Quotes About Fear

The British-American author D.H. Lawrence said that "the world fears a new experience more than anything. Because a new experience displaces so many old experiences.

Love is the one eternal thing and takes away your foundational fear of death. This is very good stuff.

Some say that FEAR is merely an acronym for "false evidence appearing real.

The reason we do anything one more time is because the last time did not really satisfy us deeply. As English poet W.H. Auden put it in "Apropos of Many Things": "We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the present and let our illusions die.

If change and growth are not programmed into your spirituality, if there are not serious warnings about the blinding nature of fear and fanaticism, your religion will always end up worshiping the status quo and protecting your present ego position and

in fact, that's largely what it means to be loving. You can hold for them what they cannot yet hold. You can transform for them what they cannot yet transform. You do that by not returning their negativity and fear in kind, as most people will do.

As my father, Saint Francis, put it, "If you have once faced the great death, the second death can do you no harm.

The shadow self invariably presents itself as prudence, common sense, justice, or "I'm doing this for your own good," when it is really manifesting fear, control, manipulation, or even vengeance…. Invariably, when something upsets you, and you have a strong emotional reaction, out of proportion to the moment, your shadow self has just been exposed, so watch for any over-reactions or over-denials.

I suppose there is no more counterintuitive spiritual idea than the possibility that God might actually use and find necessary what we fear, avoid, deny, and deem unworthy. This is what I mean by the "integration of the negative." Yet I believe this is the core of Jesus's revolutionary Good News, Paul's deep experience, and the central insight that Francis and Clare lived out with such simple elegance.

When the self is surrendered—when we're not too tied to our own agenda, anger, fear, or desire to make things happen our way—we are truly open to love. But be aware of the heart's propensity to clench and close.

Threats of hell are unfortunately more memorable to people than promises of heaven.

They are comfortable knowing, and they are comfortable not knowing. They can care and not care—without guilt or shame. They can act without success because they have named their fear of failure. They do not need to affirm or deny, judge or ignore. But they are free to do all of them with impunity. A saint is invincible.

The motivation for all morality and religion is the imitation of God, who is love. When religion bases itself in fear, duty, honor, a need for law and order, a need for a superior self-image, or group cohesiveness, it is corrupt. It looks good and will have many defenders, but it is actually at the heart of the problem. The real God is no longer needed or even wanted, and such religion usually becomes the actual enemy of God. The crucifixion of Jesus speaks to this.

our fear of death is actually our fear of God. If we resolve one, we normally resolve the other. To totally resolve the God issue would be to totally resolve the death issue. And we have the full wherewithal to do just that! That wherewithal we call Trinity, which is saying that God is an outpouring in one direction. God is only for and never against.

Thus the most common one-liner in the Bible is "Do not be afraid"; in fact, someone counted and found that it occurs 365 times!

Religion is for people who are afraid of going to hell; spirituality is for those who have been there.

If change and growth are not programmed into your spirituality, if there are not serious warnings about the blinding nature of fear and fanaticism, your religion will always end up worshiping the status quo and protecting your present ego position and personal advantage—as if it were God!

Perhaps he was frightened by the sheer prospect of matrimony, of marrying a girl he would one day want to murder.

No, most adults are like her father, whose fear, if he feels any, has been replaced by a kind of melancholy.

Over graduation weekend Jacy learned something about loneliness that she hadn't suspected before: that its most terrifying and virulent form could only be experienced in a crowd.

Nor do I want the woman that I'm married to and that I love to leave me, but the thought of her doing so moves me in a way that our growing old together and contentedly slipping, in affectionate tandem, toward the grave does not.

Was this how wars happened, the seeds of conflict, large and small, growing in the gap between what people wanted to believe and what they feared must be true?

In my own way, I too was unable to execute his wishes. He'd begged me before I left that afternoon when he'd tried to go home to stay away from the hospital, now that it was just a matter of time. But I couldn't, and toward the end I saw in his eyes each time that I appeared beside his bed that he was glad to see me, and scared as hell of dying alone. Which he ended up doing anyway. The

Protection was my strong suit. I needed something to be protected from. I