Robert > Robert's Quotes

“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“Don't be afraid of your fears. They're not there to scare you. They're there to let you know that something is worth it.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“It's the questions we can't answer that teach us the most. They teach us how to think. If you give a man an answer, all he gains is a little fact. But give him a question and he'll look for his own answers.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear

“Fear's useless. Either something bad happens or it doesn't: If it doesn't, you've wasted time being afraid, and if it does, you've wasted time that you could have spent sharpening your weapons.”
― Sarah Rees Brennan, The Demon's Lexicon

“It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Your fear is 100% dependent on you for its survival.”
― Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free

“Fear is a part of life. It's a warning mechanism. That's all. It tells you when there's danger around. Its job is to help you survive. Not cripple you into being unable to do it.”
― Jim Butcher, Dead Beat

“Men who fear demons see demons everywhere.”
― Brom, The Child Thief

“The human race is a monotonous affair. Most people spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live, and what little freedom remains so fills them with fear that they seek out any and every means to be rid of it.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

“You can only be afraid of what you think you know.”
― J. Krishnamurti

“I know how you feel," I said. "You run into something you totally don't get, and it's scary as hell. But once you learn something about it, it gets easier to handle. Knowledge counters fear. It always has.”
― Jim Butcher, Dead Beat

“To know a species, look at its fears. To know yourself, look at your fears. Fear in itself is not important, but fear stands there and points you in the direction of things that are important. Don't be afraid of your fears, they're not there to scare you; they're there to let you know that something is worth it.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“Sometimes good choices are really bad ones, wrapped up in so much fear you can't even see straight.”
― Deb Caletti, The Secret Life of Prince Charming

“He will never have true friends who is afraid of making enemies.”
― William Hazlitt, Selected Essays, 1778-1830

“Nervous means you want to play. Scared means you don't want to play.”
― Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

“Though my friends envied me because I always seemed so cheerful and confident, I was secretly terrified of practically everything.”
― Erica Jong, Fear of Flying

“My mind is the only sanctuary that has not been stolen from me.”
― Christopher Paolini

“Conquer the world by intelligence, and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it.”
― Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects

“Fear? What has a man to do with fear? Chance rules our lives, and the future is all unknown. Best live as we may, from day to day.”
― Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

“Fear tries to get us to give up but faith takes us all the way through to victory”
― Joyce Meyer

“What you are afraid of is never as bad as what you imagine. The fear you let build up in your mind is worse than the situation that actually exists.”
― Spencer Johnson, Who Moved My Cheese?

“If people would know how little brain is ruling the world, they would die of fear.”
― Ivo Andric

“You don't know where you are or where your dreams end and the world begins.”
― Rachel Klein, The Moth Diaries

“Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I am as silent as death. Do this: Go to your bedroom. Your nice, safe, warm bedroom that is not a glass coffin behind a morgue door. Lie down on your bed not made of ice. Stick your fingers in your ears. Do you hear that? The pulse of life from your heart, the slow in-and-out from your lungs? Even when you are silent, even when you block out all noise, your body is still a cacophony of life. Mine is not. It is the silence that drives me mad. The silence that drives the nightmares to me. Because what if I am dead? How can someone without a beating heart, without breathing lungs live like I do? I must be dead. And this is my greatest fear: After 301 years, when they pull my glass coffin from this morgue, and they let my body thaw like chicken meat on the kitchen counter, I will be just like I am now. I will spend all of eternity trapped in my dead body. There is nothing beyond this. I will be locked within myself forever. And I want to scream. I want to throw open my eyes wake up and not be alone with myself anymore, but I can't. I can't.”
― Beth Revis, Across the Universe

“But fear doesn't need doors and windows. It works from the inside.”
― Andrew Clements, Things Not Seen

“When you do what you fear most, then you can do anything.”
― Stephen Richards

“No power so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.”
― Edmund Burke

“The cases described in this section (The Fear of Being) may seem extreme, but I have become convinced that they are not as uncommon as one would think. Beneath the seemingly rational exterior of our lives is a fear of insanity. We dare not question the values by which we live or rebel against the roles we play for fear of putting our sanity into doubt. We are like the inmates of a mental institution who must accept its inhumanity and insensitivity as caring and knowledgeableness if they hope to be regarded as sane enough to leave. The question who is sane and who is crazy was the theme of the novel One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. The question, what is sanity? was clearly asked in the play Equus.
The idea that much of what we do is insane and that if we want to be sane, we must let ourselves go crazy has been strongly advanced by R.D. Laing. In the preface to the Pelican edition of his book The Divided Self, Laing writes: "In the context of our present pervasive madness that we call normality, sanity, freedom, all of our frames of reference are ambiguous and equivocal." And in the same preface: "Thus I would wish to emphasize that our 'normal' 'adjusted' state is too often the abdication of ecstasy, the betrayal of our true potentialities; that many of us are only too successful in acquiring a false self to adapt to false realities."
Wilhelm Reich had a somewhat similar view of present-day human behavior. Thus Reich says, "Homo normalis blocks off entirely the perception of basic orgonotic functioning by means of rigid armoring; in the schizophrenic, on the other hand, the armoring practically breaks down and thus the biosystem is flooded with deep experiences from the biophysical core with which it cannot cope." The "deep experiences" to which Reich refers are the pleasurable streaming sensations associated with intense excitation that is mainly sexual in nature. The schizophrenic cannot cope with these sensations because his body is too contracted to tolerate the charge. Unable to "block" the excitation or reduce it as a neurotic can, and unable to "stand" the charge, the schizophrenic is literally "driven crazy."
But the neurotic does not escape so easily either. He avoids insanity by blocking the excitation, that is, by reducing it to a point where there is no danger of explosion, or bursting. In effect the neurotic undergoes a psychological castration. However, the potential for explosive release is still present in his body, although it is rigidly guarded as if it were a bomb. The neurotic is on guard against himself, terrified to let go of his defenses and allow his feelings free expression. Having become, as Reich calls him, "homo normalis," having bartered his freedom and ecstasy for the security of being "well adjusted," he sees the alternative as "crazy." And in a sense he is right. Without going "crazy," without becoming "mad," so mad that he could kill, it is impossible to give up the defenses that protect him in the same way that a mental institution protects its inmates from self-destruction and the destruction of others.”
― Alexander Lowen, Fear Of Life