Quotes About Fear

When the lab rats hear the bell ringing, they freeze. That's what fear does to you - fear stops you dead in your tracks. Fear can keep you from harm, but fear can also rob you of your potential. Fear can rob you of an experience. Fear can rob you of happiness. Fear can rob you of real life... Darkness has a way of scaring us.

The deepest fear we have, 'the fear beneath all fears,' is the fear of not measuring up, the fear of judgment. It's this fear that creates the stress and depression of everyday life.

We are all afraid. That's the thing that unites all truly successful people: fear, fear of failing, fear of criticism, fear of letting down the team in some way. That why they try so hard, that's why they pay attention to detail and try to get every possible duck in a row. It's fear

This fear bears no analogy to any fear I knew before. This is the basest of all possible emotions, the feeling that was with us before we existed, before this building existed, before the earth existed. This is the fear that made fish crawl out onto dry land and evolve lungs, the fear that teaches us to run, the fear that makes us bury our dead.

The only religion that ought to be taught is the religion of fearlessness. Either in this world or in the world of religion, it is true that fear is the sure cause of degradation and sin. It is fear that brings misery, fear that brings death, fear that breeds evil. And what causes fear? Ignorance of our own nature.

I do not mean to say that such institutions act unilaterally on psychic life, or that they determine certain psychic outcomes. Rather, they exploit forms of fear and insecurity that are there for any population - no political organisation of life could ever fully do away with fear and insecurity; but some work to intensify, accelerate, and make more acute forms of fear, and to provide ideological focus for such intensified fears, at which point critical thinking has a fierce rival. The critical analysis that shows precisely how those forms of fear are promulgated, and for what purpose.

If we have plain old ordinary fear then we are within reach of a solution. Fear has been with humankind for millennia and we do know what to do about it-pray about it, talk about it, feel the fear, and do it anyway. Artistic fear, on the other hand, sounds somehow nastier and more virulent, like it just might not yield to ordinary solutions-and yet it does, the moment we become humble enough to try ordinary solutions.

The man who has lived his life totally, intensely, passionately, without any fear - without any fear that has been created in you by the priests for centuries and centuries - if a person lives his life without any fear, authentically, spontaneously, death will not create any fear in him, not at all. In fact, death will come as a great rest. Death will come as the ultimate flowering of life. He will be able to enjoy death too; he will be able to celebrate death too.

A good idea if not acted upon produces terrible psychological pain. But a good idea acted upon brings enormous mental satisfaction. Got a good idea? Then do something about it. Use action to cure fear and gain confidence. Here's something to remember: Actions feed and strengthen confidence; inaction in all forms feeds fear. To fight fear, act. To increase fear--wait, put off, postpone.

For fear, real fear such as shakes you to your foundation, such as you feel when you are brought face to face with your mortal end, nestles in your memory like a gangrene: it seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it. So you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don't, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.

Remember, the only thing to fear is Fear, and - well, don't even fear Fear, for he's a cowardly chap at the best, who will run if you show a brave front.

Impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear--civilization's fear of nature, men's fear of women, power's fear of powerlessness. Man's subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify.

After she's gone, another brief lull sets in. This one is probably the last. But what good is a lull? It's only a breathing spell in which to get more frightened. Because anticipatory fear is always twice as strong as present fear. Anticipatory fear has both fears in it at once - the anticipatory one and the one that comes simultaneously with the dread happening itself. Present fear only has the one, because by that time anticipation is over.

My father taught me to not fear anything. Having said that, much of my addiction to alcohol and drugs was tied to fear: fear of flying, fear of talking to women, etc. I conquered those fears years ago.

Fear of success is far more dangerous than fear of failure, because the subconscious mind works to prevent that which it fears. People may fear success because of low self-esteem and feeling of not deserving it; because it will increase what others expect of them. Fear of success shows up as anxiety, indecision, avoidance, procrastination or acceptance of mediocrity.

In every situation do the thing you fear. If you do the thing you fear, the death of fear is certain.

Our treasure is what we fear losing, and I fear that we fear losing our treasure. We are lovers of money.

It's scary to watch someone you love go into the center of himself and confront his fears, fear of failure, fear of death, fear of going insane. You have to fail a little, die a little, go insane a little, to come out the other side.

Fear is like fire. You can make it work for you: it can warm you in the winter, cook your food when you're hungry, give you light when you are in the dark, and produce energy. Let it go out of control and it can hurt you, even kill you... Fear is a friend of exceptional people... You must understand fear so you can manipulate it.

Few men who have liberated themselves from the fear of God and the fear of death are yet able to liberate themselves from the fear of man.

Fear is the workout we give ourselves imagining what will happen if things don't work out. . . . Worry is our effort to imagine every possible way to avoid the outcome that is causing us fear, and failing that, to survive the thing that we fear if it comes to fruition.

I'm so proud the fans still sing my name, but I fear tomorrow they will stop. I fear it because I love it. And everything you love, you fear you will lose.

Fear of success is one of the new fears I've heard about lately. And I think its definitely a sign that we're running out of fears. A person suffering from fear of success is scraping the bottom of the fear barrel.

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.

I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked doors. The fear is for what is still to be lost.

In essence I find that the foundation of modern conservatism is driven by a clinging to God in fear of the world, whereas the foundation of modern liberalism is a clinging to the world in fear of God; albeit, the true foundation should be one's clinging to God in fear of God.

Suffering will always be there. You'll always have the poor. You have to own your own progress. It is true that because of the economy and the fear factor the president [Barack Obama] is able to execute a lot of promises that it would be difficult to deliver it not for the fear factor. It's funny. He's delivering on what he promised and we call it fear.

I was terrified of vault, like literally I hated it. I had a fear of running as fast as I could at a solid object, which is I think a normal fear to have because nobody would really want to do that. Once I got over the fear of running into the table I just kind of relaxed and now it's like autopilot. I love it.

My path to poetry was slow and meandering. When I eventually found my way to graduate school at 29, making a life as a poet seemed like a bohemian fantasy. But maybe my zigzagging trajectory is just an excuse for tardiness, when fear is really the root of any reason I might give. My perfectionism and pace are certainly driven by fear that a poem is imperfect or incomplete. More significantly, my struggle to fully dedicate myself to poetry was a fear of failure.

Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased by tales, so is the other.

Fear is a wet blanket that smothers the fiery passion God deposited in your heart when he formed you. Fear freezes us into inaction. Frozen ideas, frozen souls, frozen bodies can't move, can't dream, can't risk, can't love, and can't live. Fear chains us.

As a young man, I yearned for the day when, rooted in the experience that comes only with age, I could do my work fearlessly. But today, in my mid-sixties, I realize that I will feel fear from time to time for the rest of my life. I may never get rid of my fear. But . . . I can learn to walk into it and through it whenever it rises up . . . naming the inner force that triggers . . . fear . . . Naming our fears aloud . . . is the first step toward transcending them.

That is to say, politics is essentially about the management of fear, an economy of fear, continually adjusting the level of fear to produce the right level of affect in the citizenry.

Sellers in general maintain the quality of their products and services for fear of losing customers otherwise. But, when price controls create a situation where the amount demanded is greater than the amount supplied - a shortage - fear of losing customers is no longer as strong an incentive. For example, landlords typically reduce painting and repairs when there is rent control, because there is no need to fear vacancies when there are more tenants looking for apartments than there are apartments available.

When men no longer fear God, they transgress His laws without hesitation. The fear of consequences is no deterrent when the fear of God is gone.

The next time you encounter fear, consider yourself lucky. This is where the courage comes in. Usually we think that brave people have no fear. The truth is that they are intimate with fear. When I was first married, my husband said I was one of the bravest people he knew. When I asked him why, he said because I was a complete coward but went ahead and did things anyhow.

[Donald Trump] has nothing to show for it but fear in every way. To people who are sick, fear, to people who are immigrants, fear, to people who are concerned about the greed on Wall Street taking us back to where we were.

There are only two energies at the core of the human experience: love and fear. Love grants freedom, fear takes it away. Love invites full expression, fear punishes it. Love invites you, always, to break the bonds of ignorance.

A lot of the physical flirtation with fear I did early on in my career, when I was a much younger person - stuff I wouldn't do now. But I was very interested in the mechanics of risk and fear in those days. And I found out fear pretty much always feels the same, whether it's doing a rock climb or speaking in front of an audience.

I went to a motivational training course once, a course of self-discovery, and I found out after a week that my fear - it was not a fear of not being accepted - was a very violent fear of failure.

The fear of death is far greater than the death itself. But the fear of the unknown is the greatest fear of all!

I hate the point where you have to get off the ladder, or get back on. I don't know if that's a fear of heights, or literally a fear of falling. I want to be afraid to fall. That seems like a good fear.

We fear men so much, because we fear God so little. One fear cures another. When man's terror scares you, turn your thoughts to the wrath of God.

The biggest fear that everybody has is dying. Not to get too meta on you, but I think every fear that people are trying to work out is really like I'm going to die and no one is going to care, and it doesn't matter because God might not exist. That's what people are trying to figure out. I wish we all had one fear so we could think about it together and figure out a solution, but we're all doing different things.

I have no fear, for fear is the little death that kills me over and over. Without fear, I die but once.

Behind every flinch is a fear or an anxiety - sometimes rational, sometimes not. Without the fear, there is no flinch. But wiping out the fear isn't what's important - facing it is.

The delights of this life are not its own, but our fear of the ascent into a higher life; the torments of this life are not its own, but our self-torment because of that fear.

The only thing we have to fear is a giant wheelchair-crushing squid. Well... uh... actually, I guess that's the only thing I have to fear.