Life & Wisdom Quote by Richard Savage

Anger, Savage suggests, is less a weapon than a runaway animal: fast, loud, and reliably self-sabotaging. The image of the "hot steed" does heavy lifting. It flatters anger as power and momentum, then punctures it with a stumble. You can feel the snap of restraint in the line itself: a rush that begs for release, then trips over its own urgency. The intent is moral, but not pious. It's tactical. Savage isn't asking you to be gentler; he's warning you that rage, when it turns into immediate action, wastes its force and exposes your flank.

"The man of thought" is the counterfigure, and Savage loads that phrase with a period-specific faith in reason as a form of mastery. Thought doesn't just temper violence; it aims it. "Strikes deepest and strikes safely" is chillingly precise: contemplation isn't portrayed as passive virtue but as controlled aggression, the difference between a swing and a cut. The subtext is that restraint is not mercy - it's advantage.

Context matters. Savage lived inside the bruising ecosystem of early 18th-century literary London: patronage politics, reputation warfare, and personal precarity. For a poet navigating scandal and dependence, impulse could be ruinous. The quote reads like advice learned the hard way, written for a culture where public anger was both a performance and a liability. It flatters the reader into self-command, then reminds them that the real goal isn't purity; it's efficacy.