Fear and Anxiety

It is the very error of the moon; She comes more near the earth than she was wont, And makes men mad.

Silence that dreadful bell! it frights the isle From her propriety.

The weariest and most loathed worldly life That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment Can lay on nature is a paradise To what we fear of death.

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice; To be imprison’d in the viewless winds, And blown with restless violence round about The pendant world.

Our doubts are traitors, And make us lose the good we oft might win, By fearing to attempt.

Modest doubt is call’d The beacon of the wise, the tent that searches To the bottom of the worst.

Where love is great, the littlest doubts are fear; When little fears grow great, great love grows there.

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres, Thy knotted and combined locks to part, And each particular hair to stand an end, Like quills upon the fretful porpentine.

Be thy intents wicked or charitable, Thou com’st in such a questionable shape That I will speak to thee.

What may this mean, That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel Revisit’st thus the glimpses of the moon, Making night hideous; 32 and we fools of nature So horridly to shake our disposition With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls?

Angels and ministers of grace defend us!

The chariest maid is prodigal enough If she unmask her beauty to the moon; Virtue itself ’scapes not calumnious strokes; The canker galls the infants of the spring Too oft before their buttons be disclos’d, And in the morn and liquid dew of youth Contagious blastments are most imminent.

Distill’d Almost to jelly with the act of fear.

And then it started like a guilty thing Upon a fearful summons.

Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream: The genius and the mortal instruments Are then in council; and the state of man, Like to a little kingdom, suffers then The nature of an insurrection.

Let me have men about me that are fat; Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’ nights. Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look; He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.

Beware the ides of March.

O God of battles! steel my soldiers’ hearts; Possess them not with fear; take from them now The sense of reckoning, if the opposed numbers Pluck their hearts from them.

How all the other passions fleet to air, As doubtful thoughts, and rash-embrac’d despair, And shuddering fear, and green-ey’d jealousy.

Suspicion all our lives shall be stuck full of eyes; For treason is but trusted like the fox.

Care keeps his watch in every old man’s eye, And where care lodges, sleep will never lie.

I am amaz’d, methinks, and lose my way Among the thorns and dangers of this world.

Extreme fear can neither fight nor fly.

O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me!