Fear and Anxiety

For evil news rides post, while good news baits.

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

Whence and what art thou, execrable shape?

The palpable obscure.

The sun… In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds On half the nations, and with fear of change Perplexes monarchs.

Call in thy death’s head there: tie up thy fears.

Prosperity doth bewitch men, seeming clear; But seas do laugh, show white, when rocks are near.

But keep the wolf far thence, that’s foe to men, For with his nails he’ll dig them up again.

Past cure I am, now Reason is past care, And frantic-mad with evermore unrest.

When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes I all alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries.

Now he’ll outstare the lightning. To be furious Is to be frighted out of fear.

My fell of hair Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir As life were in ’t. I have supp’d full with horrors.

Thou lily-liver’d boy.

The devil damn thee black, thou cream-fac’d loon! Where gott’st thou that goose look?

When our actions do not, Our fears do make us traitors.

What man dare, I dare: Approach thou like the rugged Russian bear, The arm’d rhinoceros, or the Hyrcan tiger; Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves Shall never tremble.

But now I am cabin’d, cribb’d, confin’d, bound in To saucy doubts and fears.

Infirm of purpose! Give me the daggers. The sleeping and the dead Are but as pictures; ’tis the eye of childhood That fears a painted devil.

I had most need of blessing, and “Amen” Stuck in my throat.

It was the owl that shriek’d, the fatal bellman, Which gives the stern’st good-night.

Thou sure and firm-set earth, Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear The very stones prate of my whereabout.

I am Thane of Cawdor: If good, why do I yield to that suggestion Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair And make my seated heart knock at my ribs, Against the use of nature? Present fears Are less than horrible imaginings.

O! that way madness lies; let me shun that.

I have full cause of weeping, but this heart Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws Or ere I’ll weep. O fool! I shall go mad.