Many people have been able to cure their anger simply by looking into a mirror.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
In the first century CE, the Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote a short book called On Anger, which to this day, in my view, remains the best book on anger management.
The first thing we should know about anger is that it is both learnt and highly contagious. Seneca tells the story of a child who was raised in Plato’s house. When the child was returned to his parents, he saw his father shouting, and remarked, ‘I never saw this at Plato’s house.’
If you are surrounded by angry people, it is hard not, in turn, to become angry—and conversely, calm people tend to calm us. In the Rhetoric, Aristotle remarks that even wild animals grow gentle in the company of the calm—although I wouldn’t go to the zoo to test this out.
So our first defence against anger is the company that we keep. Avoid the angry, seek out the calm.
Why We Get Angry
Beyond this, it is important to understand why we get angry. Anger feels powerful because it converts injury or helplessness into reaction and aggression. But it is in fact a sign of weakness, revealing the very injury or helplessness that gave rise to it.
And it is often irrational: we assume the worst about people, exaggerate the harm they have done us, and interpret their incompetence or lack of thought as contempt.
We sometimes rationalise our anger as moral courage, that is, as a spur to virtue. But even in the face of terrible injustice, anger is not required to obtain redress or do the right thing. Indeed, anger may impair our ability to act effectively.
How Anger Defeats Us
If anger arises from an injury, it often inflicts a second injury of its own making. Whereas other vices impel the mind, anger overthrows it. Anger, said Horace, is a short-lived madness. It is from anger that Alexander the Great killed the friend who saved his life—the conqueror of kings, himself conquered by madness.
We get angry because we seek reparation. But often, we make things much worse than if we hadn’t got angry. If someone has wronged us, we would do much better to calmly explain this to them, rather than lose our temper, and, with it, their ear.
The Surest Cure for Anger
Anger begins with a judgement: someone has wronged me, and I must punish them. But it is easier to revise our judgement than to rage against the world, to rage against how things are.
Before that judgement carries us away, there is a little space. Maybe we can’t prevent the first flash of irritation. But we can refuse to go with it. In that little space that we have, we can ask ourselves three things:
Am I expecting too much of the world?
How is getting angry going to help me?
Who will remember this tomorrow, or in a year’s time, or in a hundred years’ time?
That’s why the surest cure for anger is delay.
When he retired from the imperial court, the Stoic philosopher Athenodorus advised the emperor Augustus: ‘Whenever you become angry, Caesar, say or do nothing until you have repeated the twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet.’ At this, Augustus seized his departing teacher by the hand and replied, ‘I still have need of your presence here.’
Perhaps we all do. The surest way to prevent anger from ruling us is to refuse to act while it is on the throne.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Essay substantially revised on 17 August 2026.
After his brother Novatus asked him ‘how anger may be soothed’, the Stoic philosopher Seneca penned his famous treatise, On Anger (c. 45 CE).
Anger, says Seneca, is a bad habit that people tend to pick up from their parents. When a child who was raised at Plato’s house was returned to his parents and witnessed his father shouting, he said, ‘I never saw this at Plato’s house.’
Anger is like a virus. If we are around angry people, it is hard not to lose our temper, however temperate we may normally be. For this reason alone, we ought to prefer the company of mild, level-headed people. For my urban readers, even wild animals become gentle in the company of the calm (though I wouldn’t rely on it).
Anger Is a Loss of Perspective
We should also resist our egocentric tendency to believe the worst about others. Often, the people at whom we are most liable to get angry are those who are in fact trying to help us—although, of course, not as much as we would like. In their minds, they are only trying to do what they think is best for them, and we, by our anger, are trying to thwart them—which is why they tend to return our anger. If what they are doing is not in their best interests, then we should calmly explain this to them, rather than losing our temper and, with it, their ear.
As for the things that anger us, they are often mere slights or annoyances that do not do us any real harm. Luxury debilitates the mind and undermines our sense of perspective, so that pampered people (like us) are more prone to anger over trivial things.
Events are events. It is we who attach emotion to them. And it is far easier to adjust our expectation of the world than to change the world itself.
Anger Does Us More Harm than Good
Even if someone murders our father or child, anger is not required to honour their memory, obtain justice, and, more generally, do the right and honourable thing. Recognising an injustice and becoming angry about it need not be one and the same thing—and, in fact, superadded anger may impair our ability to address the injustice. Many people think that anger is a show of virtue or, at least, a spur to virtue; at most, it can substitute for virtue in those who are lacking it.
Anger and grief only add to our existing pain, and often do more harm than the things out of which they arise. It is out of anger that Alexander the Great killed the friend who had saved his life—that great conqueror of kings, himself brought down by anger. And it is also out of anger that Medea slaughtered her innocent children. Will you suffer a stroke or die from a heart attack because someone said something out of place?
In Norse myth, Angrboða—the mother of Fenrir, Jörmungandr, and Hel—means ‘she who brings grief’. The same angr, meaning grief or distress, gave us our word anger. The name preserves a psychological truth: beneath anger there is often grief—and grief indulged may give birth to monsters.
As Horace put it, anger is a short-lived madness (ira furor brevis est). Whereas other vices bend the mind, anger overthrows it. The angry person is like a collapsing building that destroys itself in the very act of bearing down upon others.
Anger Is Contrary to Our Nature
Being social animals, like ants, bees, and wolves, human beings are born to provide and receive assistance. Anger, which, on the contrary, seeks to arrogate and annihilate, is so inimical to our nature that some angry people have benefited simply from looking in a mirror.
Those who are unwilling to check their anger and work with others for the common good are like wasps in a beehive, gorging on the honey of others without contributing any of their own.
For all these reasons, we should never get angry. We might feel the beginnings of anger, but then reject this passionate impression that threatens to overthrow our reason and the tranquillity and dignity that follows in its train. We may not be able to prevent the first flash of irritation, any more than we can prevent ourselves from flinching at a sudden noise. Our freedom begins with what we do next, as we recognise anger for what it is: irrational and, often, unfair.
Now Here’s Your Answer
To regain perspective when angry, to reclaim our sanity, we might ask ourselves:
Am I expecting too much out of the world?
How is getting angry going to help me?
Who will remember this in a day or in a year, or in a hundred years?
But the surest cure for anger is delay, because it gives us a much better chance of rejecting our passionate impression.
Before rising into the first emperor of Rome, Augustus—then Octavian—was taught by the Stoic philosopher Athenodorus Cananites at Apollonia, in modern-day Albania, where he received the news of Julius Caesar’s demise. Athenodorus followed Octavian back to Rome and remained by his side as he deftly achieved that which his great uncle Caesar could or did not. When, on account of his old age, Athenodorus begged to be dismissed and was at last taking leave of Augustus, he reminded him, ‘Whenever you get angry, Caesar, do not say or do anything before repeating to yourself the twenty-four letters of the alphabet.’
At this, the emperor seized Athenodorus by the hand and said, ‘I still have need of your presence here.’
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Neel Burton is author of Stoic Stories: Stoicism by Its Best Stories. Through the lives of Zeno, Cleanthes, Cato, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and many others, Stoic Stories introduces the philosophy not through abstract theory, but through the memorable stories that have kept it alive for more than two thousand years.
Why the Stoics Believed Success Is Not the Measure of a Good Life
Antoine Bourdelle’s Herakles the Archer (1909) captures the Stoic ideal: complete commitment to the action, complete detachment from the outcome.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Essay substantially revised on 12 August 2026.
We tend to measure ourselves by success: the goals we reach, the recognition we receive, the outcomes of our efforts. But for the Stoics, this is precisely where we go wrong. Because the world has a way of foiling even our best-laid plans. The question, then, is this: if success cannot be guaranteed, what should we measure ourselves by?
The Stoics captured this predicament in a simple but timeless image: the archer. The archer does all he can to shoot accurately. But once the arrow leaves the bow, its fate is no longer within the archer’s control.
The lesson is not that the archer should stop caring about the target. It is that the archer should understand where responsibility ends — and peace of mind begins. Behind this distinction lies the deeper Stoic conviction that a good life cannot be measured by outcomes alone.
The Stoic Archer
The allegory of the archer features in On the Ends of Good and Evil, a Socratic dialogue dedicated to Brutus, murderer of Caesar, in which Cicero, through a number of mouthpieces, expounds and critiques the central tenets of the three main philosophies of his day: Stoicism, Epicureanism, and a version of Platonism. Cicero puts the allegory into the mouth of his contemporary and ally, the Stoic statesman Cato the Younger, even though it predates both Cato and Cicero:
Take the case of one whose task it is to shoot a spear or arrow straight at some target. One’s ultimate aim is to do all in one’s power to shoot straight, and the same applies with our ultimate goal. In this kind of example, it is to shoot straight that one must do all one can; none the less, it is to do all one can to accomplish the task that is really the ultimate aim. It is just the same with what we call the supreme good in life. To actually hit the target is, as we say, to be selected but not sought.
The allegory encapsulates the essence of Stoic action. The archer does everything he can to shoot accurately: his bow is well strung, his arrows are carefully calibrated, and he has taken full account of the prevailing wind and other variables. Even so, the arrow may miss the bullseye, or even the target itself. Once it leaves the bow, it is subject to forces beyond the archer’s control — a sudden change in wind, an unexpected movement, or some other contingency.
Similarly, having decided upon the optimal course of action, the good Stoic carries it out to the best of their ability. But whether the enterprise succeeds depends on unpredictable external factors — or, as the Stoics called them, “externals”. Thus, the good Stoic bases self-worth and happiness not on the success of their actions, but on their correctness. The target matters, of course — but it is not what makes the archer a good archer.
Intention Rather Than Outcome
The Stoics were not indifferent to outcomes, but understood that the quality of an action and its result are not the same thing.
In the words of Epictetus:
Some things are up to us and some things are not.
Our judgements, intentions, and choices belong to us. Reputation, success, and the opinions of others do not.
Seneca echoed the same idea:
The wise person considers intention, rather than outcome, in every situation. The beginnings are in our power; the results are judged by fortune, to which I grant no jurisdiction over myself… Death at the hands of a robber is not a condemnation.
This is not quite saying that we must do the right thing, but that the right thing is the most that we can do — and therefore all we need worry about.
The Secret to Stoic Calm
Chance, says Seneca, has a great deal of power in our lives, “necessarily so, since it is by chance that we are alive.” When it comes to things over which we do not have complete control, we play our part and do our best, like the Stoic archer, but we do not fret over the outcome — which, if we have done our best, says nothing about us.
Thus, we seek to be loveable, not to be loved, because the one is within our control whereas the other is not. We seek to write well, not to become a bestselling author, because the one is within our control whereas the other is not. We seek to act with integrity, not to be admired for our integrity, because the one is within our control whereas the other is not.
So long as we focus on the things that are within our control, we will be calm and happy. But if we concern ourselves with things outside our control, we surrender our peace of mind to chance. We become anxious and angry and miserable, and all on false grounds.
The Stoic archer teaches a simple but demanding lesson:
Aim carefully. Do your best. But do not tie yourself to outcomes.
They are none of your business.
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If this essay spoke to you, you might look into Stoic Stories, a comprehensive account of Stoic philosophy presented through its greatest stories.
The Death of Socrates, by Jacques-Louis David (1787). Others may scatter the words. Only we can turn them into an insult.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Essay substantially revised on 12 August 2026.
A playwright once mocked the Stoic philosopher Cleanthes before a packed theatre in Athens. ‘Driven by Cleanthes’ folly like dumb herds,’ he declaimed.
Everyone waited for the old philosopher’s response. But Cleanthes neither protested nor replied. He did not even alter his expression. Faced with such composure, the audience turned against the playwright, heckling him off the stage. Later, the playwright came to apologise, but Cleanthes brushed off the incident as too trivial to dwell upon.
What did Cleanthes understand that the rest of us so often forget?
Insults can sting. They can undermine our confidence, poison our relationships, and linger in the mind—sometimes, for years. A cutting remark from a colleague, a sarcastic comment from a friend, a stranger’s contemptuous glance, being left out, ignored, or spoken over—these small slights can accumulate into resentment, anxiety, and self-doubt.
The Stoics did not deny the pain of such experiences. But they did make a remarkable claim: an insult does not exist independently of our response to it. Words are only sounds, gestures only movements. They become insults only when we accept them as such. This is not to deny that people can be malicious or cruel, or, at best, thoughtless. They can. The question is whether we are prepared to hand them authority over our peace of mind.
First, Ask Yourself This
Whenever someone appears to insult us, we should consider three questions.
Is what they are saying true, or partly true?
Do they know us well enough to judge?
And why are they saying it?
If the criticism is fair and comes from someone whose judgement we respect, then it is not really an insult but valuable information. Parents, teachers, trusted friends, and respected colleagues often tell us things that we would rather not hear. Their intention is not to diminish us, but to help us grow.
If, on the other hand, the criticism comes from someone who is ill-informed, malicious, or simply foolish, why should we grant it any weight? We do not feel wounded if a dog growls at us, a naughty child calls us names, or someone beside themselves raves against us. Why should an unreasonable person have any greater power over us?
Either way, offence begins to lose its grip. Often, an ‘insult’ is not really an insult. It is admonition, advice, or just noise.
The Weakest Response
True insult or not, our instinct is to get angry. But anger is the weakest possible response.
It tells the other person that they have succeeded in disturbing us. It suggests that there may be some truth in what they have said. And it unsettles our judgement, making us liable to say or do things that we later regret. As Seneca observed, ‘Anger, if not restrained, is frequently more hurtful to us than the injury that provokes it.’
People who habitually insult others are often struggling with frustrations of their own. Their words reveal more about their character than ours. If anything, they deserve our pity rather than our anger.
Answering Back
The perfect put-down is one of life’s great fantasies. Unfortunately, it usually occurs too late. The French have a delightful expression for this: l’esprit de l’escalier—’staircase wit’—because the burning reply only enters our mind when we’re on the way home.
But even when a clever retort is perfectly timed, it is rarely the strongest response. By exchanging insults, we allow the encounter to become a contest on the insulter’s terms. We bring ourselves down to their level while raising them to ours.
Humour, however, is different. When used lightly, it exposes the absurdity of the situation without escalating it. The Roman statesman Cato the Younger was once spat upon by an opponent in court. Wiping his face, he remarked, “I will swear to anyone that people are wrong to say you cannot use your mouth.”
Another strategy is to embrace the criticism. “If you knew me better,” we might reply, “you would find much greater faults than that.” Such responses undermine the insult by depriving it of its oxygen.
The Strongest Response
But humour, too, demands wit, timing, and presence of mind. The strongest response is often the simplest: to ignore the insult altogether.
One day, a boor accidentally struck Cato at the public baths. Upon recognising the senator, the horrified man hurried to apologise.
“I don’t remember being struck,” Cato replied.
The point was not to humiliate the man, but to show that the incident had not disturbed his tranquillity—that, though his body had been struck, his mind had not been touched.
This was also Cleanthes’ secret. He did not suppress his anger. He had no need to. The playwright’s words had remained just that—words—because he had not collaborated in turning them into an insult.
Of course, there are occasions when we should speak up. If someone repeatedly insults us at work, at home, or in any unavoidable relationship, calmly and firmly asserting our boundaries may be the wisest course.
The crucial distinction is between defending our dignity and defending our ego. The first may sometimes be necessary. The second seldom is.
The Insult We Create
An insult begins with another person’s words, but it ends with our judgement.
We cannot control whether people are careless, cruel, arrogant, or simply foolish. Nor should we pretend that hurtful words do not hurt. They can wound, and some wounds take a long time to heal. But we need not add a second injury to the first: the injury of allowing another person’s behaviour to disturb our peace of mind.
The Stoics understood that our freedom lies not in preventing every insult, but in refusing to become its accomplice. We may examine criticism, learn from what is useful, laugh at what is absurd, ignore what is beneath us, and challenge what genuinely crosses a boundary. But we need not hand over our tranquillity to the person who would disturb it.
A barking dog, a naughty child, or someone raving beside themselves may all make noise. But noise is not the same as an insult. It becomes an insult only when we assent to it.
That was Cleanthes’ achievement.
The playwright thought he was insulting a philosopher.
In reality, he was only scattering words into the air.
Is Desire a Form of Madness—or the First Step on the Ladder of Love?
Saint Sebastian in Ecstasy, by Guido Reni, c. 1615.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Essay substantially revised on 8 September 2026.
For the Apostle Paul, marriage has, it seems, no higher purpose than the containment of lust:
For I would that all men were even as I myself… But if they cannot contain let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn.
Lust is the strong, passionate desire for something: not only sex, but also food, drink, money, fame, power, or knowledge, among others. Even so, owing to the historical resonance of Matthew 5:27-28, lust has come to be associated almost exclusively with sexual desire:
Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery:
But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.
There are many reasons for which we might desire sex, for example, to be close to someone, to hold on to or manipulate that person, to dominate that person, to injure a third party, to injure ourself, to define ourself, to feel alive, to pass the time, to make a child, or to gain some advantage such as money or preferment. But with lust, sex is contemplated primarily for itself, or, more precisely, for the pleasure that it may procure.
It is possible to seek out sex for itself without this desire being lustful. For the desire to be lustful, it has to be disordered, that is, inappropriately strong or inappropriately directed—although what counts as inappropriate is, ultimately, a value judgement that varies according to person, time, and place. People who experience lust without acting upon it are lustful without being lecherous; but if they act upon it, especially repeatedly or habitually, they are both lustful and lecherous.
King David was undone by his lust for the bathing Bathsheba, and Bill Clinton, while still the most powerful man in the world, was impeached following his affair with a young White House intern. In the Divine Comedy, souls that have committed the sin of lust are blown around in a whirlwind that symbolises their lack of self-control. More recently, MRI studies have found that patterns of brain activity in people experiencing lust are similar to those in addicts receiving their fix.
No surprise, then, that reason and philosophy are a poor defence against lust. In Greco-Roman art, Eros/Cupid is depicted as a child, and the ithyphallic (erect) satyrs are only half-human. According to mediaeval lore, when Alexander the Great found Phyllis (by some accounts, Alexander’s wife) riding Aristotle like a horse around the garden, he exclaimed, “Master, can this be!” Quick on his feet, Aristotle replied, “If lust can so overcome wisdom, just think what it could do to a young man like you.”
Shakespeare went so far as to compare lust to a form of madness, for instance, in Sonnet 129:
Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action…
…
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated, as a swallow’d bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit and in possession so…
But it is not just that lust can, at times, overcome reason. For Schopenhauer, the sexual impulse is the most powerful manifestation of the Will, the blind striving that directs all human behaviour. This idea is certainly borne out by modern advertising, which seems mostly about suggesting that buying a particular product will help us to obtain the objects of our lust. In contrast, no one ever made a fortune by peddling restraint or wisdom. It is sometimes said that everything is about sex, except for sex itself, which is about power—or would that be the other way round?
Even the Holy Church, when seeking to express ecstatic communion with God, could do no better than Bernini’s orgasmic Ecstasy of Saint Teresa.
Schopenhauer, who had read Indian philosophy, held that, so long as we are enthralled to lust, we can know no peace or happiness.
In the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, Krishna declares that, along with anger and greed, lust is one of the three gates to Naraka, or Hell. When the warrior Arjuna asks him by what one is impelled to sinful acts ‘even unwillingly, as if engaged by force’, he replies:
It is lust only, Arjuna, which is born from contact with the material mode of passion and later transformed into wrath, and which is the all-devouring sinful enemy of this world… Therefore, O Arjuna, best of the Bharatas, curb in the very beginning this great symbol of sin—by regulating the senses, and slay this destroyer of knowledge and self-realisation…
Lust, in the broader sense of coveting or craving, is also at the heart of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism:
1. Suffering (dukkha) is inherent in all life.
2. The cause of all suffering is lust.
3. There is a natural way to eliminate all suffering.
4. The Noble Eightfold Path is that way.
Lust, taught the Buddha, can be eliminated through attaining a higher level of consciousness. This idea can also be found sporadically in the Western canon. For instance, the poet Charles Baudelaire (d. 1867) went so far as to suggest that artists should never have sex: ‘Only the brute is good at coupling, and copulation is the lyricism of the masses. To copulate is to enter into another—and the artist never emerges from himself.’
As well as being harmful to the subject, lust is harmful also to the object. Lust is the only appetite that is for a person rather than an object, but a person qua object rather than qua person, shorn of human qualities such as dignity and agency. The lustful person is unconcerned about the blossoming of the object of his lust. More than that, he will act against her best interests to feed his appetite, and, with his appetite sated, discard her as ‘one casts aside a lemon which has been sucked dry’. These acerbic words belong to the philosopher Immanuel Kant (d. 1804), who held that a person should never be treated as a means-to-an-end but only ever as an end-in-herself.
It is in the nature of lust that it seeks to possess or ‘have’ the other, to incorporate and degrade the other by undermining her integrity and autonomy. In One Fat Englishman (1963), a novel by Kingsley Amis, the protagonist says that, when it comes to sex, his aim is ‘to convert a creature who is cool, dry, calm, articulate, independent, purposeful into a creature who is the opposite of these: to demonstrate to an animal which is pretending not to be an animal that it is an animal.’
Lust, in the words of Shakespeare, is ‘a waste of shame’. To hide that shame, many cultures magic up a male demon who lies upon sleepers to have sex with them. This incubus (and the less prevalent female equivalent, or succubus) is made to carry the blame for embarrassing nocturnal emissions, accusations of abuse or adultery, and even unexplained children. Another response to the shame of lust, much more prevalent in our culture, is to pass off lust as… romantic love. Unlike lust, love is respectable, even commendable. We look on approvingly at a pair holding hands or hugging, but turn around for the police as soon as they start acting out their lust.
Love is the acceptable face of lust, but the love that is lust in disguise is arguably even more perverse and destructive, and, in that sense, even more shameful, than the lust that knows its game. How to tell lust and love apart? While lust is hasty, furtive, and deceitful, love is patient, measured, and constant. While lust is all about taking, love is all about sharing. And while lust is all about degrading and destroying, love is all about building. Lust can lead to love, but is a poor start and a poor basis, akin to choosing one’s favourite book by the picture on the cover.
There is nothing wrong with sexual desire per se, and none of us would be here without it. Sexual desire is a life force, to be enjoyed and even celebrated. But, as with alcohol, the problems start when it turns from servant into master. Unfettered lust is especially unbecoming in the elderly, because, as the saying goes, there is no fool like an old fool.
Lust is hard to extinguish, but can more readily be redirected. If Kat is having a bad day, she can take out her frustration on anyone or everyone who crosses her path—the receptionist, her colleagues, her partner—or she can instead discharge all her nervous energy into the novel that she is writing. This second instance of anger displacement, working at her novel, is also an instance of sublimation, the channelling of unproductive or destructive forces into socially condoned and often constructive activities. As Baudelaire put it, ‘the more a man cultivates the arts, the less randy he becomes.’
For Plato, lust is the first step on the ladder of love and not to be shunned or shunted. In the Symposium, the lover begins with one beautiful body, before recognising that its beauty is shared by other bodies. From beautiful bodies, he rises to beautiful souls, practices, forms of knowledge, and finally Beauty itself. Desire is not suppressed but educated, redirected from the particular and perishable to the universal and eternal.
Lust contains its own cure, so long as one is able and willing to learn.
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If this essay spoke to you, you might look into For Better For Worse, an unconventional exploration of romantic love, marriage, and lasting relationships. For a broader exploration of love, desire, jealousy, and the emotions that shape our lives, see Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.
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