Fear Quotes

There are casualties in war. Those who don’t make it back to a place of sound hopes and dreams. Some take on their demons alone. They are deceived into fearlessness and trampled by the hooves of their oppressor. Besides intervention, there is little justice for the thousands-upon-thousands hacked to pieces all around us. How dare we try to take life to the next level. Instead of merely protecting ourselves or scrounging up our next meal, we have the audacity to hope for something more—a witness for our lives who will survive alongside us.

~ Christopher Hawke

Here is the world. It is not a safe place, but however frightening and bewildering life may become, we can survive our fears, grab them by the wolf ’s tail as Peter did, and make peace with the world.

~ Terry Tempest Williams

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

Empowered Women 101: If they made you an option you will always be an option vs. the person they really wanted. Don't ever settle for someone that makes you go through hell only to stay with you because they don't have the confidence to go get what they really want. Fear will always follow your rules when they know they don't have options that make them stay comfortable. You won't grow real love in this type of a relationship. You will water weeds and call it a garden.

~ Shannon L. Alder

I listened to make sure I was meeting the minimum requirement to stay out of jail, so to speak.

~ Bill Mckenzie

Many problems can be solved by a man not frightened by them.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

Reputation became the pirates' sharpest sword.

~ Robert Kurson

Apprehension of a painful or disagreeable recognition made me tremble. I am confident that it took no distinctness of shape, and that it was the revival for a few minutes of the terror of childhood.

~ Charles Dickens

Meanwhile, back in the real world, my first instinct is a sort of stupid ducking motion I’ve learned from the movies, and I have the sure sense I’m going to be shot in the neck, where I feel particularly exposed and vulnerable.

~ Charles D'ambrosio

We live in the tension between neophillia, or attraction to new things, and neophobia, or fear of new things.

~ Jonathan Haidt

During World War I, Germany had only 25 of its vaunted submarines sailing at any one time.

~ Erik Larson

It's because the door hasn't been closed yet that the nightmares still find their way in.

~ Joyce Rachelle

If someone wants to be in your life they will find you. If they don't they will find an excuse.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Fear transforms your body like an inept sculptor does a perfect block of stone...It's just that you're chipped away at from within, and no one sees how many splinters and layers have been taken off you. You become ever thinner and more brittle inside, until eve the slightest emotion bowls you over. One hug, and you think you're going to shatter and be lost.

~ Nina George

I didn't doubt the potential value of paying attention to subconscious cues...problem was, my inner voice resembled Chicken Little: it was screaming that I was about to die, but it did that almost every time I laced up my climbing boots.

~ Jon Krakauer

Facing up to non-being enables us to put our life into perspective, see it in its entirety, and thereby lend it a sense of direction and unity. If the ultimate source of anxiety is fear of the future, the future ends in death; and if the ultimate source of anxiety is uncertainty, death is the only certainty. It is only by facing up to death, accepting its inevitability, and integrating it into life that we can escape from the pettiness and paralysis of anxiety, and, in so doing, free ourselves to make the most out of our lives and out of ourselves.

~ Neel Burton

I know a little something about fear, honey. I know what a relief it feels like to give into it at first. It’s not hard to persuade yourself that you’re doing the right thing—that you’re making the smart, safe decision. But fear is insidious. It takes anything you’re willing to give it, the parts of your life you don’t mind cutting out, but when you’re not looking, it takes anything else it damn well pleases, too.

~ Andrea Lochen

Scripture assumes that we will be afraid and anxious sometimes. What is important is where we turn, or to whom we turn when we are afraid. The God who calls you to trust in Him when you are afraid will spend a great deal of time showing you that you can trust Him.

~ Edward T. Welch

If you smell fear - bite on it, it can't bite back.

~ T.f. Hodge

The need for control always comes from someone that has lost it.

~ Shannon L. Alder

For there is no joy in continuity, in the perpetual. We desire it only because the present is empty. A person who is trying to eat money is always hungry. When someone says, Time to stop now! he is in a panic because he has had nothing to eat yet, and wants more and more time to go on eating money, ever hopeful of satisfaction around the corner. We do not really want continuity, but rather a present experience of total happiness. The thought of wanting such an experience to go on and on is a result of being self-conscious in the experience, and thus incompletely aware of it. So long as there is the feeling of an I having this experience, the moment is not all. Eternal life is realized when the last trace of difference between I and now has vanished - when there is just this now and nothing else.By contrast, hell or everlasting damnation is not the everlastingness of time going on forever, but of the unbroken circle, the continuity and frustration of going round and round in pursuit of something which can never be attained. Hell is the fatuity, the everlasting impossibility, of self-love, self-consciousness, and seld-possession. It is trying to see one´s own eyes, hear one´s own ears, and kiss one´s own lips.

~ Alan W. Watts

If I can trust the word of a friend, why do I question the word of the God of the universe? Go figure. Sin is truly bizarre. [Running Scared, p. 111]

~ Edward T. Welch

What I find predictable is crazy people's ability to predict that unpredictable people can be predicted by their consistent unpredictable behavior, thus making all crazy people predictable when the world says they are unpredictable. Therefore, I must be “right” because I can predict crazy because I have been trained in the unpredictable nature of consistent craziness because I am crazy.

~ Shannon L. Alder

For there is no joy in continuity, in the perpetual. We desire it only because the present is empty. A person who is trying to eat money is always hungry. When someone says, Time to stop now! he is in a panic because he has had nothing to eat yet, and wants more and more time to go on eating money, ever hopeful of satisfaction around the corner. We do not really want continuity, but rather a present experience of total happiness. The though of wanting such an experience to go on and on is a result of being self-conscious in the experience, and thsu incompletely aware of it. So long as there is the feeling of an I having this experience, the moment is not all. Eternal life is realized when the last trace of difference between I and now has vanished - when there is just this now and nothing else.By contrast, hell or everlasting damnation is not the everlastingness of time going on forever, but of the unbroken circle, the continuity and frustration of going round and round in pursuit of something which can never be attained. Hell is the fatuity, the everlasting impossibility, of self-love, self-consciousness, and seld-possession. It is trying to see one´s own eyes, hear one´s own ears, and kiss one´s own lips.

~ Alan W. Watts

When you wake up to kingdom realities, you find that you are tracing the steps of both the Israelites and Jesus himself into the wilderness. . . . The wilderness is the place where God meets his people, Satan attacks, and kingdom allegiances are revealed. [Ed Welch, Running Scared, 118]

~ Edward T. Welch

For there is no joy in continuity, in the perpetual. We desire it only because the present is empty. A person who is trying to eat money is always hungry. When someone says, Time to stop now! he is in a panic because he has had nothing to eat yet, and wants more and more time to go on eating money, ever hopeful of satisfaction around the corner. We do not really want continuity, but rather a present experience of total happiness. The thought of wanting such an experience to go on and on is a result of being self-conscious in the experience, and thus incompletely aware of it. So long as there is the feeling of an I having this experience, the moment is not all. Eternal life is realized when the last trace of difference between I and now has vanished - when there is just this now and nothing else.By contrast, hell or everlasting damnation is not the everlastingness of time going on forever, but of the unbroken circle, the continuity and frustration of going round and round in pursuit of something which can never be attained. Hell is the fatuity, the everlasting impossibility, of self-love, self-consciousness, and self-possession. It is trying to see one´s own eyes, hear one´s own ears, and kiss one´s own lips.

~ Alan W. Watts

The contrast between earthly and spiritual is not a contrast between the tangible and the intangible; it is between the transitory and the eternal. Earthly is temporary, spiritual is everlasting. [Ed Welch, Running Scared, 127]

~ Edward T. Welch

No power on earth, if it labours beneath the burden of fear, can possibly be strong enough to survive.

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

I finally understand that it’s okay to be a little afraid of things but that obsessing over them does not mean you have any more control over what you fear.

~ Jen Kirkman

Jesus had no regard for the lifeboat politics you and I live within every day.

~ Donald Miller

You always were such a worrier. It was as if you thought your worrying was all that held the world together, and if you stopped for a split second the whole thing would just fly apart.

~ Paul Murray

The Cause that caused a Fear need not appear again. There for not fear about Fear.

~ Purushothaman Kollam

It's hard to imagine which is worse, living with fear, or living without it in a fantasyland were consequences don't exist.

~ Brooke Hauser

Mark felt eyes on him as tight as a sniper's aim.

~ Davis Bunn

Fear becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Thinking that there is something to be avoided manifests something to avoid.

~ Vironika Tugaleva

Panic is something that good operations officers plan for.

~ Tom Clancy

You can tell a lot about a society by what it fears.

~ Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius

His terror became his companion. When it seemed to diminish, or grow easier to bear, he forced himself to remember the details of what he had said and done so that his fears returned, redoubled. His previous life, which had been without fear, he now dismissed as an illusion since he had come to believe that only in fear could the truth be found. When he woke from sleep without anxiety, he asked himself, What is wrong? What is missing? And then his door opened slowly, and a child put its head around and gazed at him: there are wheels, Ned thought, wheels within wheels. The curtains were now always closed, for the sun horrified him: he was reminded of a film he had seen some time before, and how the brightness of the noonday light had struck the water where a man, in danger of drowning, was struggling for his life.

~ Peter Ackroyd

Everyone must imagine his own snakes because no one else's snakes can ever be as awful.

~ Tove Jansson

While doubt cannot be expelled, it can be subdued.

~ Richard Baxter