Daniel Smith Quotes

Freud was of the opinion that in fear a person is responding to a specific and immediate threat to physical safety while in anxiety a person is responding to a threat that is objectless, directionless, and located somewhere far off in the future - ruination, for example, or humiliation, or decay.

This is why therapists go to such lengths to urge their anxious patients away from intellectualization: The first step toward peace is disarmament.

And what nags me about this is that the source of my anxiety was exactly what Kierkegaard says the source of anxiety is, and what he praised in direct proportion to the volume any person possesses: possibility. The awareness that life is a series of choices any one of which could be either aggrandizing or disastrous. That this happens to be true I have no trouble signing on to. Any who has lived past the age of ten knows that even piddling actions can wind up having big consequences, and that even when you are super-conscious of your behaviors you can't know how things are going to turn out in the short- or the long-run. That's the drama of it all. On the one hand, your very existence means you can and will change things in your life and others. On the other hand, you aren't God, so everything is always going to be drenched in uncertainty and doubt.

If this all sounds melodramatic, well that, too, isn't a bad metaphor for anxiety - as a kind of drama queen of the mind. If you have ever been friends with a drama queen you know how taxing it can be. To have one in your head is enough to make you comatose.

Anxiety compels a person to think, but it is the type of thinking that gives thinking a bad name: solipsistic, self-eviscerating, unremitting, vicious.

I believe that an artist working for and representing the Kingdom of God should do the best of their ability to show and prove the depth, life, newness, creativity, truth and excitement of their Heavenly Father through the work that is set before them.

Guilt at least has a purpose; it tells us we've violated some ethical code. Ditto for remorse. Those feelings are educational; they manufacture wisdom. But regret - regret is useless.

It's like I've had a stroke. Do you think I've had a stroke?"
"I don't think you've had a stroke."
"But how do you know? How can you be sure I haven't had a stroke?"
"What are the symptoms of a stroke?"
"I don't know. Look them up. Look them up on line."
"OK. Hold on ... OK. Here it is. Do you have trouble speaking?"
"I have trouble speaking intelligently.

If you're afraid of heights, lean over a railing. If you're afraid of germs, lick a floor. But what do you do if your greatest fear is of being afraid?

Bob Dylan started out as a folk rip- off but he quickly ran with complex influences and it ended up to be his own sound.

I get excited about what the Holy Spirit is doing now through all the people he is refining and raising up all over this planet. I love connections and relationship and networking but it must be led by the Spirit.

By the tie I arrived at the clinic I was typically so demoralized I could barely stand. I was twenty-three years old and I looked like Nixon resigning the presidency.

The hard work, you discover over the years, is in learning to discern between correct and incorrect anxiety, between the anxiety that's trying to warn you about a real danger and the anxiety that's nothing more than a lying, sadistic, unrepentant bully in your head.

I believe people who are looking for a fresh idea and spirit have received Danielson. The conservative Christian press have been quite mean to us, but the mainstream 'secular' press has been very, very nice.

One of the things anxiety educates you in is how deeply physical thought can be, how concrete. In anxiety, there is no time to luxuriate in abstractions. It's just you and your mind, which has fists and is using them. It may be dualistic and logically untenable to posit the situation as You v. Head; it may not make sense philosophically. But in the throes of anxiety? In the cognitive shit? There's really no other way to think about what's going on.

My mother took the measure of what could be built with the material she'd been given, and she built it.

Anxiety and panic happen to be mundane phenomena, i.e., even when they are caused by extraordinary things like war and rape, they tend to occur when things are ordinary and predictable and relatively stable, against a backdrop of normal, everyday experience. This, of course, is one of the features of anxiety and panic that make them suck so bad.

Even the imperative to make choice after choice without clear guidance - allegedly the most nerve-wracking part of the profession - isn't exclusive to writing.

But a child is a sensitive instrument. You can hide the factual truth from a child, but you can't blanket influence. Your agitation will out, and over time it will mod your child's temperament as surely as water wear at rock.

To be anxious wasn't shameful, it was a high calling. It was to be alive to life's contradictions, more receptive to the true nature of things than everyone else. It was to be a person who saw with sharper eyes with more a active skin.

Remind yourself that every second spent scrolling through social media is one you will never get back.

I felt so skinless at times! Things hit me so hard!

Up till now I wrote the songs on my acoustic guitar alone with the Lord. Then I would take the song and share it with my family and then we all would figure out instrumentation together.