = Anger x Imagination” - Sherman Alexie

2. “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.” - Joe Klaas

3. “Never go to bed mad. Stay up and fight.” - Phyllis Diller

4. “Not my daughter, you bitch!” - J.K. Rowling

5. “I want to commit the murder I was imprisoned for.” - J.K. Rowling

6. “Working with him was sort of like trying to defuse a bomb with somebody standing behind you and every now and then clashing a pair of cymbals together. In a word, upsetting.” - Stephen King

7. “How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.” - Marcus Aurelius

8. “At the pit's bottom is no anger.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

9. “So you try to think of someone else you're mad at, and the unavoidable answer pops into your little warped brain: everyone.” - Ellen Hopkins

10. “If there was a God. I would spit in his face for subjecting me to this. If there was a Devil, I would sell my sould to make it end. If there was something Higher that controlled out f***ing fates, I would tell it to take my fate and shove it up its fucking ass. Shove it hard and far, you motherf***er. Please end. Please end. Please end.” - james frey

11. “My mother's psychologist says I have an overactive anger switch, but people just keep pissing me off.” - Meg Cabot

12. “Good! he wanted to cry out to her. Good! Because you only had to see it! I had to wear it!” - Stephen King

13. “It is hard to be angry when one has seen the sun rise,' she said.It seems to be true,' he admitted. 'I wonder why.'Because it makes one feel so small and insignificant. It has been rising forever and will rise forever no matter what we do or do not do. All our problems are as nothing to the sun.” - David Gemmell

14. “How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him.” - Frank Herbert

15. “Thats why your doing this? Because Lissa told you to?” - Richelle Mead

16. “You're insane!" she shouted."Pretty cool, huh?""No!"Tally yelled. "Why didn't you tell me it was broken?"Shay shrugged. "More fun that way?""More fun?" Her heart beating fast,her vision strangely clear. She was full of anger and relief and...joy."Well, kind of. But you suck!” - Scott Westerfeld

17. “Harry," she said quietly, "I know you must be angry."I burn things to ash and smash holes in buildings when I'm angry," I said. "I'm a couple of steps past that point right now.” - Jim Butcher

18. “Whoa, who peed in your Cheerios?” - Becca Fitzpatrick

19. “Declare your jihad on thirteen enemies you cannot see -egoism, arrogance, conceit, selfishness, greed, lust, intolerance, anger, lying, cheating, gossiping and slandering. If you can master and destroy them, then you will be read to fight the enemy you can see.” - Al-Ghazzali

20. “All Welsh knew was that he was scared shitless, and at the same time was afflicted with a choking gorge of anger that any social coercion existed in the world which could force him to be here.” - James Jones

21. “When I feel angry, I want to say something mean, or yell, or hit. But feeling like I want to is not the same as doing it. Feeling can't hurt anyone or get me into trouble, but doing can." (Bunny from picture book)” - Cornelia Maude Spelman

22. “One will hate you for taking his life, another will run to excesses that you scorn. A third will emerge mad and raving, another a monster you cannot control. One will be jealous of your superiority, another shut you out... And the veil will always come down between you Make a legion, you will be, always and forever alone!” - Anne Rice

23. “Ron seems to be enjoying the celebrations.” said Hermione. “Don’t pretend you didn’t see him. He wasn’t exactly hiding it, was — ?”The door behind them burst open. To Harry’s horror, Ron came in, laughing, pulling Lavender by the hand. “Oh,” he said, drawing up short at the sight of Harry and Hermione.“Oops!” said Lavender, and she backed out of the room, giggling.There was a horrible, swelling, billowing silence. Hermione was staring at Ron, who refused to look at her. She walked very slowly and erectly toward the door. Harry glanced at Ron, who was looking relieved that nothing worse had happened.“Oppugno!” came a shriek from the doorway.Harry spun around [...] The little flock of birds was speeding like a hail of fat golden bullets toward Ron, pecking and clawing at every bit of flesh they could reach.“Gerremoffme!” he yelled, but with one last look of vindictive fury, Hermione wrenched open the door and disappeared through it. Harry thought he heard a sob before it slammed.” - J.K. Rowling

24. “One day you wake up and realize the world can be conquered... I'm going to put a mask on and scrawl my name across the face of the world, build cities of gold, come back and stomp this place flat, until even the bricks are just dust. So you can just shut up. All of you. I'm going to move the world.” - Austin Grossman

25. “I'm supposed to be a christian, but most days I don't feel like I can even presume to say that about myself any longer. I have a lot of mad left over. When I can't sleep, I think about the other people who didn't care how much pain and trouble they caused me. And I think about how good I'd feel if they died.” - Charlaine Harris

26. “Anger as soon as fed is dead- 'Tis starving makes it fat. ” - Emily Dickinson

27. “But my patience isn't limitless... unlike my authority.” - Dan Abnett

28. “I would not look upon anger as something foreign to me that I have to fight... I have to deal with my anger with care, with love, with tenderness, with nonviolence.” - Thich Nhat Hanh

29. “I was angry with my friend:I told my wrath, my wrath did end.I was angry with my foe:I told it not, my wrath did grow.” - William Blake

30. “If I still need someone to calm my anger down,then I surely need a scapegoat who enrages me.” - Toba Beta

31. “Earnestness means willingness to live with energy, though energy bring pain. The pain may be pain to other people or pain to one's self — it makes little difference; for when the strenuous mood is on one, the aim is to break something, no matter whose or what. Nothing annihilates an inhibition as irresistibly as anger does it; for, as Moltke says of war, destruction pure and simple is its essence. This is what makes it so invaluable an ally of every other passion. The sweetest delights are trampled on with a ferocious pleasure the moment they offer themselves as checks to a cause by which our higher indignations are elicited. It costs then nothing to drop friendships, to renounce long-rooted privileges and possessions, to break with social ties. Rather do we take a stern joy in the astringency and desolation; and what is called weakness of character seems in most cases to consist of the inaptitude for these sacrificial moods, of which one's own inferior self and its pet softnesses must often be the targets and the victims.” - William James

32. “Anger is like flowing water; there's nothing wrong with it as long as you let it flow. Hate is like stagnant water; anger that you denied yourself the freedom to feel, the freedom to flow; water that you gathered in one place and left to forget. Stagnant water becomes dirty, stinky, disease-ridden, poisonous, deadly; that is your hate. On flowing water travels little paper boats; paper boats of forgiveness. Allow yourself to feel anger, allow your waters to flow, along with all the paper boats of forgiveness. Be human.” - C. JoyBell C.

33. “I need to ask, are you afraid of spiders?"Nicholas blinked, suddenly caught off guard, "Yes, I'm afraid of spiders.""Were you always?""What are you, a psychiatrist?"Pritam took a breath. He could feel Laine's eyes on him, appraising his line of questioning."Is it possible that the trauma of losing your best friend as a child and the trauma of losing your wife as an adult and the trauma of seeing Laine's husband take his life in front of you just recently..." Pritam shrugged and raised his palms, "You see where I'm going?"Nicholas looked at Laine. She watched back. Her gray eyes missed nothing."Sure," agreed Nicholas, standing. "And my sister's nuts, too, and we both like imagining that little white dogs are big nasty spiders because our daddy died and we never got enough cuddles.""Your father died?" asked Laine. "When?""Who cares?"Pritam sighed. "You must see this from our point of - ""I'd love to!" snapped Nicholas. "I'd love to see it from your point of view, because mine is not that much fun! It's insane! It's insane that I see dead people, Pritam! It's insane that this," he flicked out the sardonyx necklace,"stopped me from kidnapping a little girl!""That's what you believe," Pritam said carefully."That's what I fucking believe!" Nicholas stabbed his finger through the air at the dead bird talisman lying slack on the coffee table.” - Stephen M. Irwin

34. “Hannah expected this to make her sob even more, but instead she found her tears drying up and her tummy growing warm. How dare they? How dare they do this to little girls? She understood now why her parents go so angry when they saw the result of bombers in the white hot streets of the Middle East, why men and women wailed in anger as well as grief as they lifted the limp bodies of children from the rubble. How dare they? No, she wasn't going to die like this, wrapped up like some helpless baby.” - Stephen M. Irwin

35. “He tries to force the anger down, but it's like an anvil on his chest. He closes his eyes, like Sammy taught him, and forces the anvil up; he softens.” - Chris Crutcher

36. “When you feel terribly angry, you're possessed by anger ghost.” - Toba Beta

37. “There was something peculiarly gratifying about shouting in a blind rage until your words ran out. Of course, the aftermath was less pleasant. Once you'd told everyone you hated them and not to come after you, where exactly did you go?” - Cassandra Clare

38. “PIGEON MY ARSE!” - Sarah Waters

39. “[Harrier] locked eyes with Zanattar. He couldn't remember another time in his life when he'd been this angry and hadn't hit something.” - Mercedes Lackey

40. “If we are calm," replied the policeman, "it is the calm of organized resistance.""Eh?" said Syme, staring."The soldier must be calm in the thick of the battle," pursued the policeman. "The composure of an army is the anger of a nation.” - G.K. Chesterton

41. “This is how hatred begins -- with a muffled laugh on a hot night and a knock on the door.” - Teresa R. Funke

42. “You're afraid of your own anger.” - Kristin Cashore

43. “I liked having some time to myself. Our family was such a close one, you could get smothered. Of course, we didn't always agree with one another. Sometimes I quarreled with my brother and sisters, but I couldn't remember hating anyone for more than five minutes.” - Gloria Whelan

44. “I felt as if I had no control over what I said, as if loathsome, ugly words were waiting inside me like snakes and toads looking for a chance to sneak out before I could stop them.” - Gloria Whelan

45. “Life's not that simple. Not so easy to move on when the anger you've got is what keeps you going.” - Rachel Ward

46. “See, guys freak out. They hit critical mass and blast nuclear, white-hot anger out over the world like walking flamethrowers. But girls freak in. They absorb the pain and bitterness and keep right on sponging it up until they drown.” - Laura Wiess

47. “It isn't often that Aunt Dahlia lets her angry passions rise, but when she does, strong men climb trees and pull them up after them.” - P.G. Wodehouse

48. “Bad luck with women is a determined man's road to success. For every affliction, he makes, out of indignation, yet another advancement in order to exceed the man that the woman chose over him. This goes to show that great men are made great because they once learned how to fight the feeling of rejection.” - Criss Jami

49. “Anger should be especially kept down in punishing, because he who comes to punishment in wrath will never hold that middle course which lies between the too much and the too little. It is also true that it would be desirable that they who hold the office of Judges should be like the laws, which approach punishment not in a spirit of anger but in one of equity.” - Johannes Voet

50. “And if one day,' she said, really crying now, 'you look back and you feel bad for being so angry, if you feel bad for being so angry at me that you couldn't even speak to me, then you have to know, Conor, you have to that is was okay. It was okay. That I knew. I know, okay? I know everything you need to tell me without you having to say it out loud.” - Patrick Ness

51. “It was one lesson he never forgot.You don't sit back when you or a loved one is being assaulted.And you don't act like the goverment with their "proportional responses" and all that nonsense.If someone hurts you,mercy and pity must be put aside,You eliminate the enemy.You scorch the earth.” - Harlan Coben

52. “I began to enjoy myself: being apoplectic's quite invigorating.” - Jonathan Gash

53. “I am much fucking angrier than you think.” - Sarah Kane

54. “Living with life is very hard. Mostly we do our best to stifle life--to be tame or to be wanton. To be tranquillised or raging. Extremes have the same effect; they insulate us from the intensity of life.And extremes--whether of dullness or fury--successfully prevent feeling. I know our feelings can be so unbearable that we employ ingenious strategies--unconscious strategies--to keep those feelings away. We do a feelings-swap, where we avoid feeling sad or lonely or afraid or inadequate, and feel angry instead. It can work the other way, too--sometimes you do need to feel angry, not inadequate; sometimes you do need to feel love and acceptance, and not the tragic drama of your life.It takes courage to feel the feeling--and not trade it on the feelings-exchange, or even transfer it altogether to another person. You know how in couples one person is always doing all the weeping or the raging while the other one seems so calm and reasonable?I understood that feelings were difficult for me although I was overwhelmed by them.” - Jeanette Winterson

55. “Anger is a brief madness.” - Horace

56. “Bitterness: anger that forgot where it came from.” - Alain De Botton

57. “Anger does not come easy to me. It is something I have to encourage, like a greyhound in second place.” - Joe Dunthorne

58. “…deceitful!” she decided with a little bounce of fury that briefly ballooned the silk of her trousers. “There! You deceitful …”“Gillia…”“…misleading, dishonest, insincere…”“Those are all the same words, Gill—”“Ooh! Liar!” She’d managed to get her hands on a small pillow. He ducked just as it whizzed past him. In justice, however, it did strike the mosaic vase behind him on an engraved mahogany pedestal, and it tipped and spun on its base before landing in a shattered heap on the bare floor. “Now, look what you’ve done!” she accused tearfully and bolted from the room.” - V.S. Carnes

59. “In the world of the Machiguenga, sadness could be equated with anger, and anger was a perilous emotion, by which a foreigner could lose his life.” - Tahir Shah

60. “The whole thing becomes like this evil enchantment from a fairy tale, but you're made to believe the spell can never be broken.” - Jess C. Scott

61. “What I have learned lately is that people deal with death in all sorts of ways. Some of us fight against it, doing everything we can to make it not true. Some of us lose our selves to grief. Some of us lose ourselves to anger.” - Carrie Jones

62. “The finest fury is the most controlled.” - Christopher Hitchens

63. “Anger is the most impotent of passions. It effects nothing it goes about, and hurts the one who is possessed by it more than the one against whom it is directed.” - Carl Sandburg

64. “Tom always did anger well. Hid it well, but showed it even better” - Melina Marchetta

65. “Those who are not angry at the things they should be angry at are thought to be fools, and so are those who are not angry in the right way, at the right time, or with the right persons.” - Aristotle

66. “He's got courage," Alex said."Courage!" Raoul bellowed. "That coward almost kills him and--” - Tamora Pierce

67. “Feeling someone else’s anger is bad; being left alone is worse.” - David Levithan

68. “...you can be angry and silent, but it's no use - there's no distance in the spirit - besides, my words touch you more softly than my hands...” - John Geddes

69. “No evil being was ever wise: they are all against every wise man's critics.” - A Gentlemen

70. “I can't go on like this” - Alex Flinn

71. “Never annoy an inspirational author or you will become the poison in her pen and the villian in every one of her books.” - Shannon L. Alder

72. “This was a little house, with a ceiling that kept getting higher and higher, a hot place with no windows. This was anger.” - Helen Oyeyemi

73. “Anger at happenstance for its absurd timing. Anger at myself for being so angry. I hate being angry and every time I got this angry it made me more angry at the fact that I was so angry. I realized though that I couldn't really be mad at any of those things.” - David Bowick

74. “She's your mother. I asked, Plus, you do look a bit like her. When you're angry, you both get these tense lines around your mouth...Look, there they are.” - Molly Harper

75. “Too bad. Game over. Insert new fucking quarter.” - Nenia Campbell

76. “Gratitude takes less energy than anger.” - Kristin Cashore

77. “Why was it that her temper and her thinking never happened at the same time? Her temper behaved like a glutton sitting in an expensive restaurant ordering a hundred dishes, only to disappear when the bill came due. It left her lucid mind to do dishes.” - Ann Brashares

78. “Όταν θυμώνουμε με τους άλλους, θυμώνουμε με μια πλευρά του εαυτού μας. Με αυτό που δεν θέλουμε να είμαστε. (Γιάντες)” - Αμάντα Μιχαλοπούλου

79. “Am I ever angry or frustrated? I only feel angry sometimes when I see waste, when things that we waste are what people need, things that would save them from dying. Frustrated? No, never.” - Mother Teresa

80. “Anger makes you smaller, while forgiveness forces you to grow beyond who you were.” - Jonathan Anthony Burkett

81. “Chorus of women: […] Oh! my good, gallant Lysistrata, and all my friends, be ever like a bundle of nettles; never let you anger slacken; the wind of fortune blown our way.” - Aristophanes

82. “She looked at the last thing she had written and she felt calm. Then she crossed the words out vehemently, scribbling until even the shape of the sentence was destroyed.” - Helen Oyeyemi

83. “The typical atheist rebels against God as a teenager rebels against his parents. When his own desires or standards are not fulfilled in the way that he sees fit, he, in revolt, storms out of the house in denial of the Word of God and in scrutiny of a great deal of those who stand by the Word of God. The epithet 'Heavenly Father' is a grand reflection, a relation to that of human nature.” - Criss Jami

84. “I kept a straight face while my inner Neanderthal spluttered and then went on a mental rampage through a hypothetical produce section, knocking over shelves and spattering fruit everywhere in sheer frustration, screaming, 'JUST TELL ME WHOSE SKULL TO CRACK WITH MY CLUB, DAMMIT!” - Jim Butcher

85. “When you beat up someone physically, you get excercise and stress relief; when you assault him verbally on the Internet, you just harm yourself.” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

86. “Katherine is the master of anger; she dominates anger. She takes anger in her hands and twists its neck, ripping its head off. She throws anger against the wall and stomps it to death. Her voice rises, it changes, it conjures up ghosts and cusses in a spitting Irish brogue. Then, when she's tapped out empty, she picked anger up between her a thumb and a forefinger and carries it outside and drops it in the trash. On her way back, she scoops up forgiveness like a bouquet, sniffs it deep and arranges it in a vase. She sets forgiveness down, shining in the middle of everything.” - Colleen Clayton

87. “Marcus looked down. “Ah, man! This was my favorite shirt. Who tore it?” he asked, trying to pull the ragged edges together.” - Ripley Patton

88. “I'm not really sure why. But... do you stop loving someone just because they betray you? I don't think so. That's what makes the betrayal hurt so much - pain, frustration, anger... and I still loved her. I still do.” - Brandon Sanderson

89. “The white woman across the aisle from me says 'Look, look at all the history, that houseon the hill there is over two hundred years old, 'as she points out the window past meinto what she has been taught. I have learnedlittle more about American history during my few daysback East than what I expected and far lessof what we should all know of the tribal storieswhose architecture is 15,000 years olderthan the corners of the house that sitsmuseumed on the hill. 'Walden Pond, 'the woman on the train asks, 'Did you see Walden Pond? 'and I don't have a cruel enough heart to breakher own by telling her there are five Walden Pondson my little reservation out Westand at least a hundred more surrounding Spokane, the city I pretended to call my home. 'Listen, 'I could have told her. 'I don't give a shitabout Walden. I know the Indians were living storiesaround that pond before Walden's grandparents were bornand before his grandparents' grandparents were born.I'm tired of hearing about Don-fucking-Henley saving it, too, because that's redundant. If Don Henley's brothers and sistersand mothers and father hadn't come here in the first placethen nothing would need to be saved.'But I didn't say a word to the woman about WaldenPond because she smiled so much and seemed delightedthat I thought to bring her an orange juiceback from the food car. I respect eldersof every color. All I really did was eatmy tasteless sandwich, drink my Diet Pepsiand nod my head whenever the woman pointed outanother little piece of her country's historywhile I, as all Indians have donesince this war began, made plansfor what I would do and say the next timesomebody from the enemy thought I was one of their own.” - Sherman Alexie

90. “He hadn't meant to get so angry at Morgan. He didn't often get angry at other people. There was no sense in it. The person you were angry at was rarely ever repentant. Now, getting angry with yourself had some merit. It showed you had sense enough to chastise the one person who had any hope of benefiting from it. And he was plenty angry with himself. For many things.” - Sarah Addison Allen