quotations about fear
There is a time when fear is good and ought to remain seated as a guardian of the heart.
AESCHYLUS
The Eumenides
In my opinion the hectic and almost frantic pace of modern living is a clear sign of the fear we have of being and of life. And as long as this fear exists in a person's unconscious, he will run faster and do more so as not to feel his fear.
ALEXANDER LOWEN
Fear of Life
Like other sets of habits, emotions had to be learned. So, fear was not an instinctive reaction to phylogenetically predetermined objects or events, but was a learned response occurring on 'signals' or conditioned stimuli.... Consequently it came as no surprise ... that children shared their mother's fears. This shared community of fear within the family was not due to inheritance of psychic mechanisms: it was learned. After all, the behaviourists pointed out, there was no direct relationship between fear and vulnerability. Indeed, the most defenceless of all human beings (the new-born child) was the least fearful of all God's creatures.
JOANNA BOURKE
Fear: A Cultural History
Fear, the strength of earth's religions, gripping every living soul,
Was a monstrous human error for the making of men whole.
EDWIN LEIBFREED
"Caelestis"
For as children tremble and fear everything in the blind darkness, so we in the light sometimes fear what is no more to be feared than the things children in the dark hold in terror and imagine will come true. This terror therefore and darkness of mind must be dispelled not by the rays of the sun and glittering shafts of day, but by the aspect and law of nature.
LUCRETIUS
De Rerum Natura
When a man is afraid and accedes to fear, he will always find arguments to justify his own surrender.
NATAN SHARANSKY
Fear No Evil
Fear God and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man.
BIBLE
Ecclesiastes 12:13
It is the unknown we fear when we look upon death and darkness, nothing more.
J. K. ROWLING
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Fears themselves don't have to change at all. Fear is not the problem. It is our relationship to the fear that determines the choices we make. By changing our relationship to fear, we reduce its credibility, robbing it of its power to stop us.
THOM RUTLEDGE
Embracing Fear
The only way to get rid of the fear of doing something is to go out ... and do it.
SUSAN J. JEFFERS
Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway
We must control fear or it will control us.
WALTER MATTHEWS
Human Life from Many Angles
Fear is a distorting mirror in which anything can appear as a caricature of itself, stretched to terrible proportions; once inflamed, the imagination pursues the craziest and most unlikely possibilities. What is most absurd suddenly seems the most probable.
STEFAN ZWEIG
The Post Office Girl
The good news is that fear is typically the province of the old. And hope is the province of the young.
BARACK OBAMA
Newsweek, April 29, 2019
We build castles with our fears and sleep in them like kings and queens.
CHRISTOPHER POINDEXTER
Remington Typewriter Poetry
Within a system which denies the existence of basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the day. Fear of imprisonment, fear of torture, fear of death, fear of losing friends, family, property or means of livelihood, fear of poverty, fear of isolation, fear of failure. A most insidious form of fear is that which masquerades as common sense or even wisdom, condemning as foolish, reckless, insignificant or futile the small, daily acts of courage which help to preserve man's self-respect and inherent human dignity. It is not easy for a people conditioned by fear under the iron rule of the principle that might is right to free themselves from the enervating miasma of fear. Yet even under the most crushing state machinery courage rises up again and again, for fear is not the natural state of civilized man.
AUNG SAN SUU KYI
Freedom from Fear
Fear of danger is ten thousand times more terrifying than danger itself.
DANIEL DEFOE
The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
Of all the mental and physical polluters of life, nothing exercises such a poisonous effect as fear.
ELBERT HUBBARD
The American Bible
The fear we throw about danger is always as disproportionate as a paternal shirt on an infant.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Unpopular Essays
Fear is good in small amounts, but when it is a constant companion, it cuts away at who you are and makes it hard to do what you know is right.
CHRISTOPHER PAOLINI
Inheritance