Seneca on a daily habit to increase virtue and reduce anger

Sextius had this habit, and when the day was over and he had retired to his nightly rest, he would put these questions to his soul: ‘What bad habit have you cured today? What fault have you resisted? In what respect are you better?’ Anger will cease and become more controllable if it finds that it must appear before a judge every day. Can anything be more excellent than this practice of thoroughly sifting the whole day? And how delightful the sleep that follows this self-examination – how tranquil it is, how deep and untroubled, when the soul has either praised or admonished itself, and when this secret examiner and critic of self has given report of its own character! I avail myself of this privilege, and every day I plead my cause before the bar of self. When the light has been removed from sight, and my wife, long aware of my habit, has become silent, I scan the whole of my day and retrace all my deeds and words. I conceal nothing from myself, I omit nothing. For why should I shrink from any of my mistakes, when I may commune thus with myself?

            ‘See that you never do that again; I will pardon you this time. In that dispute, you spoke too offensively; after this don’t have encounters with ignorant people; those who have never learned do not want to learn. You reproved that man more frankly than you ought, and consequently you have not so much mended him as offended him. In the future, consider not only the truth of what you say, but also whether the man to whom you are speaking can endure the truth. A good man accepts reproof gladly; the worse a man is the more bitterly he resents it.’

Seneca, On Anger, 3.36.1-4

Seneca on anger management

I arrived at my house in Alba completely exhausted by the journey, which was thoroughly uncomfortable for an old man like me, thrashed about in that heaving carriage. And what do you know? Nothing was ready for my arrival, apart from myself. So I’m writing to you from my old man’s bed (which is of course unmade), resting, unbathed (for there’s no water) and so tired that I’m not all that sorry that the baker and the cook (now that we’ve located them!) are slower than snails.

All these difficulties have made me aware again of how calm life is if you don’t take its inconveniences to heart, and how we wear ourselves out by magnifying them. It is indeed true that my baker has no bread — but perhaps the farm manager will have some, or a tenant, or the steward. “Not very nice bread, though,” you’ll say. But wait a minute: it will soon transform itself by hunger into food fit for a king. So I’ll wait to eat until I have my own bread, or hunger makes me less picky.

We must teach ourselves to bear things. You could be enormously rich, with a flotilla of servants, and still be mown down by obstacles thrown your way arbitrarily. None of us can have everything we want, but we can refrain from wanting what we haven’t got and cheerfully make the best of what’s to hand. Tonight’s culinary improvisation just might be more tasty, and will certainly be less monotonous, than the dinner I had anticipated. 

Perhaps freedom consists of a stomach that knows when to be quiet.

Seneca: On Luxury (Letters from a Stoic)

Anger and the mean (Aristotle)

Anyone can become angry. That is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the
right purpose and in the right way - that is not easy.

ARISTOTLE , The Nicomachean Ethics


This quotation is given at the start of Dan Goleman's Emotional Intelligence.
It seems to me that what Aristotle is talking about would be described better as "emotional wisdom"

An example of using anger wisely is Betty Williams, one of the Irish Peace Women in the 1970s.
Her anger at seeing at first hand the death of 3 children in the Irish violence was channelled into co-founding the Community for Peace People
Williams and co-founder Mairead Corrigan were awared the Nobel Peace Price in 1977.