What does the Buddha mean by this quote? There is no punishment for anger. It is the anger which will punish you


I pondered on this for a few hours now but can't understand the meaning.

Tnx for all the help
There's an explanation of it here, on the Fake Buddha Quotes web site: “You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger.”
It's not a quote from the Pali canon.
Buddhism probably does have things to say about &quot;anger&quot;: but maybe not that. :-)
If I had to make sense of it I'd guess it's saying that anger is unpleasant and thus a kind of punishment (the consequences of angry behaviour might not be good either).
According to Buddhism, anger might be associated with aversion and perhaps with an unwise view of 'self'.

According to Bodhipaksa one of the earliest versions of this quote (from a non-Buddhist source) is,

They teach that he who hates shall be hated, and that the one who gets angry shall be punished by anger, and that all sin is punished by it and not for it. This is correct.

I guess this might also be Christian-like in origin, e.g. it reminds me of the aphorism, &quot;He who lives by the sword will die by the sword.&quot;
Another original version of the quote is from a book about the Hindu (non-Buddhist) Bhagavad Gita,


Even more intriguing to me is the karma of our health. Again, let me illustrate one or two kinds of connection. For one, the Buddha says that we are not punished for our anger, we are punished by our anger. In other words, anger is its own karma.

Note the absence of quotation marks. Eknath is not quoting the Buddha, but paraphrasing his teachings on anger and karma.

So it's talking about, trying to say something about, karma.
That (karma) is something which the Buddha will have talked about; however starting here from a fake quote (a mis-quote) about anger probably isn't the easiest start to explaining karma, a difficult subject.