Anxiety Quotes

We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will give us enduring satisfaction. We are invited to imagine ourselves scaling the steep cliff face of happiness in order to reach a wide, high plateau on which we will live out the rest of our lives; we are not reminded that soon after gaining the summit, we will be called down again into fresh lowlands of anxiety and desire.

~ Alain De Botton

[L]ife is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods, of failing to understand ourselves and misinterpreting the behaviour of others, of growing unproductively anxious or desirous, and of losing ourselves to vanity and error. Surreptitiously and beguilingly, then, with humour or gravity, works of art--novels, poems, plays, paintings or films--can function as vehicles to explain our condition to us. They may act as guides to a truer, more judicious, more intelligent understanding of the world.

~ Alain De Botton

People have worried about things for centuries, but it has never once had a positive effect on the outcome of a situation.

~ Lisa M. Schab

Fear and anxiety many times indicates that we are moving in a positive direction, out of the safe confines of our comfort zone, and in the direction of our true purpose.

~ Charles F. Glassman

Anxiety, and the physical symptoms it causes, is merely fog along the path of independence and discovery.

~ Charles F. Glassman

You are not stress...you are experiencing stress. You are not anxiety...you are experiencing anxiety. You are not fear...you are experiencing fear. You can recognize the fact that you are not your emotions and simply accept the experience of that emotion and move right through it.

~ Mike Basevic

It was hard to remember what I'd been so scared of. Being treated differently? Lack of acceptance? I was the one who hadn't accepted myself for who I was. I was the one who needed to be comfortable in my own skin. I hoped I could do that moving forward.

~ Kasie West

Refuse to worry. Cast your anxiety upon the Lord. He cares for you.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Sometimes we self-sabotage just when things seem to be going smoothly. Perhaps this is a way to express our fear about whether it is okay for us to have a better life. We are bound to feel anxious as we leave behind old notions of our unworthiness. The challenge is not to be fearless, but to develop strategies of acknowledging our fears and finding out how we can allay them.

~ Maureen Brady

Survivors often develop an exaggerated need for control in their adult relationships. It’s the only way they feel safe. They also struggle with commitment—saying yes in a relationship means being trapped in yet another family situation where abuse might take place. So the survivor panics as her relationship gets closer, certain that something terrible is going to happen. She pulls away, rejects, or tests her partner all the time.

~ Laura Davis

Worry wasn’t an emotion to which he was particularly accustomed—and it worried him.

~ Sol Luckman

To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose one's self.... And to venture in the highest is precisely to be conscious of one's self.

~ Søren Kierkegaard

Anxiety and fear are like baby tigers: The more you feed them, the stronger they grow.

~ Billy Graham

Though we have less to worry about than previous generations, we have more worry. Though we have it easier than our forefathers, we have more uneasiness. Though we have less real cause for anxiety than our predecessors, we are inwardly more anxious.

~ Billy Graham

Historians will probably call our era “the age of anxiety.” Anxiety is the natural result when our hopes are centered in anything short of God and His will for us.

~ Billy Graham

Hypochondriacs who have a fanciful anxiety about their health will never be well regardless of their physical condition.

~ Billy Graham

Is it any wonder that fear and anxiety have become the hallmarks of our age?

~ Billy Graham

God’s star promised peace to the whole world . . .too often man’s synthetic stars bring fear and anxiety. Our gadget-filled paradise, suspended in a hell of international insecurity, certainly does not offer us the happiness of which the last century dreamed. But there is still a star in the sky.

~ Billy Graham

No situation is beyond God’s control. Over my wife’s desk are these words: “Fear not the future, God is already there.

~ Billy Graham

Men and women who give [Christ] first place find that there is no need for anxiety about this world’s goods.

~ Billy Graham

The anxious heart, in its flailings, loses its hold on whatever grace God has bestowed upon it, and is sapped of the strength to resist the temptations of the Evil One, who is all the more ready to fish...in troubled waters.

~ Lauren F. Winner

I can't believe what a state I got myself into over this. Everyone was right. They said it would just happen, and it did. I guess the best things do.

~ Nora Roberts

An uncertain evil causes anxiety because, at the bottom of one's heart, one goes on hoping till the last moment that it may not be true; a certain evil, on the other hand, instills, for a time, a kind of dreary tranquillity.

~ Alberto Moravia

When we operate on the basis of the will to control, we are aware of only one kind of evil: the failure of existence to conform to the plan we have for it.

~ Jerome A. Miller

Is is as if life or reality itself has had it in mind all along to unravel the very design i have been trying all along to impose on it.

~ Jerome A. Miller

What we work so hard to avoid is the shattering of our lives by horrors we know we will be helpless to control.

~ Jerome A. Miller

Now, however open a person manages to be, there is one possibility to which he remains as closed as ever: the possibility that when he uncovers his deepest anxieties he will find hidden inside them certain horrifying truths which his whole effort to control his life has been designed to keep repressed.

~ Jerome A. Miller

The idea that you are not good enough and that people will not like you is something that has been ingrained into your mind over many years. You have hundreds of experiences that you can call up as evidence of the fact that people will not like you -- and that things will not turn out well. These ideas are incredibly convincing. They compel us to hesitate, to shy away, and to avoid the situations -- and people -- that we find frightening. This sets up a reinforcing cycle, where we avoid reaching out, don't get good responses from others as a result, and then gain further evidence that we are not worthy. In order to truly overcome your social anxiety at a deep, gut level, you must repeatedly take bold action. It is only through trying something new, and with a different perspective, that you learn to see the world and the people around you in a different light.

~ Aziz Gazipura

And there you sit.My eyes burning a hole on the side of your face while the stars are being captured in your eyes from the prolonged, there's-plenty-of-time, full attention you're giving each one.And there you sit.And I'm wishing I could give you every ounce of what you give the stars.

~ Taylor Patton

Sometimes my helpless blood runs numb and, if only for a second, I forget how frail bones can be.

~ Taylor Patton

I thought doctors were supposed to make you better not worse!

~ Sue Whitaker

You can't fight mental health bias if you label people based on a lists of symptoms and you have no medical degree to diagnose people. We all have crazy running through our blood and so many things trigger that. We all struggle with our anxiety and twisted issues. Defamation of character is not kind, nor Christlike. Because when you label people with self righteous vindication you open the door to the very idea that self righteousness is itself a disorder that we should all be afraid of. This doorway when left open too long gets people to pull away from Christ, not run to him.

~ Shannon L. Alder

One of the few blessings of living in an age of anxiety is that we are forced to become aware of ourselves.

~ Rollo May

It is important to note that the acquisition of wealth, as the accepted standard of succes, does not refer to increasing material goods for sustenance purposes, or even for the purpose of increasing enjoyment. It refers rather to wealth as a sign of individual power, a proof of achievement and self-worth.Modern economic individualism, though based on belief in the free individual, has resulted in the phenomenon that increasingly large numbers of people have to work on the property (capital) of a few powerful owners. It is not surprising that such a situation should lead to widespread insecurity, for not only is the individual faced with a criterion of succes over which he has only partial control but also his opportunities for a job are in considerable measure out of his control.

~ Rollo May

Politics is always driven by competing worries.

~ George F. Will

Vaccination was, and is, thoroughly infused with our politics, our social values, and our cultural norms. By acknowledging and understanding the divergent reasons why we've vaccinated in the past, however, we just may ensure the continued success of vaccination in the future.

~ Elena Conis

Free your hearts of anxiety, pain and anger, to have peace within your heart and soul.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Those who pretend as if they don't love you, are the ones who would hate to see you love another person.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

People are wrong when they say things like, “I didn’t have time to think.” If you’re really worried, or really miserable, those feelings come welling up around the edges of the other things you’re doing, so that you are in the feelings even when you’re working hard at something else.

~ Diana Wynne Jones

The most important thing is not to think very much about oneself. To investigate candidly the charge; but not fussily, not very anxiously. On no account to retaliate by going to the other extreme -- thinking too much.

~ Virginia Woolf