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Fear Quotes

Shakespeare leads, with Bertrand Russell second by a distance and then a mixed group of novelists. Russell is the one to read here. In Dreams and Facts (1919) he says no man is liberated from fear who dare not see his place in the world as it is, and in Marriage and Morals (1929) that to fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

Three entries are flagged. “The fear of death is more to be dreaded than death itself” is credited to Publilius Syrus and is disputed. A parody of the twenty-third Psalm credited to General Patton is marked misattributed. So is “None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear,” credited to Marshal Foch.

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Most quoted on fear:

“You would advise us not to worry?”
“Oh, worry by all means,” said Windlow. “By all means. Yes. It sharpens the wits. A good worry does wonders for the defensive capabilities of the brain. However, I should not advise you to do without sleep.”

Sheri S. Tepper King's Blood Four (1983)

What is anxiety? It is the next day. With whom, then, does the pagan contend in anxiety? With himself, with a delusion, because the next day is a powerless nothing if you yourself do not give it your strength.

Søren Kierkegaard

Fear was my father, Father Fear.
His look drained the stones.

Theodore Roethke

It was stupid to feel fear. Fear was nothing but the body’s involuntary response to perceived threats. Fear increased heartbeat, respiration, and perspiration; fear clouded the mind and paralyzed the limbs, and I’m going to die wasn’t subject to logical arguments about its counterproductivity.

Adam-Troy Castro Emissaries From the Dead (2008)

“I do not wish to experience that again.”
“Some people claim that the occasional exposure to fear enhances their enjoyment of more tranquil circumstances.”
“Some people ought to be confined for their own good,” my assistant said, “and to prevent them from spreading dangerous inanities.”

Matthew Hughes The Spiral Labyrinth (2007)

Still...let's talk about fear. We won't raise our voices and we won't scream; we'll talk rationally, you and I. We'll talk about the way the good fabric of things sometimes has a way of unraveling with shocking suddenness.

Stephen King

We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we… remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes which were, for the moment unpopular.

Edward R. Murrow

Most humans are still in the grip of the egoic mode of consciousness: identified with their mind and run by their mind. If they do not free themselves from their mind in time, they will be destroyed by it. They will experience increasing confusion, conflict, violence, illness, despair, madness. Egoic mind has become like a sinking ship. If you don't get off, you will go down with it. The collective egoic mind is the most dangerously insane and destructive entity ever to inhabit this planet.

Eckhart Tolle The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment (1997)

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose application of the word. Consider the flea! — incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage.

Mark Twain

Anxiety is a desire for what one fears, a sympathetic antipathy; anxiety is an alien power which grips the individual, and yet he cannot tear himself away from it and does not want to, for one fears, but what he fears he desires. Anxiety makes the individual powerless, and the first sin always occurs in weakness; therefore it apparently lacks accountability, but this lack is the real trap.

Søren Kierkegaard

Fear, imposed from the top down- from shareholder to senior executive, senior executive to executive, and so on down the chain right to the maximally squeezed Manpower temp- is the dominant trope in the post-Reagan corporate culture. One of the simplest ways to instill this fear is to make employees acutely aware that their jobs are never safe.

Mark Ames

When anxiety is at the wheel, we tragically project, blame, and then separate. We flee reality, which is the fact of conflict as part of life, rather than confront difference and expand our understanding of ourselves.

Sarah Schulman Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016)

Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round, walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

There is a virtuous fear, which is the effect of faith; and there is a vicious fear, which is the product of doubt. The former leads to hope, as relying on God, in whom we believe; the latter inclines to despair, as not relying on God, in whom we do not believe. Persons of the one character fear to lose God; persons of the other character fear to find Him.

Blaise Pascal

Fear is a great enemy of man. It is the enemy of his progress. It disturbs his peace and harmony. It sucks or saps his vitality and energy. It drains the nervous system of its reserve of energy. It produces weakness.

Swami Sivananda Conquest of Fear (1960)

From this arises the question whether it is better to be loved rather than feared, or feared rather than loved. It might perhaps be answered that we should wish to be both: but since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved.

Niccolò Machiavelli

The relationship of anger to attack is obvious, but the relationship of anger to fear is not always so apparent. Anger always involves projection of separation, which must ultimately be accepted as one's own responsibility, rather than being blamed on others. Anger cannot occur unless you believe that you have been attacked, that your attack is justified in return, and that you are in no way responsible for it.

Helen Schucman A Course in Miracles Chapter 4 The Illusions of the Ego (1976)

Everybody should fear only one person, and that person should be himself.

Philip José Farmer The Magic Labyrinth (1980)

To acknowledge the presence of fear is to give birth to failure.

Katherine Mansfield

The fears of one class of men are not the measure of the rights of another.

George Bancroft A History of the United States (1834)

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