Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Fuller

Anger, in Fuller’s framing, is less a righteous fire than a category error: a waste of spiritual energy caused by confusing what’s actionable with what’s inevitable. The line works because it snaps shut like a logical trap. If you can help it, anger is redundant; it’s a substitute for effort, a noisy emotion standing in for repair. If you can’t help it, anger is pointless; it’s a protest against physics, fate, or human limitation. By covering both boxes, Fuller leaves almost no legitimate home for rage.

The subtext is pastoral and disciplinary. As a 17th-century English clergyman living through civil war, regime change, plague years, and religious factionalism, Fuller is speaking into a culture where anger easily dressed itself up as moral seriousness. His sentence quietly demotes that pose. It doesn’t deny injustice or pain; it denies anger’s claim to be useful. What’s left is a Protestant ethic of stewardship: attention, will, and conscience are finite, and you’re accountable for how you spend them.

There’s also a social intent. A society riven by grievances needs emotional triage. Fuller offers a portable, almost algorithmic rule for self-governance, the kind that could keep private temper from becoming public violence. The neat symmetry is the persuasion: it feels like common sense, which is exactly how moral instruction travels best.