Sunday, March 15, 2020 – Panic and Fear
There is no such thing as perpetual tranquility of mind while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense. ~ Thomas Hobbes
Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear. ~ Thomas Jefferson
The only hope I can see for the future depends on a wiser and braver use of the reason, not a panic flight from it. ~ F. L. Lucas
Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear. ~ Bertrand Russell
There’s nothing I’m afraid of like scared people. ~ Robert Frost
American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it. ~ Henry Adams
If you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you. ~ Calvin Coolidge
I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened. ~ Mark Twain
We experience moments absolutely free from worry. These brief respites are called panic. ~ Cullen Hightower
Panic is a sudden desertion of us, and a going over to the enemy of our imagination. ~ Christian Nestell Bovee
If I had my life to live over, I would perhaps have more actual troubles, but I’d have fewer imaginary ones. ~ Don Herold
Let us be of good cheer, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which will never happen. ~ James Russell Lowell
If you want to test your memory, try to recall what you were worrying about one year ago today. ~ E. Joseph Cossman
If you treat every situation as a life and death matter, you’ll die a lot of times. ~ Dean Smith
It only seems as if you are doing something when you’re worrying. ~ Lucy Maud Montgomery
You can never worry your way to enlightenment. ~ Terri Guillemets
When you suffer an attack of nerves you’re being attacked by the nervous system. What chance has a man got against a system? ~ Russell Hoban
I refuse to be burdened by vague worries. If something wants to worry me it will have to make itself clear. ~ Robert Brault
It’s a funny thing that when a man hasn’t anything on earth to worry about, he goes off and gets married. ~ Robert Frost
I worry that the person who thought up Muzak may be thinking up something else. ~ Lily Tomlin
There seems to be no lengths to which humorless people will not go to analyze humor. It seems to worry them. ~ Robert Benchley
We are, perhaps, uniquely among the earth’s creatures, the worrying animal. We worry away our lives. ~ Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail, 1979
Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. ~ Soren Kierkegaard
Our age knows nothing but reaction, and leaps from one extreme to another. ~ Reinhold Niebuhr
We are largely the playthings of our fears. To one, fear of the dark; to another, of physical pain; to a third, of public ridicule; to a fourth, of poverty; to a fifth, of loneliness… for all of us, our particular creature waits in ambush. ~ Horace Walpole
The only way to get rid of my fears is to make films about them. ~ Alfred Hitchcock
I will show you fear in a handful of dust. ~ T. S. Eliot
Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint, can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation. ~ Graham Greene
It is clear that all verbal structures with meaning are verbal imitations of that elusive psychological and physiological process known as thought, a process stumbling through emotional entanglements, sudden irrational convictions, involuntary gleams of insight, rationalized prejudices, and blocks of panic and inertia, finally to reach a completely incommunicable intuition. ~ Northrop Frye
They need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won’t be at peace unless they can latch on to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, and all the time it all flies by them and they know it and that too worries them no end. ~ Jack Kerouac
Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken. ~ Jack Kerouac
When one has too great a dread of what is impending, one feels some relief when the trouble has come. ~ Joseph Joubert
Worry is interest paid on trouble before it comes due. ~ William Ralph Inge
It ain’t no use putting up your umbrella till it rains. ~ Alice Caldwell Rice
I accept chaos. I am not sure whether it accepts me. I know some people are terrified of the bomb. But then some people are terrified to be seen carrying a Modern Screen magazine. Experience teaches us that silence terrifies people the most. ~ Bob Dylan
Anything scares me, anything scares anyone but really after all considering how dangerous everything is nothing is really very frightening. ~ Gertrude Stein
Fear of things invisible is the natural seed of that which everyone in himself calleth religion. ~ Thomas Hobbes
Fear is a darkroom where negatives develop. ~ Usman B. Asif
Fear can be headier than whiskey, once man has acquired a taste for it. ~ Donald Dowes
Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. ~ Ernest Hemingway
Love is what we were born with. Fear is what we learned here. ~ Marianne Williamson
Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate it; a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noise. ~ Cyril Connolly
My fear is my substance, and probably the best part of me. ~ Franz Kafka
Never be afraid to sit a while and think. ~ Lorraine Hansberry
I have never known any distress that an hour’s reading did not relieve. ~ Charles de Montesquieu
We fear things in proportion to our ignorance of them. ~ Christian Nestell Bovee
Find out what you’re afraid of and go live there. ~ Chuck Palahniuk
There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind. ~ Fyodor Dostoevsky
There are very few monsters that warrant the fear we have of them. ~ Andre Gide
I am convinced that it is not the fear of death, of our lives ending that haunts our sleep so much as the fear that, as far as the world is concerned, we might as well never have lived. ~ Harold Kushner
I have a fear of being boring. ~ Christian Bale
Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist, since half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it. ~ Bertrand Russell
We often pretend to fear what we really despise, and more often despise what we really fear. ~ Charles Caleb Colton
Fear tastes like a rusty knife and do not let her into your house. ~ John Cheever
Fear is excitement without breath. ~ Robert Heller
Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another’s fear. ~ Umberto Eco
Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear. ~ Albert Camus
My aim, then, was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. Fear is the beginning of wisdom. ~ William Tecumseh Sherman
There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man. ~ Patrick Rothfuss
Life is made of fear. Some people eat fear soup three times a day. Some people eat fear soup all the meals there are. I eat it sometimes. When they bring me fear soup to eat, I try not to eat it. I try to send it back. But sometimes I’m too afraid to and have to eat it anyway. ~ Martin Amis
The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. ~ Joseph Campbell
No human thing is of serious importance. ~ Plato, The Republic
Just Above Sunset 