Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, Addressed to a LadyChapone, Mrs. (Hester)
Religion
Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, Addressed to a Lady
Chapone, Mrs. (Hester)
Women -- Education; Young women -- Conduct of life
It is plain, from experience, that the most passionate people can
command themselves, when they have a motive sufficiently strong--such as
the presence of those they fear, or to whom they particularly desire to
recommend themselves; it is therefore no excuse to persons, whom you
have injured by unkind reproaches, and unjust aspersions, to tell them
you was in a passion; the allowing yourself to speak to them in a
passion is a proof of an insolent disrespect, which the meanest of your
fellow-creatures would have a right to resent. When once you find
yourself heated so far as to desire to say what you know would be
provoking and wounding to another, you should immediately resolve either
to be silent, or to quit the room, rather than give utterance to any
thing dictated by so bad an inclination. Be assured, you are then unfit
to reason or to reprove, or to hear reason from others. It is therefore
your part to retire from such an occasion of sin; and wait till you are
cool, before you presume to judge of what has passed. By accustoming
yourself thus to conquer and disappoint your anger, you will, by
degrees, find it grow weak and manageable, so as to leave your reason at
liberty. You will be able to restrain your tongue from evil, and your
looks and gestures from all expressions of violence and ill-will. Pride,
which produces so many evils in the human mind, is the great source of
passion. Whoever cultivates in himself a proper humility, a due sense of
his own faults and insufficiencies, and a due respect for others, will
find but small temptation to violent or unreasonable anger.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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