It’s Not the Size of the Dog

On temper, trespass, and the quiet agreement shared by wisdom traditions

“It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”

Usually taken as encouragement, the phrase is really more ambivalent than that. It doesn’t point to physical strength so much as to what is stirred within us — the inner surge that can just as easily become courage as conflict.

Every culture has noticed this. Every religion too. Long before psychology spoke of impulse control or neuroscience mapped emotional triggers, people observed the same pattern: the danger is rarely the provocation itself, but what follows it.

In the Christian tradition, this moment is called trespass.

A trespass is not so much a crime as a crossing — a step beyond a boundary. Someone may trespass against us first: a slight, an insult, a threat. But anger is often the second trespass — the moment we step across in return.

This is why the Lord’s Prayer binds forgiveness and restraint so closely:

“Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

It acknowledges something deeply human: conflict escalates when we join it. As the old saying has it, it takes two to tango.

What is striking is how little disagreement there is across traditions once the language is stripped back. The advice converges almost perfectly:

Judaism calls strength the conquest of one’s own inclination.
Islam teaches that the strong person is the one who controls anger.
Buddhism describes anger as a fire that burns the one who carries it.
Hindu philosophy warns that desire and anger cloud wisdom.
Taoism trusts softness to overcome hardness.
Stoicism reminds us that events do not disturb us — judgments do.

Different cultures. Different centuries. The same observation.

Unchecked reaction remains humanity’s most reliable way of making things worse.

None of this asks us to deny the spark. The “fight in the dog” is real — evolutionary, emotional, sometimes necessary. But wisdom lies in recognising that we are the gatekeepers. The fire does not have to be fed.

Perhaps that is the quiet agreement beneath so many prayers, proverbs, and sayings:
not that we will never be crossed —
but that we do not have to keep crossing in return.