Anxiety quotes
1.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside anxiety — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Anxiety is essential to the human condition. The confrontation with anxiety can relieve us from boredom, sharpen the sensitivity and assure the presence of tension that is necessary to preserve human existence."
"There is no such thing as pure pleasure; some anxiety always goes with it."
"Worry is like rocking in a rocking chair all day, because it keeps you busy but gets you nowhere."
"Every day I pray. I yield myself to God and the tensions and anxieties go out of me and peace and power come in."
"No one who is in a state of fear or sorrow or tension is free, but whosoever is delivered from sorrows or fears or anxieties is at the same time delivered from servitude."
"Don't try to steer the river."
"Oh the nerves, the nerves; the mysteries of this machine called man! Oh the little that unhinges it, poor creatures that we are!"
"We adore, we invoke, we seek to appease, only that which we fear."
"Now anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity. It is the fruit of unanswered questions. But questions cannot go unanswered unless they first be asked."
"Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety."
"Learning to know anxiety is an adventure which every man has to affront if he would not go to perdition either by not having known anxiety or by sinking under it. He therefore who has leaned rightly to be in anxiety has learned the most important thing."
"You sit here for days saying, this is a strange business. You're the strange business. You have the energy of the sun in you, but you keep knotting it up at the base of your spine."
"Creative people... 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 'divine madness,' to borrow the term used by the classical Greeks."
"In an underdeveloped society, the first anxiety is of infant mortality. In an advanced one it is to keep alive the aged."
"Man, so long as he remains free, has no more constant and agonizing anxiety than find as quickly as possible someone to worship."
"Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness."
"When desire dies, fear is born."
"The hypochondriac disease consists in indigestion and consequent flatulency, with anxiety or want of pleasurable sensation."
"O foolish anxiety of wretched man, how inconclusive are the arguments which make thee beat thy wings below!"
"The sense of anxiety and guilt doesn't come from having too much to do; it's the automatic result of breaking agreements with yourself."
