Quotes about fear

“You're an idiot,” Lucy said. “Just ’cause you don’t understand them don’t mean they’re out to get you.”

Men see what they are most afraid of.

"The Greeks were different. They had a passion for order and symmetry, much like the Romans, but they knew how foolish it was to deny the unseen world, the old gods. Emotion, darkness, barbarism." He looked at the ceiling for a moment, his face almost troubled. "Do you remember what we were speaking of earlier, of how bloody, terrible things are sometimes the most beautiful?" he said. "It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown back, throat to the stars, 'more like deer than human being.' To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn."

The speculators deadly enemies are: Ignorance, greed, fear and hope. All the statute books in the world and all the rules of all the Exchanges on earth cannot eliminate these from the human animal.

I think most people would rather face the light of a real enemy than the darkness of their imagined fears. (p. 249)

Fear tends to come from ignorance. Once I knew what the problem was, it was just a problem, nothing to fear.

So this is the difference between telling a story and being in one, he thought numbly, the fear.

“I can’t imagine,” said Dupre, “a better way to unnerve people than to tell them there’s no cause for alarm.”

That afternoon I came to understand that one of the deepest purposes of intellectual sophistication is to provide distance between us and our most disturbing personal truths and gnawing fears.

Whatever solace the Christian faith could give was balanced by the anxiety it generated.

Annalise’s fantasies involve disappearance. She catastrophizes all the time, and makes things worse than they need to be by doing so.

How is it appropriate to feel? she thought. Only humans dread. Dread is appropriate to nothing. It’s the surplus of animal fear, it’s never indicated, it’s nothing but itself.