Temper

Menare likesteel— when they lose their temper, they lose theirworth.

Temperis a word used to denote a variety of qualities. It derives fromTemperare(to mix correctly) the Latin origin of words like "temperature" and "tempering"; it and "tempo" come, in turn, fromtempus(time or season). Thus, the word "temper" can refer (at least informally) to any time- and temperature-sensitive process, a material's thermo-mechanical history, or even its composition.

Quotes

• Menare likesteel— when they lose their temper, they lose theirworth.
  • Anonymousproverb; though often attributed toChuck Norris,this seems to have appeared at least as early as 1961, in an edition ofThe Physical Educator

• Through certain humors or passions, and from temper merely, a man may be completely miserable, let his outward circumstances be ever so fortunate.
  • Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury,as quoted inDay's Collacon: An Encyclopaedia of Prose Quotations:(1884), p. 930

• Good temper, like a sunny day, sheds a brightness over everything; it is the sweetener of toil and the soother of disquietude.
  • Washington Irving,inGems for the Fireside(1882) by Otis Henry Tiffany, p. 48

• The happiness and misery of men depend no less on temper than fortune.
  • François de La Rochefoucauld,Maxims and Moral Reflections(1791), CLVII, p. 48

• A man of knowledge uses words with restraint, and a man of understanding is even-tempered.
  • Proverbs 17:27,(New International Version)

• When you see anyone complaining
  of such and such a person's ill-nature and bad temper,
  know that the complainant is bad-tempered,
  forasmuch as he speaks ill of that bad-tempered person,
  becausehe alone is good-tempered who is quietly forbearing
  towards the bad-tempered and ill-natured.
  • Rumi,Jewels of Remembrance: A Daybook of Spiritual Guidance: Containing 365 Selections from the Wisdom of Rumi(1996) Translated by Camille and Kabir Helminski, IV, 771-4
• Courtesyof temper, when it is used to veil churlishness of deed, is but a knight's girdle around the breast of a baseclown.
  • Walter Scott,as quoted in "Gleanings from Many Minds" inThe Guernsey magazine(October 1876)