quotations about fear
Fear is the path to the Dark Side. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.
YODA
Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace
That's all it takes, one drop of fear to curdle love into hate.
JAMES M. CAIN
Double Indemnity
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
T.S. ELIOT
The Waste Land
Fear has many eyes and can see things underground.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote
Fear is a quicksand that slows and grips and strangles, leaving its victims unable to act, too timid to do what life requires.
BOB LONSBERRY
A Various Language
How sweet the name of Jesus sounds
In a believer's ear!
It soothes his sorrows, heals his wounds,
And drives away his fear.
JOHN NEWTON
Olney Hymns
Sometimes fear is a warning. It's like someone putting a hand on your shoulder and saying Go No Farther.
ANNE RICE
Memnoch the Devil
It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.
AUNG SAN SUU KYI
Freedom from Fear
Fearlessness requires attention and receptivity--it takes focus to stand in the still eye of a tornado and not be swept away by it.
SUSAN PIVER
O Magazine, Apr. 2007
Living fearlessly is not the same thing as never being afraid. It's good to be afraid occasionally. Fear is a great teacher.
MICHAEL IGNATIEFF
O Magazine, Apr. 2007
Fear is the parent of cruelty.
JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE
Short Studies on Great Subjects
The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.
AUNG SAN SUU KYI
attributed, Instinct for Freedom: Finding Liberation Through Living
I was as afraid as the next man in my time and maybe more so. But with the years, fear had come to be regarded as a form of stupidity to be classed with overdrafts, acquiring a venereal disease or eating candies. Fear is a child's vice and while I loved to feel it approach, as one does with any vice, it was not for grown men and the only thing to be afraid of was the presence of true and imminent danger in a form that you should be aware of and not be a fool if you were responsible for others.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
True at First Light
When we notice a connection between our present fears and their origins in early life, we are finding out how much of our identity is designed by fear. Is fear the architect of me?
DAVID RICHO
When Love Meets Fear
Fear is a destructive emotion that can deal a fatal blow to any attempt on your part to build total self-confidence. If you allow your fears to run your life, it will be impossible to create the life you truly desire.
ROBERT ANTHONY
The Ultimate Secrets of Total Self-Confidence
I have no remedy for fear; there grows
No herb of help to heal a coward heart.
ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
Bothwell
Like other sets of habits, emotions had to be learned. So, fear was not an instinctive reaction to phylogenetically predetermined objects or events, but was a learned response occurring on 'signals' or conditioned stimuli.... Consequently it came as no surprise ... that children shared their mother's fears. This shared community of fear within the family was not due to inheritance of psychic mechanisms: it was learned. After all, the behaviourists pointed out, there was no direct relationship between fear and vulnerability. Indeed, the most defenceless of all human beings (the new-born child) was the least fearful of all God's creatures.
JOANNA BOURKE
Fear: A Cultural History
A man that is afraid is never a man.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
Fear is a distorting mirror in which anything can appear as a caricature of itself, stretched to terrible proportions; once inflamed, the imagination pursues the craziest and most unlikely possibilities. What is most absurd suddenly seems the most probable.
STEFAN ZWEIG
The Post Office Girl
There is always a cause for fear. The cause may change over time, but the fear is always with us.
MICHAEL CRICHTON
State of Fear