Anger is a passion, a negative emotion the Stoics want to minimize. Seneca’s essay On Anger is the best source of Stoic advice on anger. Anger, the desire to repay suffering, is brief madness, says Seneca. Because an angry man lacks self-control, is forgetful of kinship, is deaf to reason and advice, gets aroused by trifles, and doesn’t know what’s true and false—“very like a falling rock which breaks itself to pieces upon the very thing which it crushes.”
