Letter to Eileen Danniheisser (1953), quoted in Albert Einstein: Creator and Rebel by Banesh Hoffman (1973), p. 261 http://books.google.com/books?id=sdDaAAAAMAAJ&q=%22think+with+fear%22#search_anchor. The exact date, or the name of his correspondent, is not given in the snippet of the book available online, but the quote appears after the letter to the Queen of Belgium from 12 January 1953, and is prefaced by "Nine months later, in words that recall the beliefs of an early atomic speculator, the Roman poet Lucretius, Einstein had written to an inquirer", followed by the quote. The name "Eileen Danniheisser" is given in Time: Volume 144, where it is mentioned in the snippets here http://books.google.com/books?id=JDAnAQAAIAAJ&q=%22obsessive+thoughts%22#search_anchor and here http://books.google.com/books?id=JDAnAQAAIAAJ&q=%22think+with+fear%22#search_anchor that she had written Einstein "about her obsessive thoughts of death as a child".
1950s
“The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there's no risk of accident for someone who's dead.”
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Albert Einstein 702
German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativi… 1879–1955Related quotes
“Do the thing you fear the most and the death of fear is certain.”
“He who fears not death fears not a threat.”
Qui ne craint point la mort ne craint point les menaces.
Don Gomès, act II, scene i.
Le Cid (1636)
“To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.”
1920s, Marriage and Morals (1929)
Source: The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence
“For it is not death or pain that is to be feared, but the fear of pain or death.”
Book II, ch. 1 http://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/discourses.2.two.html
Discourses
Variant: For death or pain is not formidable, but the fear of pain or death.
“What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination.”
Odysseus, Book VIII, line 560
The Odyssey : A Modern Sequel (1938)