Dealing With Fear Quotes

He would eventually have to pass through the forest, but he felt no fear. Of course - the forest was inside him, he knew, and it made him who he was. ~ Haruki Murakami

BOB DIAMOND: "Being from earth as you are and using as little of your brain as you do, your life has pretty much been devoted to dealing with fear.
DAN MILLER: "It has?"
BOB DIAMOND: "Everybody on earth deals with fear. That's what little brains do."
BOB DIAMOND: "Did you ever have friends whose stomach hurt?"
DAN MILLER: "Every one of them."
BOB DIAMOND: "It's fear. Fear is like a giant fog. It sits on your brain and blocks everything. Real feeling, true happiness, real joy, they can't get through that fog. But you lift it and buddy you're in for the ride of your life."
(From the movie 'Defending Your Life') ~ Alex Pattakos

My hosts have spread the spectrum: students, farm and construction workers, salesmen and truck drivers, teaches and writers... I've stayed in homes with backyard swimming pools and homes with backyard toilets, ridden with people who needed gas money and others who bought me meals, some who would put the fear of God into me, who whose country-twand talk almost called for an interpreter... but one thing had they in common: the willingness to help a stranger on the road or a weary friend at their door ~ Irv Thomas

You go into a book and you're in the dark, really. You go in with a certain fear and trembling. You know one thing. You know you will not be the same person when this voyage is over. But you don't know what's going to happen to you between getting on the boat and stepping off. ~ James A. Baldwin

When we operate from the central concern of being seen a certain way, we can't develop healthy relationships in the messy soil of reality-- the only place they'll grow. Presenting a perfect, fake life to others generates fear in our own hearts and intimidation in everyone else's, and creates nice, fake relationships-- with our friends, with our family members, even with our own children. ~ Jen Hatmaker

All animals are born with three basic instincts - Hunger to Grow, Fear to Survive and Sex to Multiply. ~ Anupam Sinha

Can you imagine a life with no fear? What if faith, not fear, was your default reaction to threats? ~ Max Lucado

I've thought all my life, 'Lord Christ in heaven! what did I live for?' Beatings, work! I saw nothing except my husband. I knew nothing but fear! And how Pasha grew I did not see, and I hardly know whether I loved him when my husband was alive. All my concerns, all my thoughts were centered upon one thing - to feed my beast, to propitiate the master of my life with enough food, pleasing to his palate, and served on time, so as not to incur his displeasure, so as to escape the terrors of a beating, to get him to spare me but once! But I do not remember that he ever did spare me. He beat me so - not as a wife is beaten, but as one whom you hate and detest. ~ Maxim Gorky

With cities, it is as if with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. ~ Italo Calvino

Meryn's mouth dropped. "Seriously? We're dealing with a paranormal version of Pinky and the Brain? ~ Alanea Alder

Preachers prepare with this fear: 'Am I going to be able to fill the time?' The audience never worries about that. ~ Andy Stanley

Compassion practice is daring. It involves learning to relax and allow ourselves to move gently toward what scares us. The trick to doing this is to stay with emotional distress without tightening into aversion, to let fear soften us rather than harden into resistance. ~ Pema Chodron

I want to, first of all, remove a very major error that exists in the study of Rumi today not only in America but also among a lot of Persians, Turks and others who consider Rumi only as a kind of nationalistic emblem. Rumi was a Muslim, he was a Muslim poet. He never missed his prayers. He said, (عَقل قربان کُن بہ پیش مصطفیٰ) "Sacrifice your intellect at the feet of the Prophet." Masnavi is a commentary to the Qur'an. He knew the Qur'an extremely well. At the beginning of the Masvani, he says this remarkable sentence, (این کتاب اصول اصول اصول دین) "The book is the principle of the principle of the principle of religion [in respect of its unveiling the mysteries of attainment to the Truth and of certainty]." So it is very very clear that this book is dealing with the heart of the religion. There is no secular Rumi which is authentic. Rumi cannot be secularized … In order to understand Rumi you have to understand that he was not a New Age Poet. He was not born in California. He does not represent what [some of us] are looking for; a kind of bland, sentimental, universality in which you do not do anything for God, you don't have to reform yourself, you just get together and be happy. He is not that kind of a poet, you must understand that. The relation of Rumi with Islam once severed will make Rumi irrelevant as a spiritual therapist … Anyway, it is very very important to realize that all the message of Rumi, everything he wrote is just in order for us to remember God.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr

Often we are preoccupied with the question "How can we be witnesses in the Name of Jesus? What are we supposed to say or do to make people accept the love that God offers them?" These questions are expressions more of our fear than of our love. Jesus shows us the way of being witnesses. He was so full of God's love, so connected with God's will, so burning with zeal for God's Kingdom, that he couldn't do other than witness. Wherever he went and whomever he met, a power went out from him that healed everyone who touched him (see Luke 6:19). If we want to be witnesses like Jesus, our only concern should be to be as alive with the love of God as Jesus was. ~ Henri J.M. Nouwen

A big fear of working with an actor that's never been a lead in a film before is that you're going to have to work really hard to pull a performance out of her. ~ Sean Durkin

I don't like dealing with money transactions in poor countries. I get confused between the feeling that I shouldn't haggle with poverty and getting ripped off ~ Alex Garland

When dealing with one's internal demons, denial works best. ~ Marty Rubin

I don't walk around with fear. I walk around with strength. I believe in cause and effect. ~ Melanie Griffith

Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live--that productive work is the process by which man's consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one's purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one's values--that all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others--that your work is yours to choose, and the choice is as wide as your mind, that nothing more is possible to you and nothing less is human--that to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a fear-corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time, and to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind's full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay--that your work is the process of achieving your values, and to lose your ambition for values is to lose your ambition to live--that your body is a machine, but your mind is its driver, and you must drive as far as your mind will take you, with achievement as the goal of your road--that the man who has no purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to crash in the first chance ditch, that the man who stifles his mind is a stalled machine slowly going to rust, that the man who lets a leader pres ~ Ayn Rand

Sometimes, beyond all else, should be a true passion and investment in driving the result and a lack of fear associated with making it happen. ~ Colleen Bader

Hattie clambered from the train, her skirt still hemmed with Georgia mud, the dream of Philadelphia round as a marble in her mouth and the fear of it a needle in her chest. ~ Ayana Mathis

Mma Ramotswe had heard of the operation's success. She too had been going over various possibilities; in particular she had been thinking of the threat posed by the aunt. Mma Ramotswe had gone out of her way to reassure her, but when the other woman had simply brushed her off she realised that this was one of those people with whom there simply could be no dealing. They were few and far between, thankfully, but when you encountered one of them it was best just to recognise what you were up against, rather than to hope for some miraculous change of mind, some Road to Damascus improvement. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

When you take comprehensive, then we're dealing with certain issues like full citizenship ... And whatever else we disagree on, I think we would agree on that that's a more toxic and contentious issue, granting full amnesty. ~ Herbert Spencer

Dealing with Greece's problems will be more difficult if Greece is not a member of the eurozone. ~ Lucas Papademos

Noticing that, he made a trail of the ring, to see if it had that power; and he found that whenever he turned the collet inside, he was invisible, when he turned it outside, visible. After he found this out he managed to be appointed one of the messengers to the king; when he got there, he seduced the king's wife, and with her set upon the king, and killed him, and seized the empire. Then if there could be two such rings, and if the just man put one on and the unjust the other, no one, as it would be thought, would be so adamantine as to abide in the practice of justice, no one could endure to hold back from another's goods and not to touch, when it was in his power to take what he would even out of the market without fear, and to go into any house and lie with anyone he wished, and to kill or set free from prison those he might wish, and to do anything else in the world like a very god. And in doing so he would do just the same as the other; both would go the same way. Surely one would call this a strong proof that no one is just willingly but only under a strong compulsion, believing that it is not a good to him personally; since wherever each thinks he will be able to do injustice, he does injustice. ~ Plato

Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil. ~ Solomon

This love meditation is adapted from the Visuddhimagga by Buddhaghosa, a 5th century C.E. systematization of the Buddha's teaching. We begin by practicing the love meditation on ourselves ("May I"). Until we are able to love and take care of ourselves, we cannot be much help to others. After that, we practice them on others ("May he/she/they") - first on someone we like, then on someone neutral to us, and finally on someone who makes us suffer.

May I be peaceful, happy, and light in body and spirit.
May I be safe and free from injury.
May I be free from anger, afflictions, fear and anxiety.

May I learn to look at myself with the eyes of of understanding and love.
May I be able to recognize and touch the seeds of joy and happiness in myself.
May I learn to identify and see the sources of anger, craving, and delusion in myself.

May I know how to nourish the seeds of joy in myself every day.
May I be able to live fresh, solid, and free.
May I be free from attachment and aversion, but not indifferent.

Love is not just the intention to love, but the capacity to reduce suffering, and offer peace and happiness. The practice of love increases our forbearance, our capacity to be patient and embrace difficulties and pain. Forbearance does mean that we try to suppress pain. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Her father said there was no shame in being afraid, only in showing your fear. "All men live with fear," he said. ~ George R R Martin

All of it pointed to a force stronger than the anxious formulas of religion: a radically inclusive love that accompanied people in the most ordinary of actions - eating, drinking, walking - and stayed with them, through fear, even past death. That love meant giving yourself away, embracing outsiders as family, emptying yourself to feed and live for others. The stories illuminated the holiness located in mortal human bodies, and the promise that people could see God by cherishing all those different bodies the way God did. They spoke of a communion so much vaster than any church could contain: one I had sensed all my life could be expressed in the sharing of food, particularly with strangers. ~ Sara Miles

But the Elves were not so lightly to be caught. As soon as Sauron set the One Ring upon his finger they were aware of him; and they knew him, and perceived that he would be master of them, and of an that they wrought. Then in anger and fear they took off their rings. But he, finding that he was betrayed and that the Elves were not deceived, was filled with wrath; and he came against them with open war, demanding that all the rings should be delivered to him, since the Elven-smiths could not have attained to their making without his lore and counsel. But the Elves fled from him; and three of their rings they saved, and bore them away, and hid them.

Now these were the Three that had last been made, and they possessed the greatest powers. Narya, Nenya, and Vilya, they were named, the Rings of Fire, and of Water, and of Air, set with ruby and adamant and sapphire; and of all the Elven-rings Sauron most desired to possess them, for those who had them in their keeping could ward off the decays of time and postpone the weariness of the world. But Sauron could not discover them, for they were given into the hands of the Wise, who concealed them and never again used them openly while Sauron kept the Ruling Ring.

Therefore the Three remained unsullied, for they were forged by Celebrimbor alone, and the hand of Sauron had never touched them; yet they also were subject to the One. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

When writers who are just starting out ask me when it gets easier, my answer is never. It never gets easier. I don't want to scare them, so I rarely say more than that, but the truth is that, if anything, it gets harder. The writing life isn't just filled with predictable uncertainties but with the awareness that we are always starting over again. That everything we ever write will be flawed. We may have written one book, or many, but all we know - if we know anything at all - is how to write the book we're writing. All novels are failures. Perfection itself would be a failure. All we can hope is that we will fail better. That we won't succumb to fear of the unknown. That we will not fall prey to the easy enchantments of repeating what may have worked in the past. I try to remember that the job - as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy - of the artist is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it. To be birthed by it. Each time we come to the end of a piece of work, we have failed as we have leapt - spectacularly, brazenly - into the unknown. ~ Dani Shapiro

Both the ferial and the festal cuisine, therefore, must be seen as styles of unabashed eating. Neither attempts to do anything to food other than render it delectable. Their distinction is grounded, not in sordid dietetic tricks, but in a choice between honest frugality or generous expense. Both aim only at excellence; accordingly, neither is suitable for dieting. Should a true man want to lose weight, let him fast. Let him sit down to nothing but coffee and conversation, if religion or reason bid him to do so; only let him not try to eat his cake without having it. Any cake he could do that with would be a pretty spooky proposition - a little golden calf with dietetic icing, and no taste at all worth having.

Let us fast, then - whenever we see fit, and as strenuously as we should. But having gotten that exercise out of the way, let us eat. Festally, first of all, for life without occasions is not worth living. But ferially, too, for life is so much more than occasions, and its grand ordinariness must never go unsavored. But both ways let us eat with a glad good will, and with a conscience formed by considerations of excellence, not by fear of Ghosts. ~ Robert Farrar Capon

Elizabeth, when you look into the darkness you have two choices. You either fall into it, so you'll never fear the unknown again. Or you stay on the ledge, always wondering what's there. Torturing yourself over it. Elizabeth, I live in the abyss, and would like you to leap into the unknown with me. Will you join me? ~ LeeAnn Whitaker

I am dealing with people with both sides. I see people who are liberating themselves but they want to forget the world. And I see people who want to liberate the world but they forget themselves. Neither is the way I want to go. ~ Tariq Ramadan

Living in fear is what every hater, negative person, and the devil wants. Live a righteous life with God and nothing but positivity. You must forgive anyone who has done you dirty, and move on. Your personal life, career, and love life will be that much more amazing after. Life is too short to live it being empty inside, sad, angry, and defensive just to hide your pain. Let it all go and let love and happiness in. Put yourself out there all the way and don't be fearful of losing love. If you don't live life by fully enjoying it and opening your heart, your just not living. ~ Behdad Sami

I am always concerned when people, finding out that I am a writer, apologise and say, "I'm not much of a reader actually. I know I ought to, but I just don't seem able to find the time," and then go on to tell me how they feel obliged to finish any book they begin. Well, of course, I say, you will be reluctant to open one in the first place, knowing what it might entail. It isn't meant to be like that, I assure them. If you begin a book and you don't like it, just throw it away. Or take it round to a charity shop. It's like going to a party: some people you linger with, knowing you get on. Some people you exchange greeting with and move on fast. It's nothing against them. They're just not your kind of person. It's the same with books. You must be prepared to discard. And though you may feel it's a waste of money not reading a book you don't get on with, that's like not opening the windows when the weather turns warm for fear of wasting the central heating. So, as I say, now is a good point to abandon the book. You have my permission - even my encouragement. ~ Fay Weldon

...the hopelessly romantic notion that two people can meet and instantly fall in love, an escape story where love is the highest law and conquers all against the odds. Characters like Bonnie and Clyde always appealed to me as a teenager - couples so intoxicated with one another that they fear nothing in the pursuit of the realization of each other, actions fueled by blind unconditional love. ~ Matty Healy

I enter the ancient courts of the men of antiquity where affectionately received by them I pasture on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born, where I am not too timid to speak with them and ask them about the reasons for their actions; and they in their courtesy answer me; and for four hours of time I feel no weariness, I forget every trouble, I do not fear poverty, death does not dismay me; I transfer all of myself into them... ~ Niccolo Machiavelli

As soon as men know that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage killers with approving smiles. ~ Simone Weil

Despite fear narrowing hostages' perceptions of options available to them, their perceptions are probably more accurate than outsiders'. Being there, hostages both have more information than do outsiders and are forced to live with terrifying contingencies that outsiders probably cannot even imagine. Outsiders' perceptions are often distorted by a need to believe that, if they were taken hostage, they would be able to escape. ~ Dee L.R. Graham