The saying goes like "ಬಡವನ ಸಿಟ್ಟು ದವಡೆಗೆ ಮೂಲ".
When roughly translated to English it means:
A poor man's anger only hurts his jaw [due to all the grinding of teeth in the process].
How to express this properly or idiomatically in English? Is there any alternative proverb with the same meaning?
Edit: Poor in terms of wealth (material), not judgement. It's often the poor who pay the prices. Anger due to their helplessness.
I don't know that there is a direct equivalent in common usage in the English language, that keeps the full sense of your proverb.
The closest I can think of is this quote:
"Malice drinks one half of its own poison." - Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Cutting off one's nose to spite one's face is quite close but not identical in meaning. From Wikipedia:
"Cutting off the nose to spite the face" is an expression used to describe a needlessly self-destructive over-reaction to a problem: "Don't cut off your nose to spite your face" is a warning against acting out of pique, or against pursuing revenge in a way that would damage oneself more than the object of one's anger.
A close but not identical proverb is:
if wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.
The important part of the Kannada proverb is that a poor person can't do anything about their complaints more than be angry and gnash teeth.. The English proverb emphasizes that, in the same position of lack of power, they can at least wish for the good things.
What is the point of a proverb? To say this is what you can expect from the situation. For Kannada, it is that without means all you can do is complain; in English, you can wish all you want but can't do anything about it.
You may be thinking of something like the old saying that. . .
Oft evil will shall evil mar.
In other words, nastiness often hurts itself, just like how anger is its own punishment.
Not quite a "proverb", but the chorus from She was poor but she was honest is a well-known close approximation to OP's meaning..
It's the same the whole world over,
It's the poor what gets the blame,
It's the rich what gets the pleasure,
Isn't it a blooming shame? (aint it all a bleeding shame? in the version as known to me in the UK).
There's always never go to bed angry (or ...to sleep angry) - advice which may be given for various reasons, including as a preventative for bruxism (tooth grinding, esp. when sleeping). The earliest relevant "citation" for that is Ephesians 4:26–27
do not let the sun go down on your anger
This is more of a corollary:
Anger makes dull men witty, but it keeps them poor.
- Francis Bacon
Wiktionary's entry for witty includes the following definition:
(archaic) Possessing a strong intellect or intellectual capacity; intelligent, skilful, ingenious.
It sounds a cruelly absurd ironic determinist proverb for me because talks about a kind of frustration caused by a permanent and inconvertible situation that is being poor from birth to death. Though it may has been made on critical purposes by people who protest against economical inequalities in their own society and want a change. I found some:
Wealth brings many friends. But the friends of poor people leave them alone.
It seems like a sympathy with poor people and their loneliness. I choose it to convey negative sense of poor people against their own unchangeable situation if the proverb is trying tell us about this side.
Lazy people are soon poor; hard workers get rich.
I choose it if it is only a sarcastic saying to satirize poor people and their miseries and aristocratically advices them to be calm and accept their situation without any complain or anger and if they want a change try all right or wrong methods to gain money in short term like the other rich people.
