Anxiety Quotes

Worrying is carrying tomorrow's load with today's strength- carrying two days at once. It is moving into tomorrow ahead of time. Worrying doesn't empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength.

~ Corrie Ten Boom

It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.

~ David Foster Wallace

I've spent most of my life and most of my friendships holding my breath and hoping that when people get close enough they won't leave, and fearing that it's a matter of time before they figure me out and go.

~ Shauna Niequist

The punishment of every disordered mind is its own disorder.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable.

~ Oscar Wilde

I sat down and tried to rest. I could not; though I had been on foot all day, I could not now repose an instant; I was too much excited. A phase of my life was closing tonight, a new one opening tomorrow: impossible to slumber in the interval; I must watch feverishly while the change was being accomplished.

~ Charlotte Brontë

In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.

~ Henry David Thoreau

Her forehead was a maze of anxious little grooves, from a lifetime of wondering about whether everyone within range was OK.

~ Tana French

Care keeps his watch in every old man’s eye,And where care lodges, sleep will never lie.

~ William Shakespeare

Fear and anxiety affect decision making in the direction of more caution and risk aversion... Traumatized individuals pay more attention to cues of threat than other experiences, and they interpret ambiguous stimuli and situations as threatening (Eyesenck, 1992), leading to more fear-driven decisions. In people with a dissociative disorder, certain parts are compelled to focus on the perception of danger. Living in trauma-time, these dissociative parts immediately perceive the present as being just like the past and emergency emotions such as fear, rage, or terror are immediately evoked, which compel impulsive decisions to engage in defensive behaviors (freeze, flight, fight, or collapse). When parts of you are triggered, more rational and grounded parts may be overwhelmed and unable to make effective decisions.

~ Suzette Boon

Some part of me can't wait to see what life's going to come up with next! Anticipation without the usual anxiety. And underneath it all is the feeling that we both belong here, just as we are, right now.

~ Alexander Shulgin

Men seek rest in a struggle against difficulties; and when they have conquered these, rest becomes insufferable.

~ Blaise Pascal

A bitter man needs to place his troubles on the front of his tongue so that they taste sweeter.

~ Jay Wickre

She was terrified of everything, and terrified to show it.

~ David Foster Wallace

in my experience, the words “now just calm down” almost inevitably have the opposite effect on the person you are speaking to.

~ Elyn R. Saks

He might have been encased in a thick glass bubble, so separate did he feel from his three dining companions. It was a sensation with which he was only too familiar, that of walking in a giant sphere of worry, enclosed by it, watching his own terrors roll by, obscuring the outside world.

~ J.k. Rowling

Knowing about God is crucially important for the living of our lives. As it would be cruel to an Amazonian tribesmen to fly him to London, put him down without explanation in Trafalgar Square and leave him, as one who knew nothing of English or England, to fend for himself, so we are cruel to ourselves if we try to live in this world without knowing about the God whose world it is and who runs it .The world becomes a strange, mad, painful place, and life in it a disappointing and unpleasant business, for those who do not know about God. Disregard the study of God, and you sentence yourself to stumble and blunder through life blindfold, as it were , with no sense of direction, and no understanding of what surrounds you. This way you can waste your life and lose your soul.

~ J.i. Packer

He felt like normal. Filled with anxiety, dread, sure. But even that wasn't unusual...

~ John Ajvide Lindqvist

After a traumatic experience, the human system of self-preservation seems to go onto permanent alert, as if the danger might return at any moment.

~ Judith Lewis Herman

I was in misery, and misery is the state of every soul overcome by friendship with mortal things and lacerated when they are lost. Then the soul becomes aware of the misery which is its actual condition even before it loses them.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.

~ Alain De Botton

Quite collected at cocktail parties,meanwhile in my headI'm undergoing open-heart surgery.

~ Anne Sexton

It is our work to cast care, and it is God's work to take care.

~ Thomas Watson

So why do we worry? Why do we worry about food and clothing About finances and money? About security and the needs of life? We have Jehovah-Rohi! We have the Lord as our caring Shepherd. When fears regarding the cares of this world set in, we need to confidently lean on God's promise to care for us. Then we can declare to God, Whenever I am afraid, I will trust in You (Psalm 56:3)

~ Elizabeth George

Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.

~ Alain De Botton

The novice in the military art flew from point to point, retarding his own preparations by the excess of his violent and somewhat distempered zeal; while the more practiced veteran made his arrangements with a deliberation that scorned every appearance of haste

~ James Fenimore Cooper

Free time is death to the anxious, and thank goodness I don't have any of it right now.

~ Jon Stewart

The soul is torn apart in a painful condition as long as it prefers the eternal because of its Truth but does not discard the temporal because of familiarity.

~ Augustine Of Hippo

We live only a few conscious decades, and we fret ourselves enough for several lifetimes.

~ Christopher Hitchens

A Jewish man with his parents alive is half the time a helpless infant!

~ Philip Roth

his face, though lined, bore few traces of anxiety. But, perhaps the confidential bachelor clerks in Tellson's Bank were principally occupied with the cares of other people; and perhaps second-hand cares, like second-hand clothes, come easily off and on.

~ Charles Dickens

I am stupid, am I not? What more can I want? If you ask them who is brave--who is true--who is just--who is it they would trust with their lives?--they would say, Tuan Jim. And yet they can never know the real, real truth....

~ Joseph Conrad

It was an unfamiliar feeling, waking up with a place to go, a place I was actually beginning to comprehend and face without a sense of terror.More than that, I was even questioning the assumption that I was, in my bones, a scared and anxious and miserable person. It felt like the days were almost supernaturally good, that I could wake up without the usual wave of terror, that the days were admixed with some foreign substance dripping into them, some animating essence, like the dragonborn races of Endoria, dragonborn days. I felt like I'd stumbled on one of the open secrets of the world. Why hadn't I realized before that being a grown-up could be anything you wanted it to be?

~ Austin Grossman

My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child–wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry.

~ Virginia Woolf

To some people, I may seem calm. But if you could peer beneath the surface, you would see that I'm like a duck--paddling, paddling, paddling.

~ Scott Stossel

Human beings, like plans, prove fallible in the presence of those ingredients that are missing in maneuvers - danger, death, and live ammunition.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

When I don't have something to worry about, I worry. Nothing comes so naturally to a human being as anxiety and worry.

~ Brian Richardson

He was agitated for some reason that he could not name. (page 35)

~ Kate Dicamillo

A sharp decline in actual deprivation may, paradoxically, have been accompanied by an ongoing and even escalating sense of fear of deprivation.

~ Alain De Botton

as the determinants of high status keep shifting, so, too, naturally, will the triggers of status anxiety be altered.

~ Alain De Botton