Faith & Spirit Quote by Beverly Sills

Quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger: it lands like a vocal warmup for civic life. Coming from Beverly Sills, the line reads less like sermonizing and more like backstage wisdom sharpened into ethics. Opera is an art of huge feeling under exacting control; Sills built her reputation on turning emotional excess into disciplined sound. That’s the hidden logic here: restraint isn’t repression, it’s craft.

The phrasing moves in deliberate tempo markings. “Quick... slow... slow...” creates a rhythm of self-interruption, a tiny score for impulse management. Listening is framed as the only urgent act; everything else gets a brake. That inversion matters culturally because we tend to reward the opposite: speed of reaction, readiness with hot takes, public performance of outrage. Sills’ world knew something about performance, which is why the warning about anger stings. Anger can feel like moral clarity, especially when it’s loud. The subtext is that volume and virtue aren’t the same thing.

The God-language (“righteous life”) might sound austere, but the psychological point is practical: anger is self-justifying, a mood that narrates itself as necessity. “Man’s anger does not bring about” punctures that story. It’s not denying injustice; it’s doubting anger’s competence as a tool. In an industry where egos, rivalry, and critique can ignite easily, this reads like survival advice elevated into principle: if you want something beautiful, or even merely decent, you have to conduct yourself the way you’d conduct music - attentive first, expressive second, explosive last.