Fear and Anxiety

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.

O, I have pass’d a miserable night, So full of ugly sights, of ghastly dreams, That, as I am a Christian faithful man, I would not spend another such a night, Though ’twere to buy a world of happy days.

Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind; The thief doth fear each bush an officer.

For many men that stumble at the threshold Are well foretold that danger lurks within.

’Tis not my speeches that you do mislike, But ’tis my presence that doth trouble ye. Rancor will out.

Of all base passions, fear is most accurs’d.

It made our hair stand up in panic fear.

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

The terror of the white page in the typewriter.

The solitude of writing is … quite frightening. It’s close sometimes to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.

Despair often breeds disease.

A fearful man is always hearing things.

A word does not frighten the man who, in acting, feels no fear.

To him who is in fear everything rustles.

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

Courage is knowing what not to fear.

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.

It is not death or pain that is to be dreaded, but the fear of pain or death.

Beware lest in your anxiety to avoid war you obtain a master.

Courage is a mean with regard to fear and confidence.

The generality of men are naturally apt to be swayed by fear rather than reverence, and to refrain from evil rather because of the punishment that it brings than because of its own foulness.

Excessive fear is always powerless.

Eight grown Americans out of ten dread the coming of the Fourth, with its pandemonium and its perils, and they rejoice when it is gone-if still alive.

I've seen many troubles in my time, only half of which ever came true.