Quotes on Fear

The triumph can't be had without the struggle.

After doing this work or the past twelve years and watching scarcity ride roughshod over our families, organizations, and communities, I'd say the one thing we have in common is that we're sick of feeling afraid. we want to dare greatly. We're tired of the national conversation centering on "What should we fear" and "Who should we blame?" We all want to be brave.

The roots of homophobia are fear. Fear and more fear.

I don't fear death so much as I fear its prologues: loneliness, decrepitude, pain, debilitation, depression, senility. After a few years of those, I imagine death presents like a holiday at the beach.

It isn't where you came from, its where you're going that counts.

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

You are on the eve of a complete victory. You can't go wrong. The world is behind you.

It seems that the necessary thing to do is not to fear mistakes, to plunge in, to do the best that one can, hoping to learn enough from blunders to correct them eventually.

Your playing small does not serve the world. Who are you not to be great?

'Frankenstein' did not invent the fear of science; the novel found its audience because it dramatized anxieties that already existed. Although popular entertainment can, over the long run, shape public perceptions, it becomes popular in the first place only if it addresses preexisting hopes, fears, and fascinations.

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.

But who prays for Satan? Who in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most, our one fellow and brother who most needed a friend yet had not a single one, the one sinner among us all who had the highest and clearest right to every Christian's daily and nightly prayers, for the plain and unassailable reason that his was the first and greatest need, he being among sinners the supremest?

I think I'm attracted to subjects that I'm afraid of. It's a way to approach things I am afraid of, things that bring fear in my heart, and try to understand them, try to deal with them. It's like demons. I try to approach it and understand it... I'm just visiting fears.

I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.

A further sign of health is that we don't become undone by fear and trembling, but we take it as a message that it's time to stop struggling and look directly at what's threatening us.

Our greatest fear should not be of failure but of succeeding at things in life that don't really matter.

One will seldom go wrong if one attributes extreme actions to vanity, average ones to habit, and pretty ones to fear.

We must shift our allegiances from fear to curiosity, from attachment to letting go, from control to trust, and from entitlement to humility.

If you look at life as a whole, we have to admit life's good where we live. But in an evil Twilight Zone kind of way there's nothing else to choose. In the old days there was always a Bohemia or a creative under-world to join if the mainstream life wasn't your bag - or a life of crime, or even religion.And now there's only the system. All other options have evaporated. For most people it's the System or what... death? There's nothing. There's no way out now.

So when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, 'The good outnumber you, and we always will.'

If you must say yes, say it with an open heart. If you must say no, say it without fear.