The twenty-fourth of January

Anger destroys the beauty of the heart as well as the beauty of the face^*

Indeed, people are (in my opinion, at least) a lot better-looking when they're smiling, which doesn't usually happen when they're angry. And I'm sure that holding on to anger can lead to changes to your relationships with other people and your personality — changes you might not like.

However, I don't think anger in itself should be (or even can be) completely avoided all the time. For a start, it's an emotion, and I don't think we have complete control over our emotions. We can control how we act on our emotions, though. Along these lines, we have in the Old Testament:

A fool gives full vent to his anger,
but a wise man keeps himself under control.—Proverbs 29:11 (NIV)

And in the New Testament, Paul says (in 1^st Corinthians 13) that love is "not easily angered", and James encourages people to be "slow to get angry" (James 1). None of this is an outright condemnation of anger, and I don't think it should be.

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^* Reproduced by permission of the copyright-holder BK Publications, London, www.bkpublications.com