Life & Wisdom Quote by John Dryden

Anger, in Dryden's framing, isn’t a fire that “just happens” to us; it’s a habit we privately subsidize. The sting in the line comes from how little mystery he grants the emotion. No thunderbolt psychology, no tragic inevitability: resentment is “cherished,” a verb that exposes its perverse intimacy. We don’t merely suffer it; we tend it, revisit it, keep it warm because it flatters the ego with a story where we were wronged and therefore righteous.

Dryden wrote in a late-17th-century England obsessed with self-command: a culture of sermons, honor codes, and reputation management, where passions were treated less as identity and more as something to govern. The quote carries that era’s moral engineering. It’s almost mechanical in its promise: remove the fuel and the flame goes out. That clarity is the rhetorical trick. By tying anger to a chosen mental practice, Dryden shifts responsibility from the offender to the offended, from the past event to the present replay.

The subtext is bracing, even a little unsentimental: you don’t “resolve” anger by winning the argument in your head; you end it by ending the rehearsal. “Forgotten” isn’t naïve amnesia so much as a refusal to keep renting psychic space to injury. Read now, it lands like an antidote to grievance culture, where resentment can become a badge. Dryden’s line punctures that prestige: if you’re still furious, check what you’re feeding.