Success Quote by Sean O'Casey

A rule about anger that sounds like self-control is really a manual for tactical fury. O'Casey builds the line like a trap: the first half performs civility ("never to lose me temper"), then the second half snaps shut, admitting the real standard is usefulness ("till it would be detrimental to keep it"). The misspelled, colloquial "me" does more than signal Irish voice; it lowers the rhetorical temperature so the punchline lands as commonsense street wisdom, not a moral lecture. You can hear a character saying it with a shrug, as if restraint and eruption are just tools kept in the same drawer.

The subtext is brutally pragmatic: anger isn't a failure of character, it's leverage. Don't spend it cheaply. Hold it until withholding it starts to cost you - until politeness becomes complicity, silence becomes surrender, or calm becomes a gift you can't afford to give. That twist captures O'Casey's recurring obsession: ordinary people boxed in by class, institutions, and nationalism, forced to negotiate power with whatever currency they have. Sometimes the only negotiable asset is temper.

Context matters because O'Casey wrote out of a Dublin shaped by labor struggle, political upheaval, and the humiliations of poverty. In that world, decorum is often demanded by those least at risk. The line skewers the idea that "keeping your temper" is always virtuous; it can be a way to keep others comfortable while you absorb the damage. O'Casey isn't romanticizing rage. He's insisting on timing: indignation as a conscious act, deployed when restraint stops being noble and starts being harmful.