Quotes on Fear

We can either be governed by fear - fear of immigrants, fear of Muslims, call the press the enemy of the people, tear kids away from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border - or we can be governed by our ambitions and our aspirations and our desire to make the most out of all of us. And that's America at its best.

I used to believe everything my brother told me, because he was older and I figured he knew more about the world. But as it turns out, being a grown-up doesn’t mean you’re fearless. It just means you fear different things.

You have to address anger, fear, and then to think about what the alternatives are: hope, faith, a certain kind of brotherly love. And then you have to set yourself to cultivate those.

Fear will keep you alive in a war. Fear will keep you alive in business. There's nothing wrong with fear.

Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.

Death is not the biggest fear we have; our biggest fear is taking the risk to be alive - the risk to be alive and express what we really are.

You see, what is my purpose of performance artist is to stage certain difficulties and stage the fear the primordial fear of pain, of dying, all of which we have in our lives, and then stage them in front of audience and go through them and tell the audience, 'I'm your mirror; if I can do this in my life, you can do it in yours.'

The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.

A sound of cornered-animal fear and hate and surrender and defiance . . . like the last sound the treed and shot and falling animal makes as the dogs get him, when he finally doesn't care about anything but himself and his dying.

If any man has left us for fear of Nero, I shall not account him a coward; but I shall hail as a philosopher any man who has been superior to this fear, and I shall teach him all I know.

Never let the fear of striking out get in your way.

The most dangerous kind of person... is one who is afraid of his own shadow.

You're not obligated to win. You're obligated to keep trying to do the best you can every day.

Prosperity is not without many fears and distastes; adversity not without many comforts and hopes.

It's not what you do. It's the way you do it-stripping, or writing, or talking . . . or just breathing. Do it with an air, and never admit you're scared.

Friends, to me for years St. Louis represented a city of fear... humiliation... misery and terror... A city where in the eyes of the white man a Negro should know his place and had better stay in it.

Controversy is only dreaded by the advocates of error.

I tell young people: Do not think of yourself, think of others. Think of the future that awaits you, think about what you can do and do not fear anything.

I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.

We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.

I have to make sure that I don't silence myself about the things that I believe in, because sometimes the fear creeps in of 'What if fewer people watch the show or fewer people hire me because I express my politics?' For me, the commitment is to never be quiet just because I'm in the public eye.