Quotes About Fear

The minute you hesitate you are in trouble.

If we are afraid of being rejected by others, we see signs of imminent rejection everywhere. We know that buying into that fear will not liberate us, but the possibility of rejection is so fear-inducing that it seems like a violation of basic logic not to focus on it.

Avoiding risk is not much of a goal...whether you crawl into a hole or walk a high wire, nobody gets out of here alive. We cannot grow without challenge.

You should at least wear a life jacket, she scolded. If I do go over and watch my boat sail off into the sunset, I told her, I don't relish the idea of hanging about for several days while my flesh is slowly picked by fish, like some kind of oceanic bird feeder.

His actions are not governed by common sense, they are governed by his exaggerated fear of commitment. Therefore, when the relationship becomes truly close and intimate, he feels more trapped because he knows he has no excuses for leaving. As long as the relationship is troubled, he knows he has an excuse for leaving, and there is no threat of entrapment.

Now let's look at the commitmentphobic's job pattern. Basically, he can't bear to feel trapped there either.

No matter how long he's known the woman or how casually they have met, if he's strongly attracted to her, he immediately starts thinking of marriage. Frightened by even the thought, he ends it, right there. A man such as this may know that he can't make a permanent commitment, and be really sincere about not wanting to use or mislead a woman by allowing a relationship to develop further.

When I think of getting married, I worry that my life will be over. I don't want to lose my lifestyle, which in my case often turns out to be going home, watching television alone, and reheating an old slice of pizza.

Why do so many frown so sternly at the idea of having fun? Perhaps out of fear that it connotes you aren't serious. But best as we can tell, there is no correlation between appearing to be serious and actually being good at what you do. In fact an argument can be made that the opposite is true.

When failure is demonized, people will try to avoid it at all costs—even when it represents nothing more than a temporary setback.

The fear created by commercial experts may not quite rival the fear created by terrorists like the Ku Klux Klan, but the principle is the same.

The opposite of fear is hope, defined as the expectation of good fortune not only for ourselves but for the group to which we belong. Fear is about limits; hope is about growth. Fear pushes away; hope pulls others closer. Fear divides; hope unifies.

La probabilidad de que un norteamericano medio muera por un atentado terrorista en un año dado es aproximadamente de uno entre cinco millones. Tiene 575 veces más probabilidades de suicidarse.

That we think with neither fear nor favor, with neither blind optimism nor sour skepticism. That we think like—ahem—a Freak.

The probability that an average American will die in a given year from a terrorist attack is roughly 1 in 5 million; he is 575 times more likely to commit suicide.

Letting go of the conventional wisdoms that torment us. Letting go of the artificial limits that hold us back—and of the fear of admitting what we don't know. Letting go of the habits of mind that tell us to kick into the corner of the goal even though we stand a better chance by going up the middle.

New York State, for instance, has not as of this writing executed a single criminal since reinstituting its death penalty in 1995. Even among prisoners on death row, the annual execution rate is only 2 percent—compared with the 7 percent annual chance of dying faced by a member of the Black Gangster Disciple Nation crack gang. If life on death row is safer than life on the streets, it's hard to believe that the fear of execution is a driving force in a criminal's calculus

And there are few incentives more powerful than the fear of random violence - which, in essence, is why terrorism is so effective.

Terrorism is effective because it imposes costs on everyone, not just its direct victims. The most substantial of these indirect costs is fear of a future attack, even though such fear is grossly misplaced. The probability that an average American will die in a given year from a terrorist attack is roughly 1 in 5 million; he is 575 times more likely to commit suicide.

Elephants, meanwhile, kill at least 200 people every year. So why aren't we petrified of them?

The basic reality," Sandman told the New York Times, "is that the risks that scare people and the risks that kill people are very different.

But if you are told that you have a 10 percent chance of dying within the next year, you might worry a lot more, perhaps even choosing to live your life differently. And if you are told that you have 10 percent chance of dying within the next minute, you'll probably panic. So it's the imminent possibility of death that drives the fear—which means that the most sensible way to calculate fear of death would be to think about it on a per-hour basis.

Quitting is hard in part because it is equated with failure, and nobody likes to fail, or at least be seen failing. But is failure necessarily so terrible?

Youths are chosen for combat precisely because they are unable to fully imagine their own mortality. If armies were composed of the middle-aged, there would be no wars.