quotations about fear
Fear is the enemy of logic.
FRANK SINATRA
quoted in The Way You Wear Your Hat
Fear of the unknown translates to fear of losing control. In order to feel safe, we feel we must control every variable--human, environmental, technical. And yet, as life, this just isn't realistic. Controlling everything that's around the corner simply isn't possible.
IVY NAISTADT
Speak Without Fear
The understanding of fear cures fear.
ROBERT ANTHONY
Beyond Positive Thinking
Fear is another emotion that is strongly suppressed. We cannot afford to be afraid, and so we don't allow ourselves to sense and feel the fear within us. We lower our brows to deny it, set our jaws to defy it, and smile to deceive ourselves. But inwardly we remain scared to death.
ALEXANDER LOWEN
Fear of Life
You see something scary, you should stand up and step toward it, not away from it. Instinctively, reflexively, in a raging fury.
LEE CHILD
Echo Burning
Fear flies through fancy's door.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Sometimes fear is wholesome and rational; it is well to swing fear as a mighty battle-axe over men's heads when no other motive will move them.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
All human actions are motivated at their deepest level by two emotions--fear or love. In truth there are only two emotions--only two words in the language of the soul.... Fear wraps our bodies in clothing, love allows us to stand naked. Fear clings to and clutches all that we have, love gives all that we have away. Fear holds close, love holds dear. Fear grasps, love lets go. Fear rankles, love soothes. Fear attacks, love amends.
NEALE DONALD WALSCH
Conversations with God
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
Fear is never an actuality; it is either before or after the active present. When there is fear in the active present, is it fear? It is there and there is no escape from it, no evasion possible. There, at that actual moment, there is total attention at the moment of danger, physical or psychological. When there is complete attention there is no fear. But the actual fact of inattention breeds fear; fear arises when there is an avoidance of the fact, a flight; then the very escape itself is fear.
JIDDU KRISHNAMURTI
On Fear
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
We often suffer more from our fears, than from the dangers of our situation.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
Afraid? I can dodge folly without backing into fear.
REX STOUT
The Doorbell Rang
Fear is ever-present, waiting to be called to the surface. Change brought fear, and fear brought destruction.
BERNARD BECKETT
Genesis
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
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
Not to fear where there is occasion, is as great a weakness as to fear unduly, without reason.... Fear is a kind of bell, or gong, which rings the mind into quick life and avoidance upon the approach of danger.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
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
Subjection to fear is weakness, bondage, feverish unrest. To be afraid is to have no soul that we can call our own; it is to be at the beck and call of alien powers, to be chained and driven and tormented; it is to lose the life itself in the anxious care to keep it.
HENRY VAN DYKE
"Courage," Counsels by the Way
The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL