Life & Wisdom Quote by Francis Quarles

Anger, in Quarles's hands, isn’t a righteous fire so much as a guest you can tolerate only briefly before it starts rearranging the furniture. The line works because it frames emotion as hospitality and time as moral chemistry: you can feed anger, even sit with it, but if you let it stay overnight it stops being a feeling and becomes a habit. That “repast” versus “repose” distinction is doing the heavy lifting. A repast is temporary, bodily, almost neutral; repose suggests intimacy, a surrender of guard. Quarles is warning that the real danger isn’t the flare-up, it’s the sleepover.

The subtext is Puritan-era moral psychology, the kind that treats the inner life as a domestic economy where small indulgences compound into vice. Quarles, a devotional poet writing in a Britain fraying toward civil war, isn’t offering a self-help tip; he’s policing the border between human reaction and spiritual corruption. Anger that lingers becomes hatred, hatred that persists curdles into malice: the escalation reads like a theological chain reaction, sin metabolizing itself into something colder and more deliberate.

It’s also a savvy piece of social engineering. By defining “continuance” as the turning point, Quarles shifts responsibility from what happens to you to what you choose to nurture. The line doesn’t deny that anger arrives uninvited; it insists you decide whether it gets a plate or a bed. In an age obsessed with conscience, that’s a sharp form of accountability disguised as proverb.