Temper

Men are like steel — when they lose their temper, they lose their worth.

Temper is a word used to denote a variety of qualities. It derives from Temperare (to mix correctly) the Latin origin of words like "temperature" and "tempering"; it and "tempo" come, in turn, from tempus (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

• Men are like steel — when they lose their temper, they lose their worth.
  • Anonymous proverb; though often attributed to Chuck Norris, this seems to have appeared at least as early as 1961, in an edition of The 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 in Day'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, in Gems 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,
  because he 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
• Courtesy of temper, when it is used to veil churlishness of deed, is but a knight's girdle around the breast of a base clown.
  • Walter Scott, as quoted in "Gleanings from Many Minds" in The Guernsey magazine (October 1876)