Quotes about fear
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“Fear can't hurt you," she said. "When it washes over you, give it no power. It's a snake with no venom. Remember that. That knowledge can save you.”

Maureen Johnson (1973) writer from the USA

Source: The Name of the Star

Knowledge, Hurt

“Fear is the enemy of hope.”

Dave Ramsey (1960) American financial advisor

Hope

“God is with me. Jesus is near. The Spirit is greater than my fear.”

Ted Dekker book Kiss

Source: Kiss

God

“Whatever you fear most has no power--it is your fear that has the power”

Oprah Winfrey (1954) American businesswoman, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist

“The true warrior isn't immune to fear. She fights in spite of it.”

Francesca Lia Block (1962) American children's writer

Source: Love in the Time of Global Warming

Fight

“Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore (2002)

Imagination, Reality

“I'm quite all right. I'm not even scared. You see, I've learned from looking around, there is something worse than loneliness--and that's the fear of it.”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Source: The Ladies of the Corridor

Learning, Loneliness

“Face your fears or they will climb over your back.”

Frank Herbert book Chapterhouse: Dune

Source: Chapterhouse: Dune

“Courage is fear that has said its prayers.”

Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

Source: Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

Courage

“Healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough not to fear death.”

Erik H. Erikson book Childhood and Society

Childhood and Society (1950), p. 269

Life, Death, Children

“The three most harmful negative emotions are anger, guilt, and fear. And anger is number one. It is also the strongest and most dangerous of all passions.”

Joyce Meyer (1943) American author and speaker

Source: Living Beyond Your Feelings: Controlling Emotions So They Don't Control You

Passion, Anger

“When so many hours have been spent convincing myself I am right, is there not some reason to fear I may be wrong?”

Jane Austen book Sense and Sensibility

Variant: Where so many hours have been spent in convincing myself that I am right, is there not some reason to fear I may be wrong?
Source: Sense and Sensibility

“From an evolutionary point of view, most emotions - fear, desire, anger - serve some practical purpose, but nostalgia is a useless, futile thing because it is a longing for something that is permanently lost….”

David Nicholls book Us

Source: Us

Nostalgia, Anger

“Merripen, despite his fear of heights, had often climbed a ladder to wash the second floor window for her. He had wanted her view of the outside world to be clear.
He had said the sky should always be blue for her.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Seduce Me at Sunrise

World

“Fear is a poison produced by the mind, and courage is the antidote stored always ready in the soul”

Dean Koontz (1945) American author

Soul, Courage

“Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.”

Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist

“The greatest fear dogs know is the fear that you will not come back when you go out the door without them.”

Stanley Coren (1942) American psychologist

Dogs

“You can get so confused
that you'll start in to race
down long wiggled roads at a break-necking pace
and grind on for miles across weirdish wild space,
headed, I fear, toward a most useless place.
The Waiting Place…”

Dr. Seuss (1904–1991) American children's writer and illustrator, co-founder of Beginner Books

Source: Oh, The Places You'll Go!

Waiting

“Vertigo is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.”

Salman Rushdie (1947) British Indian novelist and essayist

“Fear doesn't go away. The warrior and the artist live by the same code of necessity, which dictates that the battle must be fought anew every day.”

Steven Pressfield (1943) United States Marine

Source: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks & Win Your Inner Creative Battles

“I’m full of fears and I do my best to avoid difficulties and any kind of complications. I like everything around me to be clear as crystal and completely calm.”

Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) British filmmaker

“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

Misattributed

Depressing, Heart Touching, Life, Death

“It is better to be small, colorful, sexy, careless, and peaceful, like the flowers, than large, conservative, repressed, fearful, and aggressive, like the thunder lizards; a lesson, by the way, that the Earth has yet to learn.”

Tom Robbins book Jitterbug Perfume

Source: Jitterbug Perfume

Peace, Color, Way, Flowers

“This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature.”

Julian Barnes book The Sense of an Ending

Source: The Sense of an Ending

Life, Literature

“There is no disgrace in honest failure; there is disgrace in fearing to fail”

Henry Ford book My Life and Work

Source: My Life and Work (1922), pp. 19–20. Quoted in Samuel Crowther, "Henry Ford's Problem," The Magazine of Business, vol. 52 (1927), p. 182
Source: My Life And Work
Context: Failure is only the opportunity more intelligently to begin again. There is no disgrace in honest failure; there is disgrace in fearing to fail.

Failure

“The awareness of the damage done by severe mental illness—to the individual himself and to others—and fears that it may return again play a decisive role in many suicides”

Kay Redfield Jamison (1946) American bipolar disorder researcher

Source: Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide

Decision, Suicide

“How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies of his children? You can't scare him--he has known a fear beyond every other.”

John Steinbeck book The Grapes of Wrath

Source: The Grapes of Wrath

Hunger, Children

“What we don't let out traps us. We think, "No one else feels this way, I must be crazy." So we don't say anything. And we become enveloped by a deep loneliness, not knowing where our feelings come from or what to do with them. "Why do I feel this way? Last week, I was on top of the world and now my feelings don't make sense." Voicing it, getting it out and letting it other people hear it, helps to dissipate it. The fears and self-criticisms begin to leak. And we begin to heal.”

Sabrina Ward Harrison (1975) Canadian writer

Quoted by Katherine Martin in Women of Courage: Inspiring Stories from the Women Who Lived Them, p. 268 (1999)

People, World, Way, Feeling

“Your fear of letting go prevents you from letting go of your fear of letting go.”

John Burdett (1951) British crime novelist

Source: Bangkok Tattoo

“And I watered it in fears,
Night and morning with my tears;
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

Smile, Tear, Water, Sun

“FEAR stands for face everything and recover – Old AA saying”

Stephen King book Doctor Sleep

Variant: FEAR stands for fuck everything and run.
Source: Doctor Sleep

“Enjoy the present, bid defiance to the future, laugh at all those reasonable beings who exercise their reason to avoid the misfortunes which they fear, destroying at the same time the pleasure that they might enjoy.”

Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) Italian adventurer and author from the Republic of Venice

Pleasure, Exercises, Time, Future

“In this age of censorship, I mourn the loss of books that will never be written, I mourn the voices that will be silenced-writers' voices, teachers' voices, students' voices-and all because of fear.”

Judy Blume (1938) American children's writer

Source: Places I Never Meant To Be: Original Stories by Censored Writers

Books, Age, Silence, Teachers

“When I look at narcissism through the vulnerability lens, I see the shame-based fear of being ordinary. I see the fear of never feeling extraordinary enough to be noticed, to be lovable, to belong, or to cultivate a sense of purpose.”

Brené Brown (1965) US writer and professor

Source: Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead

Feeling, Sense

“Passionately obsessed by anything we love--an avalanche of magic flattens the way ahead, levels, rules, reasons, dissents, bears us with it over chasms, fears, doubts. Without the power of that love….”

Richard Bach (1936) American spiritual writer

Source: The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story

Love, Way, Passion

“We are afraid of losing what we have, whether it's our life or our possessions and property. But this fear evaporates when we understand that our life stories and the history of the world were written by the same hand.”

Paulo Coelho book The Alchemist

Source: The Alchemist (1988), p. 93

Life, World, History, Understanding

“Dear God,
I give this time of quiet to You.
Please dissolve my thoughts of stress and fear
And deliver me to the inner place
Where all is peace and love.
Amen.”

Marianne Williamson (1952) American writer

Source: The Law of Divine Compensation: On Work, Money, and Miracles

Love, God, Peace, Time

“I don't believe in an afterlife, so I don't have to spend my whole life fearing hell, or fearing heaven even more. For whatever the tortures of hell, I think the boredom of heaven would be even worse.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

As quoted in Philosophy on the Go (2007) by Joey Green, p. 222
General sources

Life, Hell, Thinking

“The world, even the smallest parts of it, is filled with things you don't know.

If you care about something enough, it's going to make you cry. But you have to use it. Use your tears. Use your pain. Use your fear. Get mad.”

Sherman Alexie book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Source: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Pain, World, Tear, Parting

“In the end, we get older, we kill everyone who loves us through the worries we give them, through the troubled tenderness we inspire in them, and the fears we ceaselessly cause.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

Love

“At first, when we truly love someone, our greatest fear is that the loved one will stop loving us. What we should fear and dread, of course, is that we won't stop loving them, even after they're dead and gone.”

Gregory David Roberts book Shantaram

Source: Shantaram

Love, Dead

“Do you understand now why books are hated and feared? Because they reveal the pores on the face of life. The comfortable people want only the faces of the full moon, wax, faces without pores, hairless, expressionless.”

Ray Bradbury book Fahrenheit 451

Source: Fahrenheit 451

Life, Hate, People, Books

“Nothing is more painful to the human mind than, after the feelings have been worked up by a quick succession of events, the dead calmness of inaction and certainty which follows and deprives the soul both of hope and fear.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

Source: Frankenstein

Pain, Hope, Feeling, Soul

“We're as good at talking ourselves out of fear as into it, aren't we? Maybe better.”

Deb Caletti (1963) American writer

Source: Stay

“When we are sure that we are on the right road there is no need to plan our journey too far ahead. No need to burden ourselves with doubts and fears as to the obstacles that may bar our progress. We cannot take more than one step at a time.”

Orison Swett Marden (1850–1924) American writer

Time

“Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”

James Baldwin (1924–1987) (1924-1987) writer from the United States

Deep, love, Wise, Relationship

“There are really only two positions one can take toward anything in life: hope or fear. Hope strengthens, fear kills.”

Karen Marie Moning book Darkfever

Variant: There are only really two positions one can take toward anything in life: hope or fear. Hope strengthens, fear kills.
Source: Darkfever

Life, Hope

“Is this a game? We just blurt out whatever word comes next to mind? In that case mine's 'genuphobia'. It means an unreasonable fear of knees."
"What's the word for a perfectly reasonable fear of annoying idiots?" inqired Jessamine.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Prince

Source: Clockwork Prince

Game

“The light of truth burns without a flicker in the depths of a house that is shaken with storms of passion and fear.”

Thomas Merton (1915–1968) Priest and author

Truth, Light, Passion, Housing

“Jonathan Seagull discovered that boredom and fear and anger are the reasons that a gull’s life is so short, and with these gone from his thoughts, he lived a long fine life indeed.”

Richard Bach book Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Source: Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970)

Life, Anger

“When the world moves forward too fast for some people, they try to pull us all back with their fear.”

Libba Bray book The Diviners

Source: The Diviners

People, World

“Sometimes I think there’s no such thing as falling in love. It’s just the fear of losing someone.”

Jodi Picoult (1966) Author

Source: Leaving Time

Love, Thinking

“It's my petty fear of personal rejection that allows so many true evils to exist. My cowardice enables atrocities.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Damned

Source: Damned

Evil, Personality

“Whatever you describe to another person is also a revelation of who you are and who you think you are. You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.”

James Baldwin (1924–1987) (1924-1987) writer from the United States

Hope, Thinking, Personality

“Nothing binds you except your thoughts; nothing limits you except your fear; and nothing controls you except your beliefs.”

Marianne Williamson (1952) American writer

“be greedy when others are fearful, and fearful when others are greedy.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

“Often admitting our weakness and fear is the first step to finding rest in God. Our trust in Him isn't conveyed though superhuman confidence as much as it comes in the way of childlike reliance on Him.”

Tracie Peterson (1959) American writer

Source: Morning's Refrain

God, Way, Confidence

“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”

George Lucas (1944) American film producer

Source: Star Wars - Episode I: The Phantom Menace

Hate, Suffering, Anger

“If you're feeling helpless, help someone. ”
― Aung San Suu Kyi (from Freedom from Fear)”

Aung San Suu Kyi book Freedom from Fear

Variant: If you're feeling helpless, help someone.
Source: Freedom from Fear

Feeling, Freedom, Help

“I will fear no evil for I am the baddest beast in the land. (Nick)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Infinity

Evil

“Kindness eases change.
Love quiets fear.
And a sweet and powerful
Positive obsession
Blunts pain,
Diverts rage,
And engages each of us
In the greatest,
The most intense
Of our chosen struggles.”

Octavia E. Butler book Parable of the Talents

Source: Parable of the Talents

Love, Pain, Rage, Change

“Death is something we shouldn't fear because, while we are, death isn't, and when death is, we aren't.”

Antonio Machado (1875–1939) Spanish poet

Death

“Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Courageous, Death

“Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, scenes, jealousy, envy, all the spices of fear, foreign travel, new faces, novels, stories, dreams, fantasies, music, dancing, opium, wine.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Source: The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

Jealousy, Dreams, Music, Sex

“We fear that which we cannot see.”

Tite Kubo (1977) Japanese manga artist

Source: Bleach, Volume 01

“Authority allows two roles: the torturer and the tortured. Twists people into joyless mannequins that fear and hate, while culture plunges into the abyss.”

Alan Moore V for Vendetta

Source: V for Vendetta

Hate, People

“Behind every bad law, a deep fear.”

Sarah Vowell The Wordy Shipmates

Source: The Wordy Shipmates

Law

“There is a certain freedom in giving up all hope. One is no longer bound by the cords of dread or fear; you simply move toward the inevitable without thinking on the consequences.”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: Last Breath

Hope, Thinking, Freedom

“Do not fear death, but rather the unlived life. You don't have to live forever. You just have to live.”

Natalie Babbitt (1932–2016) American children's writer and illustrator

Variant: Don't be afraid of death; be afraid of an unlived life. You don't have to live forever, you just have to live.
Source: Tuck Everlasting: Scholastic Book Guides

Life, Death

“Nino has something that's eating him inside, like Lila, and it's a gift and a suffering; they aren't content, they never give in, they fear what is happening around them.”

Elena Ferrante book My Brilliant Friend

Source: My Brilliant Friend

Suffering