Fear Quotes

Superstition is the need to view the world in terms of simple cause and effect. As I have already said, religious fundamentalism was on the rise, but that is not the type of superstition I am referring to. The superstition that held sway at the time was a belief in simple causes. Even the plainest of events is tied down by a thick tangle of permutation and possibility, but the human mind struggles with such complexity. In times of trouble, when the belief in simple gods breaks down, a cult of conspiracy arises. So it was back then. Unable to attribute misfortune to chance, unable to accept their ultimate insignificance within the greater scheme, the people looked for monsters in their midst. The more the media peddled fear, the more the people lost the ability to believe in one another. For every new ill that befell them, the media created an explanation, and the explanation always had a face and a name. The people came to fear even their closest neighbors. At the level of the individual, the community, and the nation, people sought signs of others’ ill intentions; and everywhere they looked, they found them, for this is what looking does. This was the true challenge the people of this time faced. The challenge of trusting one another. And they fell short

~ Bernard Beckett

For sometime now I have believed that it is our own force, all our own force that is still too great for us. It is true that we do not know it; but is it not just that which is most our own of which we know the least?

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Can't figure women. Sometimes they're afraid of a spider, other times they're not afraid to stand right up to the devil.

~ Donal Harding

Good.I need you to be scared.Very,very scared.And then you'll never be scared again.

~ Simon Holt

From this arises the following question: whether it is better to be loved than feared, or the reverse. The answer is that one would like to be both the one and the other, but because they are difficult to combine, it is far better to be loved than feared if you cannot be both.

~ Niccolò Machiavelli

The process of breaking down fear was always my greatest challenge and it was made easier by the careful work and gentle voices of my female workers.

~ Muhammad Yunus

He cared less, so they cared more. He said it was beautiful. I knew he was broken.This was his game.

~ Coco J. Ginger

He hated being filled with terror. It was embarrassing.

~ Rick Riordan

That's because only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear - the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

Fear is an insidious and deadly thing. It can warp judgment, freeze reflexes, breed mistakes. Worse, it's contagious.

~ Jimmy Stewart

Nico remembered something Jason Grace had told him in the palace of Notus: Maybe it’s time you come out of the shadows. If only I could, he thought. For the first time in his life, he had begun to fear the dark, because he might melt into it permanently.

~ Rick Riordan

Your lack of fear is based on your ignorance.

~ Liu Cixin

To be feared of a thing and yet to do it, is what makes the prettiest kind of a man.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Amaranta, however, whose hardness of heart frightened her, whose concentrated bitterness made her bitter, suddenly became clear to her in the final analysis as the most tender woman who had ever existed, and she understood with pitying clarity that the unjust tortures to which she had submitted Pietro Crespi had not been dictated by a desire for vengeance, as everyone had thought, nor had the slow martyrdom with which she had frustrated the life of Colonel Gerineldo Márquez been determined by the gall of her bitterness, as everyone had thought, but that both actions had been a mortal struggle between a measureless love and an invincible cowardice, and that the irrational fear that Amaranta had always had of her own tormented heart had triumphed in the end.

~ Gabriel García Márquez

As Grams treaded water, she tapped my forehead. 'What's in here, Poppy, is scarier than anything you'll encounter in the depths of the ocean. An imagination is a powerful thing.

~ Shelley Coriell

Devour your fear.

~ Simon Holt

I am afraid a monster is grown that will devour all of us. Yet we must fight him.

~ Isaac Asimov

The world can do nothing to a Christian who has no fear of man.

~ Brother Yun

Failure seldom stops you. What stops you is the fear of failure.

~ Jack Lemmon

Now I lay facedown on the bed, sobbing for the womanwho once slept here not knowing that someday one of herworst fears would come true

~ Jennifer Castle

So now i know. I fear the unknown so deeply that I'de rather repeat the same heart-breaking pattern than face something or someone i can't predict.

~ Valerie Frankel

Mind easily mesmerized when frightened.

~ Toba Beta

Scarlett, I don't know just when it was that the bleak realization came over me that my own private shadow show was over. Perhaps in the first five minutes at Bull Run when I saw the first man I killed drop to the ground. But I knew it was over and I could no longer be a spectator. No, I suddenly found myself on the curtain, an actor, posturing and making futile gestures. My little inner world was gone, invaded by people whose thoughts were not my thoughts, whose actions were as alien as a Hottentot's. They'd tramped through my world with slimy feet and there was no place left where I could take refuge when things became too bad to stand. When I was in prison, I thought: When the war is over, I can go back to the old life and the old dreams and watch the shadow show again. But, Scarlett, there's no going back. And this which is facing all of us now is worse than war and worse than prison—and, to me, worse than death.... So, you see, Scarlett, I'm being punished for being afraid.

~ Margaret Mitchell

[T]he experience of mystery comes not from expecting it but through yielding all your programs, because your programs are based on fear and desire. Drop them and the radiance comes. (16)

~ Joseph Campbell

From this arises the question whether it is better to be loved rather than feared, or feared rather than loved. It might perhaps be answered that we should wish to be both: but since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved.

~ Niccolò Machiavelli

In most communities it is illegal to cry fire in a crowded assembly. Should it not be considered serious international misconduct to manufacture a general war scare in an effort to achieve local political aims?

~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

This book is a memoir - not of specific life events, but of the processes of dissociation, and of re-enlivening emotions that are shameful to admit or even to feel. It is an account of the altered states that trauma induces, which make it possible to survive a life-threatening event but impair the capacity to feel fear, and worse still, impair the ability to love. (292)

~ Jessica Stern

Relate to the fear, not just from it. (50)

~ Stephen Levine

...as you know, I don't believe in fear, just an invention by men so they get all the money and good jobs...

~ Marian Keyes

... from our vantage point it is now clear that the only thing the population had to fear was fear itself.

~ Bernard Beckett

When I was fifteen, a companion and I, on a dare, went into the mound one day just at sunset. We saw some of those Indians for the first time; we got directions from them and reached the top of the mound just as the sun set. We had camping equiptment with us, but we made no fire. We didn't even make down our beds. We just sat side by side on that mound until it became light enough to find our way back to the road. We didn't talk. When we looked at each other in the gray dawn, our faces were gray, too, quiet, very grave. When we reached town again, we didn't talk either. We just parted and went home and went to bed. That's what we thought, felt, about the mound. We were children, it is true, yet we were descendants of people who read books and who were, or should have been, beyond superstition and impervious to mindless fear.

~ William Faulkner

There is, after all, no moral difference between the bigot and the tolerator. They are from case to case positive or negative. One man is bigoted because he was given the sword of truth, another because he is angered in thoughtlessness; then, one man is tolerant because he was given the flag of peace, another because he is cowardly and wishes to hide all guilt.

~ Criss Jami

And how do you explain to your wife that you don't have all the answers, and that you might not know what you are doing, and that you are afraid you are going to fail? How do you admit that you are most afraid that, one day, she'll walk - and replace you with an educated, professor-type guy, who shares her same interests, schedule, and the way she was used to living, especially when all of your friends, your business associates, even your own damned brother, are all just waiting for you to mess up so they can have a shot at taking her away from you? How do you look the woman you love in her eyes and tell her that?

~ Leslie Esdaile

The more important question, of course, was what the new Lucy would do, and even though I was pretty sure the old Lucy wouldn't be around much anymore, I was a little bit afraid the new Lucy hadn't yet shown up.

~ Pam Houston

Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve always enjoyed feeling afraid. I think it is the most delicious feeling there is

~ Domingos Monteiro

Choice is the basis of every part of your existence, but so is fear. The difference is, choice creates movement, where fear limits movement.

~ Réné Gaudette

It had nothing to do with whether the water was frightening, or whether he was able to swim or not. No matter how fast he swam, there was something hidden in the water that he couldn't escape from. Even if it looked like it was sleeping, it could wake up at any time and come to attack him. Fear of this hidden thing, fear of the shadows, all of these frightened feelings lived in Makoto's heart.

~ Kouji Ouji

We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist. So, for a time, if such a passion come to fruition, the man will get what he wants. He will get the moral support, the encouragement, the relief from the sense of loneliness, the assurance of his own worth. But these things pass away; inevitably they pass away as the shadows pass across sundials. It is sad, but it is so. The pages of the book will become familiar; the beautiful corner of the road will have been turned too many times. Well, this is the saddest story.

~ Ford Madox Ford

Sometimes I think I won't ever feel safe until I can count my last days on one hand.

~ Gillian Flynn

I began to get a feeling (...) of being the only sane man in a nut house. It doesn't make you feel superior but depressed and scared, because there is nobody you can contact.

~ William S. Burroughs