quotations about fear
Fear is good in small amounts, but when it is a constant companion, it cuts away at who you are and makes it hard to do what you know is right.
CHRISTOPHER PAOLINI
Inheritance
The strongest human emotion is fear. It's the essence of any good thriller that, for a little while, you believe in the boogeyman.
JOHN CARPENTER
Time, Nov. 16, 1987
The understanding of fear cures fear.
ROBERT ANTHONY
Beyond Positive Thinking
All is well, tho' faith and form
Be sunder'd in the night of fear.
ALFRED
LORD TENNYSON, In Memoriam
When we fear things I think that we wish for them ... every fear hides a wish.
DAVID MAMET
Edmond
Fear will bind you closer than love, or hate, and it works a hell of a lot quicker.
LAURELL K. HAMILTON
Guilty Pleasures
Man now needs for his salvation only one thing: to open his heart to joy, and leave fear to gibber through the glimmering darkness of a forgotten past.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
New Hopes for a Changing World
To him who is in fear everything rustles.
SOPHOCLES
Acrisius [fragment]
Though it may arrive with shocking suddenness, horror devours its prey slowly. Through hours of days and years, it spreads its sullen darkness into every corner of the being it has conquered.
JOSEPHINE HART
Damage
Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Unpopular Essays
Fear flies through fancy's door.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
You can't stop being afraid just by pretending everything that scares you isn't there.
MICHAEL MARSHALL
The Upright Man
Fear is ever-present, waiting to be called to the surface. Change brought fear, and fear brought destruction.
BERNARD BECKETT
Genesis
Fears work into the mind like maggots in a corpse; they fester and boil and work to no good.
DAVID C. SMITH & RICHARD L. TIERNEY
The Ring of Ikribu
Throughout evolutionary history, anxiety and fear have helped every species to be wary and to survive. Fear can signal us to act, or, alternatively, to resist the impulse to act. It can help us to make wise, self-protective choices in and out of relationships where we might otherwise sail mindlessly along, ignoring signs of trouble.
HARRIET LERNER
Fear and Other Uninvited Guests
Fear is a message--sometimes helpful, sometimes not--but often conveying critical information about our beliefs, our needs, and our relationship to the world around us.
HARRIET LERNER
Fear and Other Uninvited Guests
I marvel now that it was not obvious how inextricable suffering and fear are. It was not until fear left that I noticed, slowly, how it seemed to have taken suffering with it. It took a while to figure out that (for me, anyhow) suffering is mostly caused by fear--not by the circumstances themselves, but by my response to them.
JAN FRAZIER
When Fear Falls Away
We often suffer more from our fears, than from the dangers of our situation.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
Once bitten by a snake, one is afraid at the sight of a mere rope.
CHINESE PROVERB
Fear of change is a part of the state of fear man has ever lived in but out of which he has begun to escape. Civilization might be defined indeed as the steps in his escape.
ELSIE CLEWS PARSONS
Fear and Conventionality