Quotes About Anxiety

It achieves the very result that the child has painfully built his character over the years in order to avoid: it makes routine, automatic, secure, self-confident activity impossible. It makes thoughtless living in the world of men an impossibility. It places a trembling animal at the mercy of the entire cosmos and the problem of the meaning of it.

one of the great dangers of life is too much possibility, and that the place where we find people who have succumbed to this danger is the madhouse

The basic motivation for human behavior is our biological need to control our basic anxiety, to deny the terror of death.

Worry a little bit every day and in a lifetime you will lose a couple of years. If something is wrong, fix it if you can. But train yourself not to worry: Worry never fixes anything.

Scott Fitzgerald was mortally afraid of lightning.

I understand. That's the trouble. I understand. I'll understand all the time. All day and all night. Especially all night. I'll understand. You don't have to worry about that.

To worry was as bad as to be afraid. It simply made things more difficult. He

You saw fear and apprehension. The fear was made by what he had been through. The apprehension was for the possibility of evil he imagined.

He was nervous, and I did not try to help him any.

I have never seen a man in civil life as nervous as Robert Cohn--nor as eager. I was enjoying it. It was lousy to enjoy it, but I felt lousy. Cohn had a wonderful quality of bringing out the worst in anybody.

You do not love Him at all? he asked. I am afraid of Him in the night sometimes.

To worry was as bad as to be afraid. It simply made things more difficult.

Tengo miedo de morir.

Preoccuparsi è dannoso come aver paura; serve solo a far le cose più difficili.

The mark of fear is not easily removed.

You also can't move forward into your future when you are paralyzed by fear.

Worry projects a negative view of the world around us. Worry projects a negative future. Worry is an act of faith. It is a deep-seated belief in worst-case scenarios. Worry is not rooted in reality but does affect our reality.

fear has a direct object, anxiety is fear without an object. We experience anxiety when we feel overwhelmed by life. In order to reduce our anxiety, we often create smaller and smaller boundaries to give us some sense of control over our lives.

Recuérdalo: que el terror no domine tu mente.

We used to moralize; today we normalize, and performance anxiety is the secular version of our old religious guilt.

The extended family, the community, and religion may indeed have limited our freedom, sexual and otherwise, but in return they offered us a much-needed sense of belonging. For generations, these traditional institutions provided order, meaning, continuity, and social support. Dismantling them has left us with more choices and fewer restrictions than ever. We are freer, but also more alone. As Giddens describes it, we have become ontologically more anxious.

Today I am a woman torn between the terror that everything might change and the equal terror that everything might carry on exactly the same for the rest of my days. —Paulo Coelho, Adultery

But when we reduce sex to a function, we also invoke the idea of dysfunction. We are no longer talking about the art of sex; rather, we are talking about the mechanics of sex. Science has replaced religion as the authority; and science is a more formidable arbiter. Medicine knows how to scare even those who scoff at religion. Compared with a diagnosis, what's a mere sin? We used to moralize; today we normalize, and performance anxiety is the secular version of our old religious guilt.

It's hard to experience desire when you're weighted down by concern.