fear

Long before it paralyzes action, fear begins as a quiet whisper in the dark, shaping our choices, guarding our vulnerabilities, and occasionally pointing the exact way toward growth we desperately need to undertake. The voices gathered here—from philosophers and statesmen to writers wrestling with their own panic—do not offer simple blueprints for absolute bravery; instead, they examine the intricate architecture of dread itself. Exploring these nearly one thousand reflections reveals how human beings across generations have learned to stare down their shadows, transforming instinctive terror into profound self-awareness and unexpected courage. Step into this collection whenever you are ready to listen closely to what your own anxieties might be trying to teach you.

999

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759

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Top Authors in fear

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Natan Sharansky

8 quotes

Bertrand Russell

8 quotes

Dale Carnegie

6 quotes

Thomas Jefferson

6 quotes

Cyril Connolly

5 quotes

Aristotle

5 quotes

George S. Patton

5 quotes

Mahatma Gandhi

4 quotes

Featured Quotes

Some of our most popular quotes in this category

"A line from one of my 1997 columns - 'Do one thing every day that scares you' - is now widely attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, though I have yet to see any evidence that she ever said it and I don't believe she did. She said some things about fear, but not that thing."

— Mary Schmichfear

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our Light, not our Darkness, that most frightens us."

— Marianne Williamsonfear

"In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation."

— Simone de Beauvoirfear

"Writing is a form of therapy sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation."

— Graham Greenefear

"It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live."

— Marcus Aureliusfear

"Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world."

— Ralph Waldo Emersonfear

All fear Quotes

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"In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in failure."

-Samuel Taylor Coleridge

fear

Top Authors in fear

Natan Sharansky

Bertrand Russell

Dale Carnegie

Thomas Jefferson

Cyril Connolly

Aristotle

George S. Patton

Mahatma Gandhi

Featured Quotes

All fear Quotes

"In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in failure."

"I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that's my one fear: that everything has happened nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again... the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul."

"My whole life I've had the fear that I was going to be abandoned."

"I think one of the terrible things today is that people have this deathly fear of food: fear of eggs, say, or fear of butter. Most doctors feel that you can have a little bit of everything."

"Any fear of aging, I think, is simply vanity."

"There is no greater hell than to be a prisoner of fear."

"We all have that burning question about what happens if we lose somebody we love, especially if we lose them tragically. We wonder what fear was going on, we wonder if we could have reached out and touched them, held their hand, looked in their eyes, been there."

"To withdraw is not to run away, and to stay is no wise action, when there's more reason to fear than to hope."

"Courage is a special kind of knowledge: the knowledge of how to fear what ought to be feared and how not to fear what ought not to be feared."

"You can ask me pretty much anything. There'll be things I'll go, 'That feels a little too personal.' But most things I don't have a fear of being asked about."

"You cannot avoid war in life, you cannot avoid the fear of terrorism, you cannot avoid those things now, they are a part of everyday demeanor."

"Fame does lead to money, which I don't have a close relationship with. I'm the kind of guy who never sees the money - it all goes somewhere else. I don't understand it, I don't like to deal with it. I have a fear of not having it, because I grew up without it."

"I had a fear that I'd be typecast, but I don't really have that fear anymore."

"Whenever somebody says they need an angle for their story I always fear that they've got an idea and they want me to fit into it or they want me to come up with an idea myself or I'm supposed to be more revealing than I've been, and to me it just sounds like something I don't want to do."

"Fear is a very explosive emotion, but it has a short life span. It's the sprint. The marathon is hope."

"The record company's worst fear is that you'll fall in love or get rich."

"I'm very much afraid of being mad - that's my one fear."

"He who does not fear death cares naught for threats."

"Fundamentalists are panicked by the apparent disintegration of the family, the disappearance of certainty and the decay of morality. Fear leads them to ask, if we cannot trust the Bible, what can we trust?"

"I woke up full of hate and fear the day before the most recent peace march in San Francisco. This was disappointing: I'd hoped to wake up feeling somewhere between Virginia Woolf and Wavy Gravy."

"I have a big fear of change, or negative change, anyway. I'm basically the same person I was when I won 'Idol,' or when I was 10."

"I was taught that to create anything you had to believe in failure, simply because you had to be prepared to go through an idea without any fear. Failure, you learned, as I did in art school, to be a wonderful thing. It allowed you to get up in the morning and take the pillow off your head."

"We must travel in the direction of our fear."

"I have a tendency to sabotage relationships I have a tendency to sabotage everything. Fear of success, fear of failure, fear of being afraid. Useless, good-for-nothing thoughts."

"Fear attracts attack."

"Fear of things invisible in the natural seed of that which everyone in himself calleth religion."

"I try to get in quiet time and book time, but really, the only time I ever get that is when I'm on an airplane - I have a fear of flying, but I actually love flying because it's the only time I can sleep, and it's the only time I get to read."

"I define fear as standing across the ring from Joe Louis and knowing he wants to go home early."

"Business is war. I go out there, I want to kill the competitors. I want to make their lives miserable. I want to steal their market share. I want them to fear me and I want everyone on my team thinking we're going to win."

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