Daily Inspiration Quote by Edward Everett Hale

Hale frames “wise anger” as something you almost can’t summon on command, and that’s the point. Fire from flint takes friction, patience, and a deliberate hand; it’s the opposite of the hair-trigger outrage that feels good in the moment and burns everything down. The “great ado” isn’t just effort, it’s self-scrutiny: the slow internal argument where you test whether your anger is warranted, useful, or merely performative. By the time you’ve struck the stone enough to get a spark, you’ve already filtered out most of the ego.

Then he lands the twist: when it finally appears, it’s “out again immediately.” Wise anger doesn’t settle in to furnish the room. It flares to illuminate a fact, set a boundary, correct an injustice, and then disappears before it becomes identity. The line quietly rebukes the kind of moral posture that treats anger as proof of virtue. Hale’s clerical background matters here: this is a sermon against the sin of nursing grievance, but it’s not a plea for passivity. The metaphor keeps anger’s legitimacy intact while shrinking its allowable lifespan.

In the 19th-century Protestant moral imagination, emotions were not just feelings; they were habits with civic consequences. Hale, a public-minded minister in an era of reform movements and political rupture, is arguing for heat with discipline: indignation that can start a necessary fire, not a permanent blaze.