TEMPER
Addison, Joseph
A cheerful temper, joined with innocence, will make beauty attractive, knowledge delightful, and wit good-natured. It will lighten sickness, poverty, and affliction; convert ignorance into an amiable simplicity, and render deformity itself agreeable.
Burke, Edmund
Unsociable tempers are contracted in solitude, which will in the end not fail of corrupting the understanding as well as the manners, and of utterly disqualifying a man for the satisfactions and duties of life. Men must be taken as they are, and we neither make them nor ourselves better by flying from or quarrelling with them.
Buxton, Charles
Bad temper is its own scourge. Few things are more bitter than to feel bitter. A man's venom poisons himself more than his victim.
Cecil, Richard
If a man has a quarrelsome temper, let him alone. The world will soon find him employment. He will soon meet with some one stronger than himself, who will repay him better than you can. A man may fight duels all his life, if he is disposed to quarrel.
Cherbuliez, Charles Victor
Men who have had a great deal of experience learn not to lose their tempers.
Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope
A man who cannot command his temper should not think of being a man of business.
Clayton, Robert
If religion does nothing for your temper it has done nothing for your soul.
Cumberland, Richard
Of all bad things by which mankind are curst, their own bad tempers surely are the worst.
Empson, William
The difficult part of good temper consists in forbearance, and accommodation to the ill-humor of others.
Fuller, Thomas
Those who are surly and imperious to their inferiors are generally humble, flattering, and cringing to their superiors.
Greville, Lord
It is an unhappy, and yet I fear a true reflection, that they who have uncommon easiness and softness of temper have seldom very noble and nice sensations of soul.
Helps, Sir Arthur
Temperament is but the atmosphere of character, while its groundwork in nature is fixed and unchangeable.
The perverse temper of children is too often corrected with the rod, when the cause lies in fact in a diseased state of body.
More than half the difficulties of the world would be allayed or removed by the exhibition of good temper.
Irving, Washington
Good temper, like a sunny day, sheds a brightness over everything; it is the sweetener of toil and the soother of disquietude.
A tart temper never mellows with age; and a sharp tongue is the only edged tool that grows keener with constant use.
James, John Angell
Too many have no idea of the subjection of their temper to the influence of religion, and yet what is changed if the temper is not? If a man is as passionate, malicious, resentful, sullen, moody, or morose after his conversion as before it, what is he converted from or to?
Mason, John M.
I have often thought that it required as much grace to keep the apostle Peter from knocking a man down in the street as to make the apostle John look like an angel.
Rochefoucauld, Francois, Duc de la
The happiness and misery of men depend no less on temper than fortune.
Scott, Sir Walter
Courtesy of temper, when it is used to veil churlishness of deed, is but a knight's girdle around the breast of a base clown.
Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper
Through certain humors or passions, and from temper merely, a man may be completely miserable, let his outward circumstances be ever so fortunate.
Temper, if ungoverned, governs the whole man.
Sidney, Sir Philip
A noble heart, like the sun, showeth its greatest countenance in its lowest estate.
Stanley, Edward
An attribute so precious, that it becomes a virtue, is a gentle and constant equality of temper. What an unutterable charm does it give to the society of the man who possesses it! How is at possible to avoid loving him whom we always find with serenity on his brow, and a smile on his countenance!
Tatler, The
Inviolable fidelity, good-humor, and complacency of temper, outlive all the charms of a fine face, and make the decays of it invisible.
