Quotes About Fear

The blades touched my abdomen. A cold shock ran through me, and my head began to spin. If he had pressed just a bit harder, the scissors might have pierced my soft belly. The skin would have peeled back, the fat beneath laid bare. Blood would have dripped on the bedspread.

I worried that if she were forced to say more, she might shrink farther away and disappear altogether.

Everything will work out. Don't be afraid of breezes and scarves.

The stronger my feelings for you become, the greater my fear, and the more freely I abandon myself to baseless speculations and anxieties. Yet the more I immerse myself in the profound joy of loving you. I beg of you to go on living in this world I inhabit. I suppose you find this a rather ridiculous request, but to me it is of the utmost importance that you simply exist.

Ad what will happen if words disappear? I whispered to myself, afraid that if I said it too loudly, it might come true

And what will happen if words disappear? I whispered to myself, afraid that if I said it too loudly, it might come true.

I stood in the middle of that emptiness, feeling myself on the verge of being drawn into its terrible depth

Nothing is more frightening than a law that has never been enforced. When the authorities want to throw someone in jail, all they have to do is suddenly arrest him for breaking a law that no one has bothered to obey yet.

Those less affluent, less educated, and less skillful fear being thrown into the global competition as their chance of winning are minute and the price of failure unbearable. They tend to prefer "a bird in hand than two in the bush.

Death loses its terror if one dies when one has consummated one's life!

It's not easy to live every moment wholly aware of death. It's like trying to stare the sun in the face: you can stand only so much of it. Because we cannot live frozen in fear, we generate methods to soften death's terror. We project ourselves into the future through our children; we grow rich, famous, ever larger; we develop compulsive protective rituals; or we embrace an impregnable belief in an ultimate rescuer.

One reason patients are reluctant to work in a therapy group is they fear that things will go too far, that the powerful therapist or the collective group might coerce them to lose control--to say or think or feel things that will be catastrophic. The therapist can make the group feel safer by allowing each patient to set his or her limits and by emphasizing the patient's control over every interaction.

Despite the staunchest, most venerable defenses, we can never completely subdue death anxiety: it is always there, lurking in some hidden ravine of the mind.

Death cures psychoneurosis. In a sense all these neurotic concerns--fear of rejection, interpersonal concerns--seem to melt away, and people get another perspective on their lives. The important things are really important, and the trivia of life is trivialized.

None of my patients are really troubled by the idea that some part of what they say might be in a book in the future. Some have expressed the very opposite feeling--the fear that they would not be interesting enough to write about.

The more unlived your life, the greater your death anxiety.

Specialness as a primary mode of death transcendence takes a number of other maladaptive forms. The drive for power is not uncommonly motivated by this dynamic. One's own fear and sense of limitation is avoided by enlarging oneself and one's sphere of control. There is some evidence, for example, that those who enter the death-related professions (soldiers, doctors, priests, and morticians) may in part be motivated by a need to obtain control over death anxiety.

Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.

I kept my gaze steady on him. "My greatest nightmare is to be owned by someone." "No. Your nightmare is being owned by someone unworthy.

A faithful person sees life from the perspective of trust, not fear. Bedrock faith allows me to believe that, despite the chaos of the present moment, God does reign; that regardless of how worthless I may feel, I truly matter to a God of love; that no pain lasts forever and no evil triumphs in the end. Faith sees even the darkest deed of all history, the death of God's Son, as a necessary prelude to the brightest.

Vivre, c'est courir des risques tous les jours, Kurt. - Ça dépend dans quel sens on court. (p.47)

Posterity has never made the grave's embrace less cruel. It simply assuages our fear of death, because there is no better cure for out inevitable morality then the illusion of a beautiful eternity. But there is one illusion I still hold dear: that is the thought of an enlightened nation. That is the only future I still dream of.

La postérité n'a jamais rendu l'étreinte des tombes moins dure. Elle a juste le mérite de modérer notre peur de la mort puisqu'il n'y a pas de thérapie mieux appropriée à notre inexorable finitude que l'illusion d'une belle éternité.

Turmoil and terror aren't compatible with sangfroid. When horror strikes, the heart is always its first target.