Anxiety Quotes

Cast the burden of the present along with the sin of the past and the fear of the future upon the Lord.

~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Most of your unhappiness in life comes from the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself.

~ John Piper

There's a quote from 'The Breakfast Club' that goes We're all pretty bizarre. Some of us are just better at hiding it. I have it on a poster but I took a Sharpie to it and scratched out the word hiding because it reminds me that there's a certain pride and freedom that comes from wearing your unique bizarreness like a badge of honor.

~ Hafiz

Even when everything's going your way you can still be sad. Or anxious. Or uncomfortably numb. Because you can't always control your brain or your emotions even when things are perfect.

~ Jenny Lawson

A scar had been beaten into his mind which would only heal by experience.

~ Ian Fleming

The difference between a conventional counsellor and an empowerment counsellor is that a conventional therapist will allow you to dwell in your pit of misery for months, years and possibly even decades; whereas an empowerment counsellor will challenge you to recognise that your past pains and seemingly negative experiences are the very key to accessing your greatest self.

~ Miya Yamanouchi

Nobody would believe what an effort it is to do what little I am able, - to dress and entertain, and order things

~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

There's memory clutter, which reminds you of an important person, achievement, or event from your past. I think memory clutter often gathers in the homes of people with some degree of depression. And then there's I might need it one day clutter, in which people hang on to stuff in anticipation of an imagined future. Among these folks, I've noticed a recurring theme of anxiety...Maybe it's possible that the stuff we own and obsess over is the physical manifestation of the mental health issues that challenge our minds. --p29.

~ Peter Walsh

I always fill the chat box, almost every day, and end up deleting my heart.

~ Esteban Urayoán

At the fall, we became alienated not only from God and other people but also from ourselves.

~ R.c. Sproul

Each time that I have felt like I might finally be figuring some things out, life has decided to change the rules and I’ve had to start all over again.

~ Jennifer Elisabeth

This is the hour I hide everythingBehind my eyesTo see if you can seeAll the trouble my brain's been brewing. Yes, I feel I am the worst and you are the bestAnd yet, and yet, Nothing bad unfolds as we sit,Young and nervous, Alive and bursting,With futures that may not entwine.Who am I?Who am I to sabotage what may be too smallFor even chaos to noticeAnd disassemble?

~ Evan Roskos

The pain will always be in you — but you will not always be in pain.

~ Abby Norman

Like an attack this melancholy comes from time to time. I don't know at what intervals, and slowly covers my sky with clouds. It begins with an unrest in the heart, with a premonition of anxiety, probably with my dreams at night. People, houses, colors, sounds that otherwise please me become dubious and seem false. Music gives me a headache. All my mail becomes upsetting and contains hidden arrows. At such times, having to converse with people is torture and immediately leads to scenes... Anger, suffering, and complaints are directed at everything, at people, at animals, at the weather, at God, at the paper in the book one is reading, at the material of the very clothing one has on. But anger, impatience, complaints and hatred have no effect on things and are deflected from everything, back to myself.

~ Hermann Hesse

This will sound strange, and yet I'm sure it was the point: it was a bit like being high. That, for me, anyway, had always been the attraction of drugs, to stop the brutal round of hypercritical thinking, to escape the ravages of an unoccupied mind cannibalizing itself.

~ Norah Vincent

That was the crux. You. Only you could work on you. Nobody could force you, and if you weren't ready, then you weren't ready, and no amount of open-armed encouragement was going to change that.

~ Norah Vincent

The industrial and technological revolutions have made our lives simpler, in terms of what is physically required of us on a daily basis, but they have also made it possible for us to do a whole lot less than we ought to be doing, and we suffer for it.We have become flabby and overweight; our joints and muscles have become stiff from lack of use. We suffer from all sorts of problems related to our lack of physical exercise; it affects us on all levels, causing high blood pressure, increased cholesterol, anxiety, depression, insomnia and the list goes on and on.We know, too, how much better we feel for a bit of exercise. Those “feel-good” hormones lift our spirits, boost self-esteem and improve our overall sense of well-being. It’s a sort of built-in reward system. There’s a reason for that. It’s because we are meant to be active.

~ Liberty Forrest

An observant friend will recognize the signs of the rise of grief: eyes that easily well with tears, a smile that is difficult to sustain, a tendency to withdraw. And ultimately, perhaps we each need to create our own symbol of grieving — to wear our version of black, or maybe to color with black crayons for a while.

~ Sandy Oshiro Rosen

It is not depression or anxiety that truly hurts us. It is our active resistance against these states of mind and body. If you wake up with low energy, hopeless thoughts, and a lack of motivation - that is a signal from you to you. That is a sure sign that something in your mind or in your life is making you sick, and you must attend to that signal. But what do most people do? They hate their depressed feelings. They think Why me? They push them down. They take a pill. And so, the feelings return again and again, knocking at your door with a message while you turn up all the noise in your cave, refusing to hear the knocks. Madness. Open the door. Invite in depression. Invite anxiety. Invite self-hatred. Invite shame. Hear their message. Give them a hug. Accept their tirades as exaggerated mistruths typical of any upset person. Love your darkness and you shall know your light.

~ Vironika Tugaleva

You have the chief spark of your health's fire, for you have true knowledge of the hand that guides the universe.

~ Boethius

Preaching a man a sermon with a broken head and telling him to be right with God is equal to telling a man with a broken leg to get up and run a race.

~ Richard Baxter

My life felt so cluttered and obstructed that I could hardly breathe. I inhabited a closed, concentrated world, airless and without exits.

~ Nell Casey

However vivid they might be, past images and future delights did not protect Sylvia from the present, which rules despotic over pale shadows of past and future. That was Sylvia's genius and her Panic Bird- her total lack of nostalgia. She had no armor. This left her especially vulnerable in New York, where she was removed from the context of her life, severed from that reassuring arc.

~ Elizabeth Winder

Dishonoring what we feel is an epidemic that has us self-medicating as a culture and trying to numb ourselves.

~ Abiola Abrams

You haunt my days and dreams.

~ Jennifer Elisabeth

I would if somebody would want to but of course nobody would want to so I wouldn't want to force anybody to want to.

~ Susanna Kaysen

There were times when I would sob until I shook, until my eyelids were so swollen that it pained me to open them, and through hiccoughs, trembling, I would hiss, don’t touch me! as he moved to place a gentle hand on my shoulder. There were times when we seemed locked into our chairs, discrete, the static between us more eloquent than words. But there was never a moment when I doubted Peter’s ability to heal me.

~ Antonella Gambotto-Burke

I know what it's like to sleep in fear, to starve myself to be worthy, to be ashamed of my voice, to want to sleep forever. To question why I deserve to live.

~ Anna White

I name you today, heart fears. I am small, but you are smaller. You will not stop me. You have a voice, fears, and I must listen, but then I will open my heart. I will love you right to death.

~ Anna White

I've had a lot of therapists, so I've had the opportunity to approach my fear in many different ways. I've faced it head on and sideways and tried to tiptoe up behind it.

~ Anna White

In our circle, stress was a valuable status marker: I stress, therefore I am.

~ Antonella Gambotto-Burke

For years, I worked seven-day weeks, through birthdays and most public holidays, Christmases and New Year’s Eves included. I worked mornings and afternoons, resuming work after dinner. I remember feeling as if life were a protracted exercise in pulling myself out of a well by a rope, and that rope was work.

~ Antonella Gambotto-Burke

Alcohol has its own well-know defects as a medication for depression but no one has ever suggested - ask any doctor - that it is not the most effective anti-anxiety agent yet known.

~ Joan Didion

Finding your self-culture is hero's work. I liken it to the journey of a warrior who is preparing for battle. There is no violence in the battle, but there is a plan of attack and a methodology that you need to employ to complete the journey. Page 12

~ Victoria Lorient-Faibish

It was impossible to sleep. Anxiety stopped me from falling asleep, depression woke me up.

~ David Walliams

Lewis encourages his cancer-stricken and temporarily depressed wife that uncertainty rather than hopelessness is our cross.

~ C.s. Lewis

Find your self-culture is hero's work. I liken it to the journey of a warrior who is preparing for battle. There is no violence in the battle, but there is a plan of attack and a methodology that you need to employ to complete the journey. Page 12

~ Victoria Lorient-Faibish

We are created for adventure, and if we cannot find one, we start blowing things out of proportion so it feels like we have one.

~ John Eldredge

Okay, I’ll just jump right out and say it. I have anxiety issues.

~ Shannon Celebi

Perhaps the relevant truth- and it's one whose existence was apparent to my wife, and I'm sure to much of the world, long before it became apparent to me-is that we all find ourselves in temporal currents and unless you're paying attention you'll discover, often too late, that an undertow of weeks or of years has pulled you deep into trouble.

~ Joseph O'neill