Quotes About Fear

Thus fear of danger is ten thousand times more terrifying than danger itself when apparent to the eyes ; and we find the burden of anxiety greater, by much, than the evil which we are anxious about : ...

Today we love what tomorrow we hate, today we seek what tomorrow we shun, today we desire what tomorrow we fear, nay, even tremble at the apprehensions of.

ne feriare feri' (strike lest thou be stricken).

They say I was afraid to stand up to a paper tiger. It is all such nonsense. What good would it have done me in the last hour of my life to know that though our great nation and the United States were in complete ruins, the national honor of the Soviet Union was intact?

A streetcar rattled by on the tracks as I read the headline: a single American bomb had destroyed a Japanese city. My first thought: "I know exactly what that bomb was." It was the U-235 bomb we had discussed in school and written papers about the previous fall. I thought: We got it first. And we used it. On a city. I had a sense of dread, a feeling that something very dangerous for humanity had just happened.

Cautious Brain Types often look to the future with trepidation, but when you are wrapped up in the future, it means you are missing out on the present and live with a baseline level of anxiety, which creates misery.

Part of living in the present means not worrying about the future, which will kill your happiness every day of the week and twice on Sunday. Worrying may be second nature to many, but most of us are not aware of how much we dwell on fearful thoughts. Research shows that happy people worry far less often than unhappy people do.

You need some anxiety to be happy. Appropriate anxiety helps us make better decisions. It prevents us from running into the street as children, risking broken bodies, and running headlong into toxic relationships as adults, risking broken hearts.

Seeing repeated scary images activates our brains' primitive fear circuits (in the amygdala) that are meant to ensure our survival but are now obsolete.

From craving is born grief, from craving is born fear. For one freed from craving, there's no grief—so how fear? —Buddha

She was so scared that she actually went out and bought a siren to get her up in the morning. Even though that helped her, she had made all of her neighbors mad at her, and now she was threatened with eviction from her condominium.

fear, worry, and anxiety have useful roles to play in our lives.

we sometimes imagine dark futures just to scare our own pants off.

WHAT WOULD YOU DO right now if you learned that you were going to die in ten minutes?

When we are in the grip of craving or fury, head-over-heals in love our recoiling in dread, it is the limbic system that has us in its grip.

Said a forty-eight-year-old Ohio man: I regret not being more adventurous . . . taking time to travel, explore, and experience more of what the world has to offer. I let the fear of disappointment rule me and allowed others' expectations to be more important than my own. I was always the "good soldier" and worked hard to please those around me. I have a good life—I just wish I had more experiences to share with others. Someday . .

The most telling demonstration of this point came from several dozen people from all over the world who described their regret—their failure to be bold—with the same five words: "Not being true to myself.

Hay personas que prefieren decir "Sí", y hay otras que prefieren decir "No" —escribe Keith Johnstone—. Las que dicen "Sí" obtienen la recompensa de las aventuras que viven. Las que dicen "No" tienen su recompensa en la seguridad que obtienen.»

One of the most robust findings, in the academic research and my own, is that over time we are much more likely to regret the chances we didn't take than the chances we did.

Boldness regrets sound like this: If only I'd taken the risk.

Anticipating regret can sometimes steer us away from the best decision and toward the decision that most shields us from regret—as you'll discover again when you return to the office.

Regret aversion can often lead to decision aversion, many studies have shown.[28] If we focus too much on what we'll regret, we can freeze and decide not to decide.

The other study examined the effect of awe. Awe lives "in the upper reaches of pleasure and on the boundary of fear," as two scholars put it. It "is a little studied emotion . . . central to the experience of religion, politics, nature, and art."19 It has two key attributes: vastness (the experience of something larger than ourselves) and accommodation (the vastness forces us to adjust our mental structures).

One thirty-three-year-old South African woman spoke for many when she wrote: I regret not having the courage to be more bold earlier in my career and caring too much what other people thought of me.