Mark Twain? Ann Landers? Turkish Proverb? Mohandas Gandhi? Seneca the Younger? Frederica Mathewes-Green? Anonymous?
Question for Quote Investigator: Intense feelings of anger affect the body and mind negatively. This notion can be expressed metaphorically:
Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.
Mark Twain, Ann Landers, and Mohandas Gandhi have received credit for this saying, but I am skeptical because I have not seen any solid citations. Would you please explore this topic?
Reply from Quote Investigator: QI has found no substantive evidence that Mark Twain employed this saying. It does not appear on the Twain Quotes website edited by Barbara Schmidt,1 nor does it appear in the large compilation “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips” edited by Caroline Thomas Harnsberger.2
The earliest close match located by QI appeared in May 1955 within the “Daily News-Post” of Monrovia, California. Boldface added to excerpts by QI:3
Corrosive
Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it’s stored than to anything on which it’s poured.
The saying above also appeared on the same day in other newspapers such as the “San Pedro News-Pilot”4 of San Pedro, California and the “Evening Vanguard”5 of Venice, California. The creator was anonymous.
The central metaphor of this expression has a long history in the Turkish language. A compact instance appeared in “A Dictionary of Turkish Proverbs” compiled by Metin Yurtbaşı:6
Keskin sirke küpüne/kabına zarar.
Sour vinegar harms its jar.
[A bad temper harms its possessor most!]
The dictionary provided a nineteenth century citation and a twentieth century citation for this proverb in Turkish:
ÖAA 1402 < Ş 3037
Ş. = Şinasi, Durüb-ı Emsâl-i Osmaniyye (Ottoman Proverbs), Istanbul, 1863.
ÖAA = Ömer Asim Aksoy, Atasözleri Sözlüyü (Dictionary of Proverbs), Ankara, 1965.
Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.
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