Quotes about anxiety (434 quotes, page 4)

“The social conditions of the British people in the early years of the twentieth century cannot be contemplated without deep anxiety. … We are at the cross-ways. If we stand on the old happy-go-lucky way, the richer classes ever growing in wealth and in number, and ever declining in responsibility, the very poor remaining plunged or plunging even deeper into helpless, hopeless misery, then I think there is nothing before us but savage strife between class and class, with an increasing disorganization, with an increasing destruction of human strength and human virtue—nothing, in fact, but that dual degeneration which comes from the simultaneous waste of extreme wealth and of extreme want.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

The People's Rights [1909] (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), pp. 138-139
Early career years (1898–1929)

People , Way , Thinking , Wealth

“The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.”

Ernest Becker book The Denial of Death

The Denial of Death (1973)
Source: "Human Character as a Vital Lie", p. 66

Life , Death

“A doctor recently described to me "benign positional vertigo": it means you get dizzy in certain positions, but you can get over it without necessarily changing the position. Change "vertigo" to "anxiety," and you've summed up the neurotic's plight.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Neurotics and neurosis

Change

“Anxiety is often related to having to perform and act an acceptable role in order to be admitted into relationships.”

Michael Elmore-Meegan (1959) British humanitarian

All shall be well (2014)

“We're in a freefall into future. We don't know where we're going. Things are changing so fast, and always when you're going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. And all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. It's a very interesting shift of perspective and that's all it is… joyful participation in the sorrows and everything changes.”

Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) American mythologist, writer and lecturer

Sukhavati (2002, reissued 2007)

Hell , Change , Future

“Love born of anxiety resembles a thorn shaped so that efforts to pull it out of one's flesh merely cause it to penetrate more deeply therein.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Loving

Love , Effort

“I like the material, which makes it easy to sort of delve into it, and then also I was too tired to be nervous. I was just happy. The anxiety, the anxious energy was not there, because I was too exhausted.”

St. Vincent (musician) (1982) American singer-songwriter

On the first public performances of some of the music from her album Actor in an interview for Billboard magazine (20 March 2009) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0w53ut9dzhI

Happiness

““God” is often clinically paranoiac because the shaman’s “supernatural helper” is the projection of the shaman himself. The personality of Yahweh, so to speak, exactly fits the irascible personality of the sheikh-shaman Moses; the voices of Yahweh and Moses are indistinguishable. Of course, shamans do not always have an easy time of it. If the dereistic dreamer arouses too much anxiety, people call him crazy, just as people must put themselves at a psychological distance from the frightening and uncanny schizophrenic. But if the dreamer largely allays anxiety in the society, then he is the shaman-savior. Thus it is that outsiders to the society cannot tell the difference between a psychotic and a vatic personality. Only the society itself can distinguish between its psychotics and its shaman-saviors.”

Weston La Barre (1911–1996) anthropologist

Source: Hallucinogens and the Shamanic Origins of Religion (1972), p. 266

God , People , Time , Personality

“Conquest brings no lasting happiness unless the person conquered was possessed of free will. Only then can there be doubt and anxiety and those continual victories over habit and boredom which produce the keenest pleasures of all. The comely inmates of the harem are rarely loved, for they are prisoners. Inversely, the far too accessible ladies of present-day seaside resorts almost never inspire love, because they are emancipated. Where is love's victory when there is neither veil, modesty, nor self-respect to check its progress? Excessive freedom raises up the transparent walls of an invisible seraglio to surround these easily acquired ladies. Romantic love requires women, not that they should be inaccessible, but that their lives should be lived within the rather narrow limits of religion and convention. These conditions, admirably observed in the Middle-Ages, produced the courtly love of that time. The honoured mistress of the chateau remained within its walls while the knight set out for the Crusades and thought about his lady. In those days a man scarcely ever tried to arouse love in the object of his passion. He resigned himself to loving in silence, or at least without hope. Such frustrated passions are considered by some to be naive and unreal, but to certain sensitive souls this kind of remote admiration is extremely pleasurable, because, being quite subjective, it is better protected against deception and disillusion.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Loving

Love , Women , Pleasure , Age

“Some of the anxiety about personal religion is due to a subtle lack of faith in religion. Men think it is a fragile thing that will break up and vanish when the customs and formulas which have hitherto encased and protected it are broken and cast aside. Most of us have known religion in one form, and we suppose it can have no other. But religion is the life of God in the soul of man, and is God really so fragile?”

Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) United States Baptist theologian

Source: Christianizing the Social Order (1912), p. 105

Life , Men , God , Faith

“In the languor of disease and the weariness of old age, the pleasures of the vain and empty distinctions of greatness disappear. To one, in this situation, they are no longer capable of recommending those toilsome pursuits in which they had formerly engaged him. In his heart he curses ambition, and vainly regrets the ease and the indolence of youth, pleasures which are fled for ever, and which he has foolishly sacrificed for what, when he has got it, can afford him no real satisfaction. In this miserable aspect does greatness appear to every man when reduced either by spleen or disease to observe with attention his own situation, and to consider what it is that is really wanting to his happiness. Power and riches appear then to be, what they are, enormous and operose machines contrived to produce a few trifling conveniencies to the body, consisting of springs the most nice and delicate, which must be kept in order with the most anxious attention, and which, in spite of all our care, are ready every moment to burst into pieces, and to crush in their ruins their unfortunate possessor. …
But though this splenetic philosophy, which in time of sickness or low spirits is familiar to every man, thus entirely depreciates those great objects of human desire, when in better health and in better humour, we never fail to regard them under a more agreeable aspect. Our imagination, which in pain and sorrow seems to be confined and cooped up within our own persons, in times of ease and prosperity expands itself to every thing around us. We are then charmed with the beauty of that accommodation which reigns in the palaces and economy of the great; and admire how every thing is adapted to promote their ease, to prevent their wants, to gratify their wishes, and to amuse and entertain their most frivolous desires. If we consider the real satisfaction which all these things are capable of affording, by itself and separated from the beauty of that arrangement which is fitted to promote it, it will always appear in the highest degree contemptible and trifling. But we rarely view it in this abstract and philosophical light. We naturally confound it, in our imagination with the order, the regular and harmonious movement of the system, the machine or economy by means of which it is produced. The pleasures of wealth and greatness, when considered in this complex view, strike the imagination as something grand, and beautiful, and noble, of which the attainment is well worth all the toil and anxiety which we are so apt to bestow upon it.
And it is well that nature imposes upon us in this manner. It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind.”

Adam Smith book The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Chap. I.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Part IV

Pain , Health , Pleasure , Youth

“The signal failure of the academic Marxists is in their obliviousness to the transformation of modern labor. In the age of mass media, power has shifted its meaning and loci. Capitalism, whatever its problems, remains the most efficient economic mechanism yet to bring the highest quality of life to the greatest number. Because I have studied the past, I know that, in America and under capitalism, I am the freest woman in history. Union blue-collar jobs now routinely pay higher salaries than are earned by most teachers. Physical labor, as a concrete skill occupation, is free of the soul-destroying office politics suffers by the Marxists' demonized managerial class, who take their jobs home with them and are in a continual funk of anxiety and neurosis. … Unharried weekend leisure time is the center of working-class American life in ways the academic Marxists, resentfully marking papers and endlessly pressed for time, simply don't see.</b”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, pp. 247

Life , Age , Way , Home

“Man is constantly building anxiety-structures, like geodesic domes, around his social and religious institutions.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

Source: "Quotes", The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982), Chapter 8, p. 232

“Ibn 'Umar reported that the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, said, "A Muslim is the brother of another Muslim. He should not wrong him nor surrender him to his enemy. Allah will take care of the needs of anyone who takes care of the needs of his brother. On the Day of Rising Allah will dispel the anxiety of anyone who dispels the anxiety of another Muslim. On the Day of Rising Allah will veil anyone who veils another Muslim."”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Riyadh-as-Saliheen by Imam Al-Nawawi, volume 2, hadith number 233
Sunni Hadith

Peace

“Through fasting, concentration and prayer, mystics shut out the shifting world of the senses in order to reach a timeless reality. Quite often they find what they seek - but it is only a shadow play, an arabesque of their own anxieties, projected onto an inner screen. They end as they began, stuck fast in the personal time of memory and regret.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

As It Is: Turning Back (p. 198)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

World , Reality , Sense , Memory

“When one recalls the lessons of 1814, 1870 and 1914-18 it is not to be wondered at that those who dwell within daily sight of the scars due to the tearing wounds inflicted by Teutonic hands on their living land should have a natural apprehension lest the same calamities should befall again. Stripped of some of its richest provinces, Germany has still a population 50 per cent above that of France. The German is industrious, intelligent and resourceful, and although he is poor to-day such qualities soon make riches. He will therefore, so Frenchmen realise, once more become a formidable menace. The Teuton is on the French nerves. This accounts for the anxiety to keep him chained by Treaties, impoverished by levies, and overawed by armaments.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

The Truth about Reparations and War-Debts (London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1932), p. 68.
Later life

Intelligence , Nature , Tear

“The anxiety felt today is an unmistakable symptom of rebellion. The very depths of a continent are profoundly moved, a continent that has witnessed four centuries of slave, semi-slave, and feudal exploitation beginning with its aboriginal inhabitants and slaves brought from Africa, up to the nuclei of nationalities that emerged later: white, black, mulatto, mestizo and Indian, who today are made brothers and sisters by scorn, humiliation and the Yankee yoke, and are brothers and sisters in their hope for a better tomorrow.”

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) former First Secretary of the Communist Party and President of Cuba

The Second Declaration of Havana (1962)

Hope , Sister

“The procedure under section 28 of the merchant marine act has created great difficulty and threatened friction during the past 12 months. Its attempted application developed not only great opposition from exporters, particularly as to burdens that may be imposed upon agricultural products, but also great anxiety in the different seaports as to the effect upon their relative rate structures. This trouble will certainly recur if action is attempted under this section. It is uncertain in some of its terms and of great difficulty in interpretation.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Second State of the Union Address (1924)

Past

“Such was the discipline of the navy at that time, and such the anxiety to conform to the law of Congress against spirituous liquors, that no officer or man in the service would take a drink out of a bottle unless it was marked 'Medicine.”

David Dixon Porter (1813–1891) United States Navy admiral

Source: 1880s, Incidents and Anecdotes of the Civil War (1885), p. 324

Law , Drink , Time

“After all, people with a herd instinct hold mediocrity in high esteem. They praise it as having great value. They believe they are strong because they are the majority. The middling level has no terrors, no anxieties. They huddle together, indulging in the illusion of warmth. If you’re alone with nothing, and certainly not yourself. And how content they are with that state of affairs!”

Elfriede Jelinek book The Piano Teacher

P 66
The Piano Teacher (1988)

People , Strong

“Neurotics are anxiety prone, accident prone, and often just prone.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Neurotics and neurosis

“This is made since a long time in Pichilemu, because of that, and the anxiety of our inhabitants we are proposing that these beaches become legal.”

Jorge Vargas González (1967) Chilean politician

Vargas on nude beaches in Pichilemu, in Terra (24 December 2002)

Time

“I write of a coming shift from a profit-taking economy to a gift economy, from an economy of ‘how can I take the most?’ to ‘how can I best give of my gifts?’ This future, in which the anxiety of "making a living" no longer drives us, will arise out of the transformation in the human sense of self that is gathering today. But it is not only a future. We can live it now.”

Charles Eisenstein (1967) American writer

The Ascent of Humanity http://charleseisenstein.net/project/ascent-of-humanity/
The Ascent of Humanity (2007)

Sense , Future

“The essay was impelled by Clare's anxiety that his poems were slipping out if fashion.”

John Birtwhistle (1946) English poet

Clare's 'Popularity in Authorship (1824)

Fashion

“The fact that most of the time human beings put the truth about the nature and risks of the nuclear war out of their minds because it is too painful and therefore not "acceptable", does not alter the nature and risks of such war. The device of "rejection" may temporarily cover up anxiety, but it does not bestow peace of mind and emotional security.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, The Quest for Peace and Justice (1964)

Pain , War , Truth , Peace

“When a broad and significant change occurs in the organization, the first question many people ask is “What's in it for me?” or “What's going to happen to me? This is an indication of the anxiety that occurs when people are faced with the uncertainty associated with organizational change.”

David A. Nadler (1948–2015) American organizational theorist

David A Nadler (2010), "Techniques for the management of change," Robert Golembiewski (ed.) Handbook of Organizational Consultation, p. 1067; Quoted in: Diane Dormant, ‎Joe Lee (2011). The Chocolate Model of Change.

People , Question , Change

“If … we meet a man of acknowledged mental superiority, whether generally or in his special department, it is our social duty by intelligent questioning, by an anxiety to learn from him, to force him to condescend to our ignorance, or join in our fun, till his broader sympathies are awakened, and he plays with us as if we were children. Indeed this very metaphor points out one of the very remarkable instances of social equality asserted by an inferior—I mean the outspoken freedom of the child—which possesses a peculiar charm, and often thaws the dignity or dissipates the reserve of the great man and woman whose superiority is a perpetual obstacle to them in ordinary society.”

John Pentland Mahaffy (1839–1919) Irish classicist and polymathic scholar

Conversation (1896), p. 104 http://books.google.com/books?id=1yEVAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA104

Children , Intelligence , Question , Freedom

“If a young mother has a job as a secretary in a company trying to cut expenses, where they start giving her the work of two secretaries and making extra demands on her, she will do all she can to please her employers. In fact, they are causing her to worry, hurry to work and rush home late to her expectant family. Thus, pressure and demands in a business setting lead to anxiety and tension at home. This is what begins to happen in our civilization when we put profit before people, and getting work done before the feelings of those we work with.”

Michael Elmore-Meegan (1959) British humanitarian

All shall be well (2014)

People , Family , Feeling , Home

“[about his painting 'Approaching a CityWell' Hopper painted in 1946:] I've always been interested in approaching a big city in a train, and I can't exactly describe the sensations, but they're entirely human and perhaps have nothing to do with aesthetics. There is a certain fear and anxiety and a great visual interest in the things that one sees coming into a great city. I think that's about all I can say about it.”

Edward Hopper (1882–1967) prominent American realist painter and printmaker

1941 - 1967
Source: 'Oral history interview with Edward Hopper' (1959, June 17), conducted by John Morse; 'Archives of American Art', Smithsonian Institution

Fear , Thinking , Painting , Training

“The anxiety children feel at constantly being tested, their fear of failure, punishment, and disgrace, severely reduces their ability both to perceive and to remember, and drives them away from the material being studied into strategies for fooling teachers into thinking they know what they really don't know.”

John Holt book How Children Learn

How Children Learn (1967).

Children , Fear , Fools , Feeling

“When, where, and how were you, Joseph Smith, first called? How old were you? and what were you qualifications? I was between fourteen and fifteen years of age. Had you been to college? No. Had you studied in any seminary of learning? No. Did you know how to read? Yes. How to write? Yes. Did you understand much about arithmetic? No. About grammar? No. Did you understand all the branches of education which are generally taught in our common schools? No. But yet you say the Lord called you when you were but fourteen or fifteen years of age? How did he call you? I will give you a brief history as it came from his own mouth. I have often heard him relate it. He was wrought upon by the Spirit of God, and felt the necessity of repenting of his sins and serving God. He retired from his father's house a little way, and bowed himself down in the wilderness, and called upon the name of the Lord. He was inexperienced, and in great anxiety and trouble of mind in regard to what church he should join. He had been solicited by many churches to join with them, and he was in great anxiety to know which was right. He pleaded with the Lord to give him wisdom on the subject; and while he was thus praying, he beheld a vision, and saw a light approaching him from the heavens; and as it came down and rested on the tops of the trees, it became more glorious; and as it surrounded him, his mind was immediately caught away from beholding surrounding objects. In this cloud of light he saw two glorious personages; and one, pointing to the other, said, "Behold my beloved son! hear ye him."”

Orson Pratt (1811–1881) Apostle of the LDS Church

Journal of Discourses 7:220 (August 14, 1859).
Joseph Smith Jr.'s First Vision

Wisdom , God , Age , Education

“A mistake in judgment isn't fatal, but too much anxiety about judgment is.”

Pauline Kael (1919–2001) American film critic

"Zeitgeist and Poltergeist; or, Are Movies Going to Pieces?" http://www.paulrossen.com/paulinekael/aremoviespieces.html (December 1964), from I Lost It at the Movies (1965).

“Courage is the capacity to meet the anxiety which arises as one achieves freedom. It is the willingness to differentiate, to move from the protecting realms of parental dependence to new levels of freedom and integration.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: Man’s Search for Himself (1953), p. 192

Courage , Parent , Freedom , Dependency

“Steno conceded, as Fabio Colonna had done before him, that all marine fossils might have been transported into their present situation at the time of the Noachian deluge. He maintained that fossil vegetables had been once living plants, and he hinted that they might, in some instances, indicate the distinction between fluvial and marine deposits. He also inferred that the present mountains had not existed ever since the origin of things, suggesting that many strata of submarine origin had been accumulated in the interval between the creation and deluge. Here he displayed his great anxiety to reconcile his theory with the Scriptures; for he at the same time advanced an opinion, which does not seem very consistent with such a doctrine, viz., that there was a wide distinction between the shelly, and nearly horizontal beds at the foot of the Apennines, and the older mountains of highly inclined stratification. Both, he observed, were of sedimentary origin; and a considerable interval of time must have separated their formation. Tuscany, according to him, had successively passed through six different states; and to explain these mighty changes, he called in the agency of inundations, earthquakes, and subterranean fires.”

Charles Lyell book Principles of Geology

Chpt.3, p. 32
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1

Mountain , Change , Time , Success

“You could argue people are generally better off now mentally than they were back then. We follow the natural cycles. We eat real food instead of processed crap full of chemicals. We're not jacked up on coffee and television and sexy advertising all the time. No more anxiety about credit card bills.”

James Howard Kunstler book World Made By Hand

Source: World Made By Hand (2008), Chapter 7, p. 37–38

People , Food , Coffee , Nature

“The strangest mores of the most of-the-way societies will, in spite of everything, be relatively comprehensible to the person who has a flesh-and-blood knowledge of man’s needs, anxieties, and hopes. If, on the other hand, this experience is lacking, he will not even be able to understand the customs of those about him.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Saint Genet

139
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952)

Hope , Way , Understanding , Knowledge

“What must be acknowledged, for example the prevalence of anxiety, is grafted onto man’s essence as if it grew there. Such is the tried and tested method of the apologist: what is social in origin is presented as natural.”

Russell Jacoby (1945) American historian

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 63

Nature

“When one read’s Kierkegaard’s profound analyses of anxiety and despair or Nietzsche’s amazingly acute insights into the dynamics of resentment and the guilt and hostility which accompany repressed emotional powers, one might pinch oneself to realize that one is reading works written in the last century and not some new contemporary psychological analysis.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: The Discovery of Being (1983), p. 53

Hostility , Reading , Despair

“Anxiety is the poison of human life; the parent of many sins and of more miseries. – In a world where everything is doubtful, and where we may be disappointed, and be blessed in disappointment, why this restless stir and commotion of mind? – Can it alter the cause, or unravel the mystery of human events?”

Tryon Edwards (1809–1894) American theologian

Misattributed to Tryon Edwards by a number of websites, thinkexist.com and quoteland.com among others. This quote does appear on p. 23 of Edwards' compilation, A Dictionary of Thoughts; however, it is clearly identified there as a quote by Hugh Blair, the Scottish author and preacher.
A genuine Tryon Edwards quote on the subject of anxiety appears above in the Sourced section ( from p. 22 of A Dictionary of Thoughts. )
Misattributed

Life , World , Disappointment , Parent

“One such evolutionary system, or ridge, encompasses panhuman emotional faculties, or affective "programs." These include the basic, or primary, emotions that Darwin first identified: surprise, fear, anger, joy, sadness, disgust, and perhaps contempt. Certain reactions characteristic of the neurophysiology of surprise and fear are already evident in reptiles, and the other primary emotions are at least apparent in monkeys and apes. Then there are the secondary, mostly "social" emotions, such as anxiety, grief, guilt, pride, vengeance, and love. These may be unique to humans-hence, at the lower level in our evolutionary mountain landscape and somewhat more liable to cultural manipulation and variation than the primary, "Darwinian" emotions. Thus, only humans seek revenge or redemption across lifetimes and generations, whatever the cost, although the nature of the deeds that trigger insult or remorse may vary considerably across societies, and the means to counter them may range even wider.”

Scott Atran (1952) Anthropologist

Introduction: an evolutionary riddle, p. 11
In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (2002)

Love , Sadness , Fear , Mountain

“Anxiety occurs because of a threat to the values a person identifies with his existence as a self … most anxiety comes from a threat to social, emotional and moral values the person identifies with himself. And here we find that a main source of anxiety, particularly in the younger generation, is that they do not have viable values available in the culture on the basis of which they can relate to their world. The anxiety which is inescapable in an age in which values are so radically in transition is a central cause of apathy … such prolonged anxiety tends to develop into lack of feeling and the experience of depersonalization.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: Psychology and the Human Dilemma (1967), p. 42

Age , World , Feeling , Personality

“The repulsion, the anxiety, the wish for removal and the anger at pain and the means thereof, which stick in the mind in consequence of feeling of pain, in the case of him who has felt the pain, preceded by a remembrance of the pain, is aversion.”

Vyasa central and revered figure in most Hindu traditions

In p. 104.
Sources, The Yoga Darsana Of Patanjali With The Sankhya Pravacana Commentary Of Vyasa

Pain , Feeling , Anger

“The great secret, known to internists and learned early in marriage by internist’s wives, but still hidden from the general public, is that most things get better by themselves. Most things, in fact, are better by morning. Obviously, it is a great time-saver and money-saver for the physician’s family that anxiety about disease is not handled as though it were the disease itself; there is perhaps greater willingness to accept anxiety as a natural, often transient, phenomenon. And certainly there is much less ambition to deploy the full technology of medicine as a corrective for the human condition.”

Lewis Thomas (1913–1993) American physician, poet and educator

Source: Aspects of Biomedical Science Policy (1972), p. 3

Money , Marriage , Secret , Disease

“I shall within a few days divest myself of the anxieties and the labors with which I have been oppressed, and retire with inexpressible delight to my family, my friends, my farms, and books. There I may indulge at length in that tranquillity and those pursuits from which I have been divorced by the character of the times in which I have lived, and which have forced me into the line of political life under a sense of duty and against a great and constant aversion to it.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Letter to David Baillie Warden (25 February 1809)
1800s, Second Presidential Administration (1805-1809)

Life , Books , Family , Sense

“The practical basis of the medical profession rested on psychology. Everyone felt better when self-confident, expensive experts could be called in to handle a vital emergency. Doctors relieved others of the responsibility for deciding what to do. As such, their role was strictly comparable to that of the priesthood, whose ministrations to the soul relieved anxieties parallel to those relieved by medical ministrations to the body.”

William H. McNeill (1917–2016) Canadian historian

Source: Plagues and Peoples (1976), Ch.6 "The Ecological Impact of Medical Science and Organization since 1700".

Soul , Confidence , Self-confidence

“I passed by a corner office in which an employee was typing up a document relating to brand performance. … Something about her brought to mind a painting by Edward Hopper which I had seen several years before at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. In New York Movie (1939), an usherette stands by the stairwell of an ornate pre-war theatre. Whereas the audience is sunk in semidarkness, she is bathed in a rich pool of yellow light. As often in Hopper’s work, her expression suggests that her thoughts have carried her elsewhere. She is beautiful and young, with carefully curled blond hair, and there are a touching fragility and an anxiety about her which elicit both care and desire. Despite her lowly job, she is the painting’s guardian of integrity and intelligence, the Cinderella of the cinema. Hopper seems to be delivering a subtle commentary on, and indictment of, the medium itself, implying that a technological invention associated with communal excitement has paradoxically succeeded in curtailing our concern for others. The painting’s power hangs on the juxtaposition of two ideas: first, that the woman is more interesting that the film, and second, that she is being ignored because of the film. In their haste to take their seats, the members of the audience have omitted to notice that they have in their midst a heroine more sympathetic and compelling than any character Hollywood could offer up. It is left to the painter, working in a quieter, more observant idiom, to rescue what the film has encouraged its viewers not to see.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Source: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (2009), pp. 83-84.

War , Beauty , Art , Intelligence

“And why should man, added he, pretend to an exemption from the lot of all other animals? The whole earth, believe me, PHILO, is cursed and polluted. A perpetual war is kindled amongst all living creatures. Necessity, hunger, want, stimulate the strong and courageous: Fear, anxiety, terror, agitate the weak and infirm. The first entrance into life gives anguish to the new-born infant and to its wretched parent: Weakness, impotence, distress, attend each stage of that life: and it is at last finished in agony and horror.”

David Hume book Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

Demea to Philo, Part X
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779)

Life , Hunger , War , Fear

“[singing the song her therapist told her to improvise in order to "let her anxieties out"] If I keep the kitchen floor clean, no one will die!”

Maria Bamford (1970) American actress and comedian

The Now Show (2006)

Singing

“I have a two-year-old who just turned three, and my four-year-old just turned five. I have the same irrational feelings taking them to pre-school. It's this charged combination of stress and joy and anxiety and excitement. When they're away, you've got a sudden loss of purpose and this ever-present fear about the kid's welfare. The departure of our children from our nest is not an easy thing.”

Vera Farmiga (1973) American actress

As quoted in " Q&A: Bates Motel's Vera Farmiga on the Terrors of Parenthood http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/interviews/a27056/vera-farmiga-interview/" by Eric Spitznagel at Esquire (February 1, 2014)

Children , Fear , School , Feeling

“He had a sensation of anxiety and shame, a sensitivity acute beyond usefulness, as if the nervous system, flayed of its old hide of social usage, must record every touch of pain.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

On Franz Kafka, quoted in report on Great Books discussion groups, New York Times (28 February 1985)

Pain

“Anxiety is the rust of life, destroying its brightness and weakening its power. – A childlike and abiding trust in Providence is its best preventive and remedy.”

Tryon Edwards (1809–1894) American theologian

Source: A Dictionary of Thoughts, 1891, p. 22.

Life

“Economic life should be definancialised. We should learn not to use markets as storehouses of value: they do not harbour the certainties that normal citizens require. Citizens should experience anxiety about their own businesses (which they control), not their investments”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960) Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader and risk analyst

which they do not control
Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5d5aa24e-23a4-11de-996a-00144feabdc0.html?nclick_check=1, Financial Times, 2009-04-07.
Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world (2009)

Life , Business , Learning

“Everything exists; nothing exists. Either formula affords a like serenity. The man of anxiety, to his misfortune, remains between them, trembling and perplexed, forever at the mercy of a nuance, incapable of gaining a foothold in the security of being or in the absence of being.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

“The anxiety to be admired is a loveless passion …, loud on the hustings, gay in the ball-room, mute and sullen at the family fireside.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

Aids to Reflection, 1839 https://archive.org/stream/aidstoreflection06cole#page/142/mode/2up, p. 142.

Family , Passion

“We are placing burdens on the broadest shoulders. Why should I put burdens on the people? I am one of the children of the people. I was brought up amongst them. I know their trials; and God forbid that I should add one grain of trouble to the anxieties which they bear with such patience and fortitude. When the Prime Minister did me the honour of inviting me to take charge of the National Exchequer at a time of great difficulty, I made up my mind, in framing the Budget which was in front of me, that at any rate no cupboard should be barer, no lot would be harder. By that test I challenge you to judge the Budget.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in Limehouse, East London (30 July 1909), quoted in Better Times: Speeches by the Right Hon. D. Lloyd George, M.P., Chancellor of the Exchequer (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1910), p. 156.
Chancellor of the Exchequer

God , Children , People , Time

“I couldn’t avoid being a poet. I was really having a pretty rough time of things, and I had a lot of energy, and poems were practically the only recourse I had to alleviate that energy and that anxiety. I take no credit for all the poems I’ve written. They were a way of releasing anxiety.”

A.R. Ammons (1926–2001) American poet

Paris Review interview (1996)

Way , Time

“What anxiety when one is not sure of one's doubts or wonders: are these actually doubts?”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

All Gall Is Divided (1952)

“There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one's means of livelihood…Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.”

W. Somerset Maugham book Of Human Bondage

Source: Of Human Bondage (1915), Ch. 51

Money , Sense

“For such is the work of philosophy: it cures souls, draws off vain anxieties, confers freedom from desires, drives away fears.”
Nam efficit hoc philosophia: medetur animis, inanes sollicitudines detrahit, cupiditatibus liberat, pellit timores.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

Book II, Chapter IV; translation by Andrew P. Peabody
Tusculanae Disputationes – Tusculan Disputations (45 BC)

Fear , Soul , Freedom , Drawing

“Childhood, after all, has to be an age of discovery. These are days you'll remember vividly all your life, even when you're old and forget why you came into a room. It must never be allowed to become the age of anxiety.
The anxiety has been greatly increased by this government's multiplication of exams and emphasis on starting training as a middle manager in a computer company from the age of six. Parents have made things worse by worrying unduly about exam results and seeing that their children work a great deal harder than most middle managers in computer companies.”

John Mortimer (1923–2009) English barrister, dramatist, screenwriter and author

Source: Where There's a Will: Thoughts on the Good Life (2003), Ch. 14 : Living with Children

Life , Children , Age , Parent

“In my eyes, the year 1942 already has behind it the most fateful trial of our people. That was the winter of '41 to '42. I may be permitted to say that in that winter the German people, and in particular its Wehrmacht, were weighed in the balance by Providence. Nothing worse can or will happen. That we conquered that winter, that "General Winter," that at last the German fronts stood, and that this spring, that is, early this summer, we were able to proceed again, that, I believe, is the proof that Providence was content with the German people… You do not realize what is hidden beneath these words in the way of human heroism, and also of human pain, and suffering, and we may say, often anxiety too, naturally, deathly anxiety on the part of all those who, especially for the first time, are placed before the trial of God in this highest court.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

Address at the Opening of the Winter Relief Campaign http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/adolf-hitler-address-at-the-opening-of-the-winter-relief-campaign-september-1942 (September 30, 1942)
1940s

God , Pain , Fate , People

“Whoever may come, God will not retire. It is natural that you are filled with anxieties at present, but after twenty or thirty years have passed, a day is sure to come when all of you will admit the truth of My intention.”

Nakayama Miki (1798–1887) Founder of Tenrikyo

The Life of Oyasama, Foundress of Tenrikyo, p. 5
The Life of Oyasama

God , Truth , Nature

“My little fellow, about four years old, whom I brought with me, gave himself no trouble amid the boats, omnibuses, and railway coaches, on sea, land, and in dark tunnels; his father was at his side, and never a care or fear or doubt or anxiety had he. May we have grace to be led by the hand, and trust to the care and kindness of a reconciled God and Father.”

Thomas Guthrie (1803–1873) British divine

Source: The Autobiography of Thomas Guthrie and Memoir Vol.2 (1875), P. 203.

God , Fear , Sea

“We all feel relief that war has not come this time. Every one of us has been passing through days of anxiety; we cannot, however, feel that peace has been established, but that we have nothing but an armistice in a state of war. We have been unable to go in for care-free rejoicing. We have felt that we are in the midst of a tragedy. We have felt humiliation. This has not been a victory for reason and humanity. It has been a victory for brute force. At every stage of the proceedings there have been time limits laid down by the owner and ruler of armed force. The terms have not been terms negotiated; they have been terms laid down as ultimata. We have seen to-day a gallant, civilised and democratic people betrayed and handed over to a ruthless despotism. We have seen something more. We have seen the cause of democracy, which is, in our view, the cause of civilisation and humanity, receive a terrible defeat.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1938/oct/03/prime-ministers-statement#S5CV0339P0_19381003_HOC_14 in the House of Commons (3 October 1938) against the Munich Agreement.
1930s

War , People , Peace , Feeling

“When it is stated in Genesis that God said to Adam, “Only from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you must not eat,” it follows as a matter of course that Adam really has not understood this word, for how could he understand the difference between good and evil when this distinction would follow as a consequence of the enjoyment of the fruit. When it is assumed that the prohibition awakens the desire one acquires knowledge instead of ignorance, and in that case Adam must have had knowledge of freedom, because the desire was to use it. The explanation is therefore subsequent. The prohibition induces in him anxiety, for the prohibition awakens in him freedom’s possibility. What passed by innocence as the nothing of anxiety has now entered into Adam, and here again it is a nothing-the anxious possibility of being able. He has no conception of what he is able to do; otherwise-and this it what usually happens-that which comes later, the difference between good and evil, would have to be presupposed. Only the possibility of being able is present as a higher form of ignorance, as a higher expression of anxiety, because in a higher sense it both is and is not, because in a higher sense he both loves it and flees from it.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Source: 1840s, The Concept of Anxiety (1844), p. 44-45

Love , God , Understanding , Knowledge

“I think there's an anxiety in life when we automatically tend to look to the next thing or we're complaining about the past; like somebody recently said to me, 'Well, is your show going to get picked up? Aren't you concerned about that?' I said, 'I don't care. I don't want to worry about that because worrying is not going to make it happen or not happen.' I want to trust that if it does, then that's what's supposed to happen and if it doesn't get picked up, then that's okay, too. It's just a more peaceful way to live.”

Sherilyn Fenn (1965) American actress

Sherilyn Fenn, quoted in "Fenntastic", by Jill Daniel. Orange Coast (USA). January 1999.

Life , Peace , Way , Thinking

“A sense of humor is a measurement of the extent to which we realize that we are trapped in a world almost totally devoid of reason. Laughter is how we express the anxiety we feel at this knowledge.”

Dave Barry (1947) American writer

Originally published in "Encyclopedia Tropicana: A Reference Book for the Modern World, Volume 1" by Joel Achenbach, The Miami Herald, May 4, 1986; quoted by Bryan Curtis, " Dave Barry: Elegy for the humorist http://slate.msn.com/id/2112218," Slate, January 12, 2005
Columns and articles

World , Feeling , Knowledge , Sense

“Not knowing what one is looking for is pure agony. Too much analytical thinking, too much logic, too many meanings! Life has no logic, so why does there have to be logic to explain what it means? Also, what is logic? I think I may need to break away from analytical thinking; this is the cause of all my anxieties.”

Gao Xingjian book Soul Mountain

Source: Soul Mountain (1989), ch. 8, p. 50

Life , Thinking

“But I very early realized, instinctively, my life formula: to get others to accept as natural the excesses of one's personality an thus to relieve oneself of his own anxieties by creating a sort of collective participation.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

as cited in The Unspeakable confessions of Salvador Dali, Parinaud, ed. W. H. Allen, London 1976, p. 17
Quotes of Salvador Dali, 1971 - 1980, Comment on deviant Dali, les aveux inavouables de Salvador Dali

Life , Nature , Personality

“Germany is already well on her way to become, and must become incomparably, the most heavily armed nation in the world and the nation most completely ready for war. There is the dominant factor; there is the factor which dwarfs all others, the factor which we find affecting the movements of politics and diplomacy in every country throughout Europe…we cannot have any anxieties comparable to the anxiety caused by German re-armament. The House will pardon me if I continue to press that anxiety upon it.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1935/oct/24/international-situation in the House of Commons (24 October 1935)
The 1930s

War , World , Way , Housing

“Orientation in time, space, and status are the essentials of social existence, and the Balinese, although they make very strong spirits for ceremonial occasions, with a few startling exceptions resist alcohol, because if one drinks one loses one's orientation. Orientation is felt as a protection rather than as a strait jacket and its loss provokes extreme anxiety.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1940s, Balinese Character (1942), p. 11

Alcohol , Drink , Strong , Loss

“At the end of ancient civilization ontic anxiety is predominant, at the end of the Middle Ages moral anxiety, and at the end of the modern period spiritual anxiety.”

Paul Tillich book The Courage to Be

Source: The Courage to Be (1952), p.57

Age

“I have listened to you, to our people. I have heard your doubts, your anxieties, nay, outright opposition to the lifting of Martial Law. And I have prayed to the Almighty for guidance. And it is after deliberate, sober judgment and soul-searching that I come before you and say, it is now time to terminate martial law.”

Ferdinand Marcos (1917–1989) former President of the Philippines from 1965 to 1986

Speech proclaiming the termination of the state of Martial law, Heroes Hall, Malacañang (17 January 1981)
1965

People , Law , Soul , Search

“Naturally, it isn't the mere fact of being named that brings about the hoax of being a "real person"; it is all that goes with it. The child is tricked into the ego-feeling by the attitudes, words, and actions of the society which surrounds him—his parents, relatives, teachers, and, above all, his similarly hoodwinked peers. Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. We are, perhaps, rather dimly aware of the immense power of our social environment. We seldom realize, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society. We copy emotional reactions from our parents, learning from them that excrement is supposed to have a disgusting smell and that vomiting is supposed to be an unpleasant sensation. The dread of death is also learned from their anxieties about sickness and from their attitudes to funerals and corpses. Our social environment has this power just because we do not exist apart from a society. Society is our extended mind and body.”

Alan Watts (1915–1973) British philosopher, writer and speaker

Source: The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), p. 53-54

Death , People , Feeling , Nature

“The degree of civilization which a people has reached, no doubt, is marked by their anxiety to do as they would be done by.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935) United States Supreme Court justice

Ibid., p. 44.
1880s

People

“Anxiety, sickness, suffering, or danger now and then with a foregoing of the common conveniences and charities of this life, may make us pause and cause the spirit to waver and the soul to sink; but let this only be for a moment. All these are nothing when compared with the glory which shall be revealed in and for us. I never made a sacrifice.”

David Livingstone (1813–1873) Scottish explorer and missionary

Speech to students at Cambridge University (4 December 1857)
Context: People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa. Can that be called a sacrifice which is simply paid back as a small part of a great debt owing to our God, which we can never repay? Is that a sacrifice which brings its own blest reward in healthful activity, the consciousness of doing good, peace of mind, and a bright hope of a glorious destiny hereafter? Away with the word in such a view and with such a thought! It is emphatically no sacrifice. Say rather it is a privilege. Anxiety, sickness, suffering, or danger now and then with a foregoing of the common conveniences and charities of this life, may make us pause and cause the spirit to waver and the soul to sink; but let this only be for a moment. All these are nothing when compared with the glory which shall be revealed in and for us. I never made a sacrifice.

Life , Soul , Suffering

“The animal lacks both anxiety and hope because its consciousness is restricted to what is clearly evident and thus to the present moment: the animal is the present incarnate.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

Vol. 2 "On the Suffering of the World" as translated in Essays and Aphorisms (1970), as translated by R. J. Hollingdale
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Counsels and Maxims
Context: The animals are much more content with mere existence than we are; the plants are wholly so; and man is so according to how dull and insensitive he is. The animal’s life consequently contains less suffering but also less pleasure than the human’s, the direct reason being that on the one hand it is free from care and anxiety and the torments that attend them, but on the other is without hope and therefore has no share in that anticipation of a happy future which, together with the enchanting products of the imagination which accompany it, is the source of most of our greatest joys and pleasures. The animal lacks both anxiety and hope because its consciousness is restricted to what is clearly evident and thus to the present moment: the animal is the present incarnate.

Hope , Animals

“Laugh at your worries and insecurities. View your anxieties with humor. It will be difficult at first, but you'll gradually get used to it.”

Paulo Coelho book The Witch of Portobello

Source: The Witch of Portobello (2007), p. 152.
Context: You are what you believe yourself to be.
Don't be like those people who believe in "positive thinking" and tell themselves that they're loved and strong and capable. You don't need to do that because you know it already. And when you doubt it — which happens, I think, quite often at this stage of evolution — do as I suggested. Instead of trying to prove that you're better than you think, just laugh. Laugh at your worries and insecurities. View your anxieties with humor. It will be difficult at first, but you'll gradually get used to it. Now go back and meet all those people who think you know everything. Convince yourself that they're right, because we all know everything, it's merely a question of believing.
Believe.

“Fate, then, is the nothing of anxiety.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Source: 1840s, The Concept of Anxiety (1844), p. 96-97
Context: Anxiety and nothing always correspond to each other. As soon as the actuality of freedom and of spirit is posited, anxiety is canceled. But what then does the nothing of anxiety signify more particularly in paganism. This is fate. Fate is a relation to spirit as external. It is the relation between spirit and something else that is not spirit and to which fate nevertheless stands in a spiritual relation. Fate may also signify exactly the opposite, because it is the unity of necessity and accidental. … A necessity that is not conscious of itself is eo ipso the accidental in relation to the next moment. Fate, then, is the nothing of anxiety.

Fate

“We still proclaim the old ideals of liberty but we cannot voice them without anxiety in our hearts. The question is no longer one of establishing democratic institutions but of preserving them.”

Charles Evans Hughes (1862–1948) American judge

As quoted in Charles Evans Hughes (1951) by Merlo J. Pusey, Vol. II, p. 794
Context: We still proclaim the old ideals of liberty but we cannot voice them without anxiety in our hearts. The question is no longer one of establishing democratic institutions but of preserving them. … The arch enemies of society are those who know better but by indirection, misstatement, understatement, and slander, seek to accomplish their concealed purposes or to gain profit of some sort by misleading the public. The antidote for these poisons must be found in the sincere and courageous efforts of those who would preserve their cherished freedom by a wise and responsible use of it. Freedom of expression gives the essential democratic opportunity, but self-restraint is the essential civic discipline.

Question , Heart

“Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Journals VII 1A 363
1840s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1840s
Context: Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household. One keeps this anxiety at a distance by looking at the many round about who are related to him as kin and friends, but the anxiety is still there, nevertheless, and one hardly dares think of how he would feel if all this were taken away.

World

“We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster's whim and the purest ideal.”

Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) Swedish filmmaker

Four Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman (1960).
Context: People ask what are my intentions with my films — my aims. It is a difficult and dangerous question, and I usually give an evasive answer: I try to tell the truth about the human condition, the truth as I see it. This answer seems to satisfy everyone, but it is not quite correct. I prefer to describe what I would like my aim to be. There is an old story of how the cathedral of Chartres was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. Then thousands of people came from all points of the compass, like a giant procession of ants, and together they began to rebuild the cathedral on its old site. They worked until the building was completed — master builders, artists, labourers, clowns, noblemen, priests, burghers. But they all remained anonymous, and no one knows to this day who built the cathedral of Chartres.
Regardless of my own beliefs and my own doubts, which are unimportant in this connection, it is my opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life, generating and degenerating itself. In former days the artist remained unknown and his work was to the glory of God. He lived and died without being more or less important than other artisans; 'eternal values,' 'immortality' and 'masterpiece' were terms not applicable in his case. The ability to create was a gift. In such a world flourished invulnerable assurance and natural humility. Today the individual has become the highest form and the greatest bane of artistic creation.
The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy. Thus we finally gather in one large pen, where we stand and bleat about our loneliness without listening to each other and without realizing that we are smothering each other to death. The individualists stare into each other's eyes and yet deny the existence of each other.
We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster's whim and the purest ideal. Thus if I am asked what I would like the general purpose of my films to be, I would reply that I want to be one of the artists in the cathedral on the great plain. I want to make a dragon's head, an angel, a devil — or perhaps a saint — out of stone. It does not matter which; it is the sense of satisfaction that counts.
Regardless of whether I believe or not, whether I am a Christian or not, I would play my part in the collective building of the cathedral.

Falseness

“We need tremendous energy to bring about a psychological change in ourselves as human beings, because we have lived far too long in a world of make-belief, in a world of brutality, violence, despair, anxiety. To live humanly, sanely, one has to change.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

Talks in Europe 1968, 5th Public Talk, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (22 May 1968) Collected Works, Vol. XV
1960s
Context: We need tremendous energy to bring about a psychological change in ourselves as human beings, because we have lived far too long in a world of make-belief, in a world of brutality, violence, despair, anxiety. To live humanly, sanely, one has to change. To bring about a change within oneself and therefore within society, one needs this radical energy, for the individual is not different from society — the society is the individual and the individual is the society. And to bring about a necessary radical, essential change in the structure of society — which is corrupt, which is immoral — there must be change in the human heart and mind. To bring about that change you need great energy and that energy is denied or perverted, or twisted, when you act according to a concept; which is what we do in our daily life. The concept is based on past history, or on some conclusion, so it is not action at all, it is an approximation to a formula. So one asks if there is an action which is not based on an idea, on a conclusion formed by dead things which have been.

World , Change , Despair

“The prospect of more freedom stirs anxiety. We want it, but we fear it”

Ellen Willis (1941–2006) writer, activist

"Ghosts, Fantasies, and Hope" http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=190 Dissent (Fall 2005)
Context: It’s not only corruption that distorts the utopian impulse when it begins to take some specific social shape. The prospect of more freedom stirs anxiety. We want it, but we fear it; it goes against our most deeply ingrained Judeo-Christian definitions of morality and order. At bottom, utopia equals death is a statement about the wages of sin.

Fear , Freedom

“Anxiety is dead.”

Josef Albers (1888–1976) German-American artist and educator

Albers' short quote in: Robert Rauschenberg, Works, Writings and Interviews Sam Hunter, Ediciones Poligrafa, Barcelona, Spain 2006, p. 10

Dead

“In any age courage is the simple virtue needed for a human being to traverse the rocky road from infancy to maturity of personality. But in an age of anxiety, an age of her morality and personal isolation, courage is a sine qua non.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: Man’s Search for Himself (1953), p. 191
Context: In any age courage is the simple virtue needed for a human being to traverse the rocky road from infancy to maturity of personality. But in an age of anxiety, an age of her morality and personal isolation, courage is a sine qua non. In periods when the mores of the society were more consistent guides, the individual was more firmly cushioned in his crises of development; but in times of transition like ours, the individual is thrown on his own at an earlier age and for a longer period.

Age , Courage , Personality

“I propose that the aim of education is exactly the opposite, namely, the widening and deepening of consciousness. To the extent that education can help the student develop sensitivity, depth of perception, and above all the capacity to perceive significant forms in what he is studying, it will be developing at the same time the student's capacity to deal with anxiety constructively.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: Psychology and the Human Dilemma (1967), p. 50
Context: The overemphasis on the Baconian doctrine of knowledge as power, and the accompanying concern with gaining power over nature as well as over ourselves in the sense of treating ourself as objects to be manipulated rather than human beings whose aim is to expand in meaningful living, have resulted in the invalidation of the self. This tends to shrink the individual's consciousness, to block off his awareness, and thus play into … unconstructive anxiety … I propose that the aim of education is exactly the opposite, namely, the widening and deepening of consciousness. To the extent that education can help the student develop sensitivity, depth of perception, and above all the capacity to perceive significant forms in what he is studying, it will be developing at the same time the student's capacity to deal with anxiety constructively.

Education , Study , Time , Help

“Creative people, as I see them, are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: The Courage to Create (1975), Ch. 4 : Creativity and the Encounter, p. 93
Context: Creative people, as I see them, are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of insecurity, sensitivity, and defenselessness for the gift of the "divine madness" to borrow the term used by the classical Greeks. They do not run away from non-being, but by encountering and wrestling with it, force it to produce being. They knock on silence for an answering music; they pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.

People

“It occurred to me at once that Harris had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him. This was a view of the question I had never taken before; but it was one I never forgot afterwards. From that event to the close of the war, I never experienced trepidation upon confronting an enemy, though I always felt more or less anxiety. I never forgot that he had as much reason to fear my forces as I had his. The lesson was valuable.”

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) 18th President of the United States

1880s, Personal Memoirs of General U. S. Grant (1885)
Context: As we approached the brow of the hill from which it was expected we could see Harris' camp, and possibly find his men ready formed to meet us, my heart kept getting higher and higher until it felt to me as though it was in my throat. I would have given anything then to have been back in Illinois, but I had not the moral courage to halt and consider what to do; I kept right on. When we reached a point from which the valley below was in full view I halted. The place where Harris had been encamped a few days before was still there and the marks of a recent encampment were plainly visible, but the troops were gone. My heart resumed its place. It occurred to me at once that Harris had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him. This was a view of the question I had never taken before; but it was one I never forgot afterwards. From that event to the close of the war, I never experienced trepidation upon confronting an enemy, though I always felt more or less anxiety. I never forgot that he had as much reason to fear my forces as I had his. The lesson was valuable.

Account of his effort as Colonel of the 21st Infantry of Illinois, to engage Confederate Colonel Thomas Harris in northern Missouri, Ch. 18.

War , Fear , Question

“I was humiliated for them, for their apparent insensibility. But I was mistaken in my anxiety — their wish to help, to show her their concern, was real, their feelings were true and lasting, no matter how awkwardly expressed; their love and tenderness and wish to help were from the heart.”

Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980) American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist

The Never-Ending Wrong (1977)
Context: I remember small, slender Mrs. Sacco with her fine copper-colored hair and dark brown, soft, dazed eyes moving from face to face but still smiling uncertainly, surrounded in our offices by women pitying and cuddling her, sympathetic with her as if she were a pretty little girl; they spoke to her as if she were five years old or did not understand — this Italian peasant wife who, for seven long years, had shown moral stamina and emotional stability enough to furnish half a dozen women amply. I was humiliated for them, for their apparent insensibility. But I was mistaken in my anxiety — their wish to help, to show her their concern, was real, their feelings were true and lasting, no matter how awkwardly expressed; their love and tenderness and wish to help were from the heart. All through those last days in Boston, those strangely innocent women enlisted their altar societies, their card clubs their literary round tables, their music circles and their various charities in the campaign to save Sacco and Vanzetti. On their rounds, they came now and then to the office of my outfit in their smart thin frocks, stylish hats, and their indefinable air of eager sweetness and light, bringing money they had collected in the endless, wittily devious ways of women's organizations. They would talk among themselves and to her about how they felt, with tears in their eyes, promising to come again soon with more help. They were known as "sob sisters" by the cynics and the hangers-on of the committee I belonged to who took their money and described their activities as "sentimental orgies," of course with sexual overtones, and they jeered at "bourgeois morality." "Morality" was a word along with "charitable" and "humanitarian" and "liberal," all, at one time, in the odor of sanctity but now despoiled and rotting in the gutter where suddenly it seemed they belonged. I found myself on the side of the women; I resented the nasty things said about them by these self-appointed world reformers and I thought again, as I had more than once in Mexico, that yes, the world was a frightening enough place as it was, but think what a hell it would be if such people really got the power to do the things they planned.

Love , Feeling , Help , Heart

“Today, anxiety is a first principle of social life, and the right knows how to exploit it. Capital foments the insecurity that impels people to submit to its demands.”

Ellen Willis (1941–2006) writer, activist

"Ghosts, Fantasies, and Hope," Dissent (Fall 2005)
Context: Today, anxiety is a first principle of social life, and the right knows how to exploit it. Capital foments the insecurity that impels people to submit to its demands. And yet there are more Americans than ever before who have tasted certain kinds of social freedoms and, whether they admit it or not, don’t want to give them up or deny them to others. From Bill Clinton’s impeachment to the Terri Schiavo case, the public has resisted the right wing’s efforts to close the deal on the culture. Not coincidentally, the cultural debates, however attenuated, still conjure the ghosts of utopia by raising issues of personal autonomy, power, and the right to enjoy rather than slog through life. In telling contrast, the contemporary left has not posed class questions in these terms; on the contrary, it has ceded the language of freedom and pleasure, "opportunity" and "ownership," to the libertarian right.

Life , People

“A crust eaten in peace is better than a banquet partaken in anxiety.”

Aesop book The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse

The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse.

Peace

“Anxiety and nothing always correspond to each other.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Source: 1840s, The Concept of Anxiety (1844), p. 96-97
Context: Anxiety and nothing always correspond to each other. As soon as the actuality of freedom and of spirit is posited, anxiety is canceled. But what then does the nothing of anxiety signify more particularly in paganism. This is fate. Fate is a relation to spirit as external. It is the relation between spirit and something else that is not spirit and to which fate nevertheless stands in a spiritual relation. Fate may also signify exactly the opposite, because it is the unity of necessity and accidental. … A necessity that is not conscious of itself is eo ipso the accidental in relation to the next moment. Fate, then, is the nothing of anxiety.

“The first step is the last step. The first step is to perceive, perceive what you are thinking, perceive your ambition, perceive your anxiety, your loneliness, your despair, this extraordinary sense of sorrow, perceive it, without any condemnation, justification, without wishing it to be different.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

Source: 1970s, Krishnamurti in India, 1970-71 (1971), p. 50
Context: The first step is the last step. The first step is to perceive, perceive what you are thinking, perceive your ambition, perceive your anxiety, your loneliness, your despair, this extraordinary sense of sorrow, perceive it, without any condemnation, justification, without wishing it to be different. Just to perceive it, as it is. When you perceive it as it is, then there is a totally different kind of action taking place, and that action is the final action. Right? That is, when you perceive something as being false or as being true, that perception is the final action, which is the final step. Now listen to it. I perceive the falseness of following somebody else, somebody else’s instruction — Krishna, Buddha, Christ, it does not matter who it is. I see, there is the perception of the truth that following somebody is utterly false. Because your reason, your logic and everything points out how absurd it is to follow somebody. Now that perception is the final step, and when you have perceived, you leave it, forget it, because the next minute you have to perceive anew, which is again the final step.

Thinking , Sense , Loneliness , Despair

“These symposia may have been, as much as anything, occasions to release the pent-up anxieties of a society always at war”

Thomas Cahill (1940) American scholar and writer

Source: Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003), Ch. III The Poet: How to Party
Context: These symposia may have been, as much as anything, occasions to release the pent-up anxieties of a society always at war—"the father of all, the king of all," "always existing by nature," as the Greek philosophers expressed it.

War

“My ability to endure tension had now grown amazingly. From the accidental pain of southern years, from anxiety that I had sought to avoid, from fear that had been too painful to bear, I had learned to like my unintermittent burden of feeling, had become habituated to acting with all of my being, had learned to seek those areas of life, those situations, where I knew that events would complement my own inner mood. I was conscious of what was happening to me; I knew that my attitude of watchful wonder had usurped all other feelings, had become the meaning of my life, an integral part of my personality; that I was striving to live and measure all things by it. Having no claims upon others, I bent the way the wind blew, rendering unto my environment that which was my environment's, and rendering unto myself that which I felt was mine. It was a dangerous way to live, far more dangerous than violating laws or ethical codes of conduct; but the danger was for me and me alone.”

Richard Wright book Black Boy

Source: Black Boy (American Hunger) (1991), p. 282

Life , Pain , Fear , Law

“Then anxiety stirs. He is tortured day and night with the thought that he might possibly be a father, that somewhere in the world there could be a created being who owed his life to him. He cannot share his secret with anyone; he does not even have any reliable knowledge of the fact.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Journal and Papers 5622 (Papers IV A 65) n.d. 1843
1840s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1840s
Context: Once in his early youth a man allowed himself to be so far carried away in an overwrought irresponsible state as to visit a prostitute. It is all forgotten. Now he wants to get married. Then anxiety stirs. He is tortured day and night with the thought that he might possibly be a father, that somewhere in the world there could be a created being who owed his life to him. He cannot share his secret with anyone; he does not even have any reliable knowledge of the fact. –For this reason the incident must have involved a prostitute and taken place in the wantonness of youth; had it been a little infatuated or an actual seduction, it would be hard to imagine that he could know nothing about it, but now this this very ignorance is the basis of his agitated torment. On the other hand, precisely because of the rashness of the whole affair, his misgivings do not really start until he actually falls in love.

Life , Secret , World , Knowledge

“They do not know that, if they put a stop to conceptual thought and forget their anxiety, the Buddha will appear before them, for this Mind is the Buddha and the Buddha is all living beings. It is not the less for being manifested in ordinary beings, nor is it greater for being manifest in the Buddhas.”

Huangbo Xiyun Chinese Zen Buddhist

Source: The Zen Teachings of Huang Po (1958), p. 29
Context: All the Buddhas and all sentient beings are nothing but the One Mind, beside which nothing exists. This Mind, which is without beginning, is unborn and indestructible. It is not green nor yellow, and has neither form nor appearance. It does not belong to the categories of things which exist or do not exist, nor can it be thought of in terms of new or old. It is neither long nor short, big nor small, for it transcends all limits, measure, names, traces and comparisons. It is that which you see before you - begin to reason about it and you at once fall into error. It is like the boundless void which cannot be fathomed or measured. The One Mind alone is the Buddha, and there is no distinction between the Buddha and sentient things, but that sentient beings are attached to forms and so seek externally for Buddhahood. By their very seeking they lose it, for that is using the Buddha to seek for the Buddha and using mind to grasp Mind. Even though they do their utmost for a full aeon, they will not be able to attain it. They do not know that, if they put a stop to conceptual thought and forget their anxiety, the Buddha will appear before them, for this Mind is the Buddha and the Buddha is all living beings. It is not the less for being manifested in ordinary beings, nor is it greater for being manifest in the Buddhas.

Appearance , Forgetting

“Yin people ring the bells, saying, "Pay attention." And you say, "Oh, I see now." Yet I'm a fairly skeptical person. I'm educated, I'm reasonably sane, and I know that this subject is fodder for ridicule. … To write the book, I had to put that aside. As with any book. I go through the anxiety, "What will people think of me for writing something like this?" But ultimately, I have to write what I have to write about, including the question of life continuing beyond our ordinary senses.”

Amy Tan (1952) American novelist

SALON Interview (1995)
Context: I've long thought about how life is influenced by death, how it influences what you believe in and what you look for. Yes, I think I was pushed in a way to write this book by certain spirits — the yin people — in my life. They've always been there, I wouldn't say to help, but to kick me in the ass to write.... Yin people is the term Kwan uses, because "ghosts" is politically incorrect. People have such terrible assumptions about ghosts — you know, phantoms that haunt you, that make you scared, that turn the house upside down. Yin people are not in our living presence but are around, and kind of guide you to insights. Like in Las Vegas when the bells go off, telling you you've hit the jackpot. Yin people ring the bells, saying, "Pay attention." And you say, "Oh, I see now." Yet I'm a fairly skeptical person. I'm educated, I'm reasonably sane, and I know that this subject is fodder for ridicule.... To write the book, I had to put that aside. As with any book. I go through the anxiety, "What will people think of me for writing something like this?" But ultimately, I have to write what I have to write about, including the question of life continuing beyond our ordinary senses.

Life , People , Books , Education

“We've got an agreeable, comfortable life here as Americans. But under it there's a huge, free-floating anxiety.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

TIME interview (1991)
Context: We've got an agreeable, comfortable life here as Americans. But under it there's a huge, free-floating anxiety. Our inner lives, our inner landscape is just like that sky out there — it's full of smog. We really don't know what we believe anymore, we're nervous about everything.

Life

Quotes about anxiety page 4

Quotes about anxiety
page 4