Quotes About Fear

Our best destiny, as planetary cohabitants, is the development of what has been called "species consciousness" something over and above nationalisms, blocs, religions, ethnicities. During this week of incredulous misery, I have been trying to apply such a consciousness, and such a sensibility. Thinking of the victims, the perpetrators, and the near future, I felt species grief, then species shame, then species fear.

Life is made of fear. Some people eat fear soup three times a day. Some people eat fear soup all the meals there are. I eat it sometimes. When they bring me fear soup to eat, I try not to eat it, I try to send it back. But sometimes I'm too afraid to and have to eat it anyway.

Suicide is what everyone young thinks they'll do before they get old. But they hardly ever get round to it. They just don't want to commit themselves in that way. When you're young and you look ahead, time ends in mist at twenty-five. "Old won't happen to me", you say. But old does. Oh, old does. Old always gets you in the end.

In the end one cannot avoid the conclusion that AIDS unites certain human themes -- homosexuality, sexual disease, and death -- about which society actively resists enlightenment. These are things that we are unwilling to address or even think about. We don't want to understand them. We would rather fear them.

The children of the nuclear age, I think, were weakened in their capacity to love. Hard to love, when you're bracing yourself for impact. Hard to love, when the loved one, and the lover, might at any instant become blood and flames, along with everybody else.

Well, my father [Kingsley Amis] was a writer and it seemed natural to start writing in my late teens. I think it was good that I began when I was young and bold and foolish, otherwise I'd have become too self-conscious and aware of the weight of not having written anything yet.

Life is made of fear. Some people eat fear soup three times a day. Some people eat fear soup all the meals there are. I eat it sometimes. When they bring me fear soup to eat, I try not to eat it, I try to send it back. But sometimes I'm too afraid to and have to eat it anyway.

Catholicism - all the perversions of Christianity - is not a faith of love. It is a faith of fear. Obey, be good, toe the line, and heaven is yours, the first prize in the lottery of eternity. Disobey, react, cut the lifeline, and never-ceasing damnation is the booby prize. The dogma is, love the only god and you shall be safe. Fail in that love and he will not rescue you, not until you crawl and apologize and fawn before the altar. What kind of a religion demands such indignity?

Nothing can doom man but the belief in doom, for this prevents the movement of return.

Trust, trust in the world, because this human being exists - that is the most inward achievement of the relation in education. Because this human being exists, meaninglessness, however hard pressed you are by it, cannot be the real truth. Because this human being exists, in the darkness the light lies hidden, in fear salvation, and in the callousness of one's fellow-men the great Love.

What is manifold is often frightening because it is not neat and simple. Men prefer to forget how many possibilities are open to them.

is even worse than fear for oneself. The shadows of madness became longer as the day progressed, and even though it was certain that crime could have no permanence, it was unfortunately uncertain how long and how far God would permit this trial to go, for I am sorry to say that in history there are many examples of extended periods of darkness.

More people fear snakes than full stops, so they recoil when a long sentence comes hissing across the page.

Just the hill and me. Just the challenge and me. Just my fears an me. Bring it on.

that overwhelming desire to find a way to succeed, if only to be spared public humiliation.

Whatever the reasons, we never allow anyone else to know the whole of our personal history. I suppose we're afraid of what they might think of us. But there's more to it than that. We are terrified of what they might do with the knowledge.

When freedom from want and freedom from fear are achieved, man's remains will be in rigor mortis.

I find that most men would rather have their bellies opened for five hundred dollars than have a tooth pulled for five.

Anyone can achieve their fullest potential, who we are might be predetermined, but the path we follow is always of our own choosing. We should never allow our fears or the expectations of others to set the frontiers of our destiny. Your destiny can't be changed but, it can be challenged. Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.

If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life - and only then will I be free to become myself.

In a surprising 2008 study, researchers at the University of Bath, UK, found that the fear of failure drives consumers far more than the promise of success; the latter oddly tends to paralyze us, while the former spurs us on (and pries open our wallets). In fact, as the study found, the most powerful persuader of all was giving consumers a glimpse of some future "feared self."24

We are afraid, for example, of letting others know more about us than we know about ourselves, fearing most of all that our masks will slip, and will lose control, letting others see us as we truly are.

Cuanto mayor sea el grado de estrés, más temerosos, inseguros e inciertos nos sentimos y más irracional tiende a ser nuestro comportamiento.

Because their fears were so deep, verbal acknowledgment would not suffice. He had to model the behavior.