Mortal Fear Quotes

Anesthesia was discovered. Do you know what it means to relieve man of his pain and suffering? Anesthesia is the most humane of all of man's accomplishments, and what a merciful accomplishment it was. For this great discovery we are indebted to Dr. W. T. G. Morton.

Do you know that the religionists opposed the use of anesthesia on the ground that God sent pain as a punishment for sin, and it was considered the greatest of sacrileges to use it - just think of it, a sin to relieve man of his misery! What a monstrous perversion! This one instance alone should convince you of the difference in believing in God or not.

No believer in God would have spent his energies to discover anesthesia. He would have been in mortal fear of the wrath of his God for interfering with his 'divine plan,' of making man suffer for having eaten of the fruit of the 'Tree of Knowledge.'

The very crux of the matter is in this one instance. Man seeks to relieve his fellow man from the suffering of disease and the pangs of mental agony. The believers in God are content that man's suffering is ordained, and therefore he accepts life and its trials and tribulations as a penance for living.

The fear of the wrath of God has been a stumbling block to progress. ~ Joseph Lewis

I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail for replacement in as many decades ~ Aldo Leopond

The temptation to second-guess is strong. But I must remember one thing.
Life is simple.
You are healthy or you are sick. You are faithful to your wife or you aren't. You are alive or you are dead.
I am alive. ~ Greg Iles

He thought he would light the fire when he got inside, and make himself some breakfast, just to pass away the time; but he did not seem able to handle anything from a scuttleful of coals to a teaspoon without dropping it or falling over it, and making such a noise that he was in mortal fear that it would wake Mrs. G. up, and that she would think it was burglars and open the window and call "Police!" and then these two detectives would rush in and handcuff him, and march him off to the police-court. He was in a morbidly nervous state by this time, and he pictured the trial, and his trying to explain the circumstances to the jury, and nobody believing him, and his being sentenced to twenty years' penal servitude, and his mother dying of a broken heart. So he gave up trying to get breakfast, and wrapped himself up in his overcoat and sat in the easy-chair till Mrs. G came down at half-past seven. ~ Jerome K. Jerome

Rules were invented by elders so they could get to bed early. Men who speak endlessly on authority only prove they have none. And kings who make speeches about submission only betray twin fears in their hearts: they are not certain they are really true leaders, sent of God. And they live in mortal fear of a rebellion...
No... authority from God is not afraid of challenges, makes no defense, and cares not one whit if it must be dethroned. ~ Gene Edwards

Creative people live in mortal fear of tossing their seed on barren ground. ~ Kate Alcott

Whatever junk novels were, however they worked, they were close to therapy, and airports were close to therapy. They both belonged to the culture of the waiting room. Piped music, the language of calming suasion. Come this way--yes, the flight attendant will see you now. Airports, junk novels: they were taking your mind off mortal fear. ~ Martin Amis

It was an archaic expression of friendship by an undisciplined man in an age when most men seemed in mortal fear of being mistaken for pansies for even a split second. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Thus a man will sometimes suffer half an hour of mortal fear with a robber, but once the knife is finally at his throat, even fear vanishes. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

All right, don't scoff, mock or disbelieve: we live in mortal fear of not-quite-twins. ~ Kamila Shamsie

Mortal fear is the ghetto of the human soul, to be free of it something like the psychic equivalent of inheriting a hundred million dollars. ~ Ben Fountain

Thinking like a Mountain
We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes - something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters' paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.…I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades. So also with cows. The cowman who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolf's job of trimming the herd to fit the range. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea. ~ Aldo Leopold

You must learn what to fear and what not to fear. ~ Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The phobic has no other object than the abject. But that word, "fear"- a fluid haze an elusive clamminess- no sooner has it cropped up than it shades off like a mirage and permeates all words of the language with nonexistence, with a hallucinatory, ghostly glimmer. Thus, fear having been bracketed, discourse will seem tenable only if it ceaselessly confront that otherness, a burden both repellent and repelled, a deep well of memory that is unapproachable and intimate: the abject. ~ Julia Kristeva

The intelligence displayed by many dumb animals approaches so closely to human intelligence that it is a mystery. The animals see and hear and love and fear and suffer. They use their organs far more faithfully than many human beings use theirs. They manifest sympathy and tenderness toward their companions in suffering. Many animals show an affection for those who have charge of them, far superior to the affection shown by some of the human race. They form attachments for man which are not broken without great suffering to them. ~ Ellen G. White

I lifted my chin, meeting the eyes of the woman who'd become the living embodiment of my totem, my bright phoenix, and forged ahead. "But I live with the wrong choices, the paths untraveled, the lives lost, and I never hold those regrets against anyone but myself. So, if you have some reason that you think I'll regret getting in that car or not getting in that car, then tell me. Because I won't have anything between us, either." My mind flashed to an hourglass, grains of sand trickling away, carrying my life with them. "At least, nothing that we can avoid...like the fear of unspoken words. ~ Marie Castle

A warrior fears the battle he missed. More than any fight he can make his own, he fears the fight that's gone, that ended without him, that no feat of arms can change. ~ Mark Lawrence

He that is down needs fear no fall. ~ John Bunyan

A most insidious form of fear is that which masquerades as common sense or even wisdom, condemning as foolish, reckless, insignificant or futile the small, daily acts of courage which help to preserve man's self-respect and inherent human dignity. ~ Aung San Suu Kyi

I love her beauty, but I fear her mind. ~ Stendhal

Fear is beside the point when you're faced with the thing you fear. ~ Andrea Cremer

The terror that took Baru came from the deepest part of her soul. It was a terror particular to her, a fundamental concern - the apocalyptic possibility that the world simply did not permit plans, that it worked in chaotic and unmasterable ways, that one single stroke of fortune, one well-aimed bowshot by a man she had never met, could bring total disaster. The fear that the basic logic she used to negotiate the world was a lie. Or, worse, that she herself could not plan: that she was as blind as a child, too limited and self-deceptive to integrate the necessary information, and that when the reckoning between her model and the pure asymbolic fact of the world came, the world would devour her like a cuttlefish snapping up bait. ~ Seth Dickinson

There was a direct, intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account. ~ George Orwell

There are many faces to war. There is the face of courage, of bravery, of fellowship.There is the face of fear. Above all, there is love of country. ~ Barbara Boxer

Cruelty and fear are man-made, and men who perpetrate them are ruled by them. Such men are only half-made things. They live out their unresolved lives by attempting to destroy anything that challenges the void in themselves. A child holds a blanket over its face in fear. A fear-filled man transposes his inadequacy onto another. He blames them, hates them, and hopes to rid himself of his unloved self by hurting, or worse, destroying them. ~ Brian Keenan

The texts' representation of homosexuality thus overturn the Christian fundamentalist accusation that it is sinful because it is not procreative. As the boys produce new beings through gay sex, they empower both themselves and the site of their desire, the anus. The heterosexual fear of the anus as a "grave", as death, and as nothingness, is challenged and transformed into a queer celebration of its role as a site of desire and alternate reproduction. ~ Jamie Russell

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

This is why sociopaths cling on to people they have used. They do not like ending relationships, although they know they are hurting and ruining the other person. When a sociopath refuses to break up with a lover, it does not mean that he cannot live without the person or that he truly cares. His refusal to let go stems from his fear of losing control over the other person and the fear of being exposed. ~ Clarence T. Rivers

It was no coincidence, that fear could move a person to extremes, just as seamlessly as love. They were the conjoined twins of emotion: If you didn't know what was at stake to lose, you had nothing to fight for. ~ Jodi Picoult

I love you, Francesca," Gabriel told her solemnly. "I cannot express in words what you are to me."
She smiled up at him. "You do a fairly good job expressing yourself."
His eyebrow shot up. "Fairly good?"
"I think your ego is already far too large. I am not about to call you the greatest lover in the world."
His hand cupped her soft breast, his thumb stroking small caresses over her taut nipple. "But you would if it were not for fear of my ego? ~ Christine Feehan

Hold my hand in yours, and we will not fear what hands like ours can do. ~ Anonymous

This is the end of Prime Minister, Cardinal Archbishop Lomenie de Brienne. Flimsier mortal was seldom fated to do as weighty a mischief; to have a life as despicable-envied, an exit as frightful. Fired, as the phrase is, with ambition: blown, like a kindled rag, the sport of winds, not this way, not that way, but of all ways, straight towards such a powder-mine, - which he kindled! Let us pity the hapless Lomenie; and forgive him; and, as soon as possible, forget him. ~ Thomas Carlyle

To live is to be vulnerable. To love is to fear. And the one who is not afraid--that person is calm like a boa constrictor and cannot love. ~ Marina Dyachenko

The Swimming Pool

All around the apt. swimming pool
the boys stare at the girls
and the girls look everywhere but the opposite
or down or up. It is
as it was a thousand years ago: the fat
boy has it hardest, he
takes the sneers,
prefers the winter so he can wear
his heavy pants and sweater.
Today, he's here with the others.
Better they are cruel to him in his presence
than out. Of the five here now (three boys,
two girls) one is fat, three cruel,
and one, a girl, wavers to the side,
all the world tearing at her.
As yet she has no breasts
(her friend does) and were it not
for the forlorn fat boy whom she joins
in taunting, she could not bear her terror,
which is the terror
of being him. Does it make her happy
that she has no need, right now, of ingratiation,
of acting fool to salve
her loneliness? She doesn't seem
so happy. She is like
the lower middle class, that fatal group
handed crumbs so they can drop a few
down lower, to the poor, so they won't kill
the rich. All around
the apt. swimming pool
there is what's everywhere: forsakenness
and fear, a disdain for those beneath us
rather than a rage
against the ones above: the exploiters,
the oblivious and unabashedly cruel. ~ Thomas Lux

I have no fear of death, except I hate waiting for it. ~ Doug Stanhope

business is neither a burden to bear nor a battle to win, but a chance to outgrow fear by helping others outgrow theirs. This ~ Devdutt Pattanaik

Pride was my wilderness, and the demon that led me there was fear. ~ Margaret Laurence

FURIES:
Over the beast doomed to the fire
this is the chant, scatter of wits,
frenzy and fear, hurting the heart,
song of the Furies
binding brain and blighting blood
in its stringless melody. ~ Aeschylus

My name is Ferrum. I was the first, born of the forges, when mankind first began to experiment with iron. I rose from their imagination, from their ambition to conquer the world with a metal that could slice through bronze like paper. I was there when the world started to shift, when humans took their first steps out of the Dark Ages into civilization. For many years, I thought I was alone. But mankind is never satisfied. Others came, risen from these dreams of a new world ... Then, with the invention of computers, the gremlins came, and the bugs. Given life by the fear of monsters lurking in machines, these were more chaotic than the other fey, violent and destructive. They spread to every part of the world. As technology became a driving force in every country, powerful new fey rose into existence. Virus. Glitch. And Machina, the most powerful of all. ~ Julie Kagawa

Vanity, fear, desire, competition - all such distortions within our own egos - condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions to our own egos the corresponding distortions in the egos of others, and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other. ~ Tennessee Williams

What an odd creature you are, Bernard, with your constant fear of death! Do you never have a feeling, as I do, of utter futility? No? Doesn't it occur to you that the sort of life people like us lead is remarkably like death? ~ Francois Mauriac

This is the only sun that you will ever see again. But a millennium of nights will be yours to see light as no mortal has ever seen it, to snatch from the distant stars as if you were Prometheus an endless illumination by which to understand all things. ~ Anne Rice

Death is not an evil, because it frees us from all evils, and while it takes away good things, it takes away also the desire for them. Old age is the supreme evil, because it deprives us of all pleasures, leaving us only the appetite for them, and it brings with it all sufferings. Nevertheless, we fear death, and we desire old age. ~ Giacomo Leopardi

The agnostic does not simply say, "l do not know." He goes another step, and he says, with great emphasis, that you do not know. He insists that you are trading on the ignorance of others, and on the fear of others. He is not satisfied with saying that you do not know,
he demonstrates that you do not know, and he drives you from the field of fact
he drives you from the realm of reason
he drives you from the light, into the darkness of conjecture
into the world of dreams and shadows, and he compels you to say, at last, that your faith has no foundation in fact. ~ Robert G. Ingersoll

Don't fear change. It's always for the best. ~ Richard Bach