A Quote by Maya Angelou

I'm very blessed that I have a healthy temper. I can become quite angry and burning in anger, but I have never been bitter. Bitterness is a corrosive, terrible acid. It just eats you and makes you sick.

Maya Angelou

Quote Topics

Acid Anger Angry Become Been Bitter Bitterness Blessed Burning Corrosive Eats Healthy Just Makes Never Quite Sick Temper Terrible Very

Quote Author

Maya Angelou
American - Poet
April 4, 1928 - May 28, 2014

You should be angry. You must not be bitter. Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. It doesn't do anything to the object of its displeasure. So use that anger. You write it. You paint it. You dance it. You march it. You vote it. You do everything about it. You talk it. Never stop talking it.

Maya Angelou

Of ill-temper there are three kinds: irascibility, bitterness, sullenness. It belongs to the ill-tempered man to be unable to bear either small slights or defeats but to be given to retaliation and revenge, and easily moved to anger by any chance deed or word. Ill-temper is accompanied by excitability of character, instability, bitter speech, and liability to take offence at trifles and to feel these feelings quickly and on slight occasions.

Aristotle

Whenever you are in anger, remember yourself. In that very remembering the focus changes, the gestalt changes. You become more and more centred. Anger remains there just on the periphery of your being, but you know now that it is separate from you. You are not angry, you are only a witness to it. Now it is up to you to choose to be angry or not to be angry. You are no more identified; hence the freedom to choose.

Rajneesh

Emotions can create problems that do not exist. It's fine to be justifiably angry. But, it's not okay to let that anger fester long enough to become bitterness.

Ruben Papian

Anger is active sadness; sadness is inactive anger. They are not two things. Watch your own behaviour. When do you find yourself sad? You find yourself sad only in situations where you cannot be angry. The boss in the office says something and you cannot be angry; it is uneconomical. You cannot be angry and you have to go on smiling - then you become sad. The energy has become inactive. You come home, and with your wife you find a small thing, anything irrelevant, and you become angry.

Rajneesh

A man can submit today in order to resist tomorrow. My submission had been such. And because I had not been free to show my real feeling, to voice my true thoughts, my submission had bred bitterness and anger. And there were nearly ten million others who had submitted with equal anger and bitterness.

Peter Abrahams

There was no time for bitterness now: eat bitterness, and bitterness eats you.

Joan Slonczewski

Joyful let the soul be in the present, let it disdain to trouble about what is beyond and temper bitterness with a laugh. Nothing is blessed forever.

Horace

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

Anger is not bitterness. Bitterness can go on eating at a man's heart and mind forever. Anger spends itself in its own time.

Madeleine L'Engle

Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.

Maya Angelou

Most of the things that make you angry are of very small consequence. And what a terrible price you are paying for your anger.

Gordon B. Hinckley

Be angry, it's okay. To be angry, that is very human. And to learn how to smile at your anger and make peace with your anger is very nice.

Nhat Hanh

It’s not just what you eat that matters, it’s what eats you. You can have all the right macrobiotics and organic food, but if your body is filled with resentment, worry, fear, lust, guilt, anger, bitterness, or any other emotional disease, it’s going to shorten your life.

Rick Warren

I'm not angry, I'm not an angry person, but I do sometimes like playing with the perception of anger, as in pretending that I'm more angry than I actually am, and sometimes it works quite well.