Fear quotes
2.7K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside fear — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"I accept chaos. I am not sure whether it accepts me. I know some people are terrified of the bomb. But then some people are terrified to be seen carrying a modern screen magazine. Experience teaches us that silence terrifies people the most."
"If men as individuals surrender to the call of their elementary instincts, avoiding pain and seeking satisfaction only for their own selves, the result for them all taken together must be a state of insecurity, of fear, and of promiscuous misery."
"Mankind owns four things that are no good at sea: rudder, anchor, oars and the fear of going down."
"Our fears are always more numerous than our dangers."
"There are two levers for moving men - interest and fear."
"Be content with what you are, and wish not change; nor dread your last day, nor long for it."
"Love can no more continue without a constant motion than fire can; and when once you take hope and fear away, you take from it its very life and being."
"There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it."
"Fear is the enemy of logic."
"Sometimes they threaten you with something - something you can't stand up to, can't even think about. And then you say, Don't do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to So-and-so. And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn't mean it. But that isn't true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there's no other way of saving yourself, and you're quite ready to save yourself that way. You WANT it to happen to the other person. You don't give a damn what they suffer. All you care is yourself."
"Do something. Anything. You're alive, and you'll only be for a few decades, and then it's done. You'll be in the ground, worm food. Make something and don't let fear consume you."
"To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly. Death of one's own free choice, death at the proper time, with a clear head and with joyfulness, consummated in the midst of children and witnesses: so that an actual leave-taking is possible while he who is leaving is still there."
"Your fear of death is but the trembling of the shepherd when he stands before the king whose hand is to be laid upon him in honour."
"Life inspires more dread than death - it is life which is the great unknown."
"Fear is a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life."
"Writing is something that you don't know how to do. You sit down and it's something that happens, or it may not happen. So, how can you teach anybody how to write? It's beyond me, because you yourself don't even know if you're going to be able to. I'm always worried, well, you know, every time I go upstairs with my wine bottle. Sometimes I'll sit at that typewriter for fifteen minutes, you know. I don't go up there to write. The typewriter's up there. If it doesn't start moving, I say, well this could be the night that I hit the dust."
"Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones."
"The greatest works of admiration, And all the fair examples of renown. Out of distress and misery are grown."
"The safest course is to do nothing against one's conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death."
"How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened."
