Quotes About Fear

Aprendí que el coraje no era la ausencia de miedo, sino el triunfo sobre él... El hombre valiente no es aquel que no siente miedo, sino el que conquista ese miedo". NELSON MANDELA

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, "I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along." —ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

The perspiring of drops of blood is a known, but rare medical condition called hematidrosis. It is thought to be caused by intense anxiety when our body's fight-or-flight mechanism narrows the capillaries to prepare us for actions in the face of fear. If the fear is suddenly relieved, the capillaries dilate and, in some cases, rupture, leaving blood entering the sweat glands. It might actually be a sign of a very rapid relief from anxiety.1

When I think of this story, I can't help but think of the many immigrants, both legal and illegal, who flee to the United States either in fear for their lives in their home country, or in hopes of a better future. Jesus was a child taken into Egypt as an alien, a refugee.

It struck me then, for the first time, how unethical anxiety is, how it voids the reality of other people by conscripting them as palliatives for your own fear.

The monster you lie with is your own. The struggle is endlessly private. I thought it was over. That one night the beast at my back would squeeze more tightly and I would cease breathing. What remained of me hoped for it.

We ward off love because it presents itself to us as a demand: to acknowledge another person's needs, and thus our own; to glimpse their mortality, and thus ours. We each have our own means of achieving this avoidance.

how deeply I had made that promise, and how long I had kept it, never being with a man who might leave me. Always maintaining that control. A promise to oneself never to be left. What sleight of mind.

Real stories like this, human ones, could get you sent to prison, and it didn't matter what they were about. It didn't matter if the story was about an old woman or a squid attack—if it diverted emotion from the Dear Leader, it was dangerous.

I find a tattered copy of 1984. I open the book and read a little. Of course it is fiction, but the author gets a few things right—the control, the scrutiny, the feeling that nothing can be spontaneous, that the slightest move carries consequences for your future. It evokes a feeling I haven't experienced in a long time, a sense that, even though you have a great job and house, there is no safe place to turn. The

To survive in this world, you got to be many times a coward but at least once a hero

He held his grip on her arm. "What if something goes wrong? Have you thought of that? What if today is all there is?" "Today, tomorrow," she said. "A day is nothing. A day is just a match you strike after the ten

He held his grip on her arm. "What if something goes wrong? Have you thought of that? What if today is all there is?" "Today, tomorrow," she said. "A day is nothing. A day is just a match you strike after the ten thousand matches before it have gone out.

I was terrified, on the verge of crying. My father said, "See, my mouth said that, but my hand, my hand was holding yours. If your mother ever must say something like that to me, in order to protect the two of you, know that inside, she and I are holding hands. And if someday you must say something like that to me, I will know it's not really you. That's inside. Inside is where the son and the father will always be holding hands." He reached out and ruffled my hair.

The darkness inside your head is something your imagination fills with stories that have nothing to do with the real darkness around you.

Fear is contempt, whether the fearful know it or don't.

Without constancy, we fear that the foundations of our individual worlds could crumble. Without constancy we face the unknown. So we repeat. We pattern. To maintain constancy.

The point was to learn what it was we feared more: being misunderstood or being betrayed.

If I'd thought she was uninterested, I never would have worried so much - the prospect of screwing something up is much more daunting than that of screwing nothing up. I definitely thought there was something there, and so there was something to lose, you see.

It is dangerous to exist in the world. To exist is to be threatened. We must live with threats.

it is good to do justice because God will kill you and your family whether you do justice or not.

I'm fiercely independent, but I'm also terrified of being alone.

At its best monogamy may be the wish to find someone to die with; at its worst it is a cure for the terrors of aliveness. They are easily confused.

psychoanalysis is an account of how and why modern people are so frightened of each other. What