Daily Inspiration Quote by Franz Schubert

Schubert’s line lands like a polite note that suddenly turns into a fist through the paper. It begins as self-help - “Above all things, I must not get angry” - the kind of moral bookkeeping you’d expect from a disciplined artist trying to protect his work from his moods. Then it swerves into grotesque, almost cartoonish violence: not just “I lash out,” but “I knock all the teeth out,” and not an enemy, a “poor wretch.” The phrasing does two things at once: it confesses an impulse and ridicules it.

The intent isn’t to posture as a tough guy; it’s to dramatize the sheer scale of anger he’s trying to keep contained. He writes like someone startled by his own capacity for escalation, making the threat so extreme that it reads as a warning to himself. The “must not” is the superego talking; the teeth are the id.

Context matters. Schubert wasn’t a swaggering public celebrity; he was a working composer in a cramped Vienna, dependent on fragile networks of friends, patrons, and performers. In that world, anger isn’t cathartic - it’s reputational suicide. The line reveals a man who knows his temperament could cost him rooms, relationships, rehearsals, commissions. It also hints at the Romantic-era belief that the artist’s interior weather is volatile, even dangerous: genius as a pressure system.

Subtext: he’s terrified that emotion, once unleashed, won’t stay “proportionate.” The joke is that he can only describe restraint by imagining total ruin.