Fear and Anxiety

An’ all us other children, when the supper things is done, We set around the kitchen fire an’ has the mostest fun A-list’nin’ to the witch-tales ’at Annie tells about, An’ the Gobble-uns ’at gits you Ef you Watch Out!

When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.

Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.

Real freedom is freedom from fear, and unless you can live free from fear you cannot live a dignified human life.

The average man doesn’t want to be free. He wants to be safe.

My spirit is too weak—mortality Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep, And each imagin’d pinnacle and steep Of godlike hardship, tells me I must die Like a sick Eagle looking at the sky. 2

I have always been scared of you,

I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy.

Anxiety is love’s greatest killer. It creates the failures. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.

Otherwise, why do so many people walk upright and with open eyes into their misfortune?

Ignorance is not a simple lack of knowledge but an active aversion to knowledge, the refusal to know, issuing from cowardice, pride, or laziness of mind.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Security is mostly superstition.

My specter around me night and day Like a wild beast guards my way. My emanation far within Weeps incessantly for my sin.

Don’t let us make imaginary evils, when you know we have so many real ones to encounter.

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.

Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action.

C’est ce dequoy j’ay le plus de peur que la peur .

I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe.

He who is too much afraid of being duped has lost the power of being magnanimous.

Lord, Lord! methought what pain it was to drown: What dreadful noise of water in mine ears! What sights of ugly death within mine eyes! Methought I saw a thousand fearful wracks; A thousand men that fishes gnaw’d upon.

Demoniac frenzy, moping melancholy, And moon-struck madness.

Courage is a mean with regard to fear and confidence.

The ice was here, the ice was there, The ice was all around: It cracked and growled, and roared and howled, Like noises in a swound!