Quotes About Fear

Life can paralyze us, freeze us into statues if we think about things too long.

You remember. And so Us against Them became the world. But the more fear is used to motivate people, the more afraid they will become, the more fear will come to define their lives.

rather than raising us, their children, from a place of love, they raised us in fear. Doesn't it stand to reason that their fear would shape the adults we become? Anxious, plagued by a constant sense that something, everything, is wrong. Their fear has crippled us, and our inability to function only feeds our anxiety. We are failing at life. So now all we are is failure.

Anyone who has ever stood at a great height and felt the impulse to jump recognizes the draw. And what is adolescence if not a great height from which we are all expected to jump?

Nothing meaning the absence of tangible threats—no gun to her head, no knife to her throat—and yet what is poverty if not a threat? What is being called that word or followed down the street by packs of boys if not a threat?

True horror, you see, comes not from the savagery of the unexpected, but from the corruption of everyday objects, spaces.

Difficult personalities are a mirror for the places where we get stuck in judgment, fear, and confusion.

Who are you trying to protect, punish or please by not succeeding?

The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.

The public is not to see where power lies, how it shapes policy, and for what ends. Rather, people are to hate and fear one another.

The more you can increase fear of drugs, crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all of the people.

Better the devil that you know than the one that you don't.

I'm terrified of being too famous. What I'm really afraid of is that the audiences will go into the theater and not be able to forget that it's me, that fame will stand in the way of my acting. I want to keep being able to change into different shapes and different personalities.

I fear feeling my heart break a second time, because I'm not sure I could survive it. I'd rather live alone than risk the pain.

Think of what's scary in a movie… The unseen, the imagined, is always more frightening than what's graphically portrayed.The same holds true in your head. Face your fear, step into it, look at it head-on and it will diminish in stature, lose its hold on your imagination. But run, and it'll grow wings, breather fire, and fly after you.

If I was lonely, if I was afraid of being alone, then why abandon myself? Why run to someone else looking to give myself the thing that only I could give? I wanted to escape myself because I felt empty, and the emptiness frightened me. But obviously, I was empty because I was always running out, running away. The only way to fill the emptiness was to remain, to take up residence in myself.

I do know this. It's the things we run from that hurt us the most." –Brad Sturdevant

Growth demands a temporary surrender of security." Gail Sheehy

People are never more insecure than when they become obsessed with their fears at the expense of their dreams.

All of us have worries. We worry because we are intelligent beings. Intelligence predicts, that is its essence; the same intelligence that allows us to plan, hope, imagine, and hypothesize also allows us to worry and anticipate negative outcomes.

The Jerusalem Report captures this Holocaust kitsch moment on the March: "'I'm so scared, I can't go on, I want to be in Israel already,' repeats a young Connecticut woman over and over. Her body is shaking. . . . Suddenly her friend pulls out a large Israeli flag. She wraps it around the two of them and they move on." An Israeli flag: don't leave home without it.87

The difference is that bad engineers will soon be checked by the results of their poor judgments through the inoperability, unreliability, or high cost of what they create. (Physical reality is a stern taskmaster!) By contrast, bad doctors-such is the way of the world-can often rely on the gullibility, suggestibility, fear, and desperation of their clients to get themselves off the hook. And, of course, the old adage still holds as ever: doctors get to bury their mistakes.

Anna and I did not make love. I don't remember why. Maybe we didn't need to. She might have been afraid, although I doubt she was afraid of much. She'd been a midwife before she opened a studio; she'd held life in her hands, like a wire from a galvanic cell. Maybe death was too strong in me for an act so inspirited with life. Although I sometimes think that death is what gives lovemaking its desperate and terrible joy.

The natural role of the twentieth-century man is anxiety.