Quotes about Anxiety

To each of man's ages the Lord gives its own anxieties.

The psychological condition of fear is divorced from any concrete and true immediate danger. It comes in many forms: unease, worry, anxiety, nervousness, tension, dread, phobia, and so on. This kind of psychological fear is always of something that might happen, not of something that is happening now.

If we can recognize that change and uncertainty are basic principles, we can greet the future and the transformation we are undergoing with the understanding that we do not know enough to be pessimistic.

Most people believe only in degrees of jeopardy and live in degrees of greater and lesser anxiety, but never in true relaxation. The assurance of safety is a vital and wonderful resources that we need to share with one another.

Nagasaki destroyed by the magic of science is the nearest man has yet approached to the realization of dreams that even during the safe immobility of sleep are accustomed to develop into nightmares of anxiety.

"When you were looking for the big fight, the moment that you thought i would knock everything over, nothing much happened at all." (written from perspective of the character Cecilia in The Patron Saint of Liars)

People live their lives, constantly surrounded by anxiety. if they live long before dying, they end up in senility, worn out by concerns: a terrible fate! The body is treated in a very harsh fashion. Courageous men are seen by everyone under Heaven as worthy, but this doesn't preserve them from death. I am not sure I know whether this is sensible or not.

The experience of separateness arouses anxiety; it is, indeed, the source of all anxiety.

And yet, within her anxiety, secured there like a gemstone, she carries the cool and curious power of occasionally being able to see the world vividly.  Clarity bursts upon her a spray of little stars.  She understands this, and thinks of it as one of the tricks of consciousness; there is something almost luxurious about it..  The narrative maze opens and permits her to pass through.  She may be crowded out of her own life -- she knows this for a fact and has always know it -- but she possesses, as a compensatory gift, the startling ability to draft alternative versions.

But this is human life: the war, the deeds, the disappointmrent, the anxiety.  Imaginations struggles, far to nigh, all human; bearing in themselves this good, that they are still the air, the subtle food, to make us feel existence.  This is the "goal" of the soul path - to feel existence; not to overcome lifes struggles and anxieties, but to know life first hand, to exist fully in context.

A treasured friendship can replace regret and hatred and heal the old wounds of the mind. Such a friendship can provide sincere help, consolation and encouragement. These can be magic weapons for eliminating grief and anxiety. When your life is free from anxiety and grief, you will find food tasty, sleep restful and recreation enjoyable.'

According to Buddhism, the deepest, most pernicious erroneous view held by sentient beings is the view that a permanent, eternal, immutable, independent self exists.  There is not such self, and deep down we know that.  This makes us anxious, since it entails that no self or identity endures forever.  In order to assuage that anxiety, we attempt to construct a self, to fill the anxious void, to do something enduring.  The projection of cognitive objects for appropriation is consciousness's main tool for this construction.  If I own things (ideas, theories, identities, material objects), then "I am."  If there are permanent objects that I can possess, then I too must be permanent.  If I can be identified with something permanent, the I too must have a permanent identity.  To undermine this desperate and erroneous appropriative grasping, Yogacara texts say: Negate the object , and the self is also negated.

But man has other needs as well: emotional needs. These, too, are few, but every bit as important as his physical requirements, yet not so simple. If they aren't met, they can be as devastating as physical hunger, as uncomfortable as a lack of shelter, as incapacitating as thirst. The frustration, isolation and anxiety brought about by unmet emotional needs can, like physical privation, produce death or a degree of living death - neurosis and psychosis.

He decided then that he would love her forever no matter what came to pass. It was not so much a matter of deciding as accepting the inevitability of it. It made him feel better, though he felt perturbed, too, worried that this kiss was wrong. But from his point of view, at fourteen years old, their love was entirely unavoidable. It had started on the day they’d clung to his glass box and kissed in the sea, and now it must go on forever. He felt certain of this.

The word secure comes from two small Latin words: se meaning "without" and cure meaning "care"--being without care, freedom from anxiety. Victor Hugo articulates this very special sense in this lovely couplet:

"Be like the bird
That pausing in her flight
While on boughs too slight
Feels them give way
Beneath her, and yet sings,
Knowing that she hath wings."

The physical symptoms of fight or flight are what the human body has learned over thousands of years to operate efficiently and at the highest level…anxiety is a cognitive interpretation of that physical response.

The awakened sages call a person wise when all his undertakings are free from anxiety about results.

Men are anxious to improve their circumstances, but are unwilling to improve themselves.

The components of anxiety, stress, fear, and anger do not exist independently of you in the world. They simply do not exist in the physical world, even though we talk about them as if they do.

If you're anxious for to shine in the high aesthetic line As a man of culture rare, You must get up all the germs of the transcendental terms And plant them everywhere. You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases Of your complicated state of mind, The meaning doesn't matter if it's only idle chatter Of a transendental kind.

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations is an admirable work, and I studied it intently. The quotations when engraved upon the memory give you good thoughts. They also make you anxious to read the authors and look for more.

There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one's means of livelihood. . . . Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.

April O fair mid-spring, besung so oft and oft, How can I praise thy loveliness enow? Thy sun that burns not, and thy breezes soft That o'er the blossoms of the orchard blow, The thousand things that 'neath the young leaves grow, The hopes and chances of the growing year, Winter forgotten long, and summer near. When summer brings the lily and the rose, She brings us fear-her very death she brings Hid in her anxious heart, the forge of woes; And, dull with fear, no more the mavis sings. But thou! thou diest not, but thy fresh life clings About the fainting autumn's sweet decay, When in the earth the hopeful seed they lay. Ah! life of all the year, why yet do I, Amid thy snowy blossoms' fragrant drift, Still long for that which never draweth nigh, Striving my pleasure from my pain to sift, Some weight from off my fluttering mirth to lift? - Now, when far bells are ringing "Come again, Come back, past years! why will ye pass in vain?"

In positive terms, we can state that psychological maturity entails finding greater satisfaction in giving than in receiving; having a capacity to form satisfying and permanent loyalties; being primarily a creative, contributing person; having learned to profit from experience; having a freedom from fear (anxiety) with a resulting true serenity and not a pseudo absence of tension; and accepting and making the most of unchangeable reality when it confronts one.

There is but one straight road to success, and that is merit. The man who is successful is the man who is useful. Capacity never lacks opportunity. It can not remain undiscovered, because it is sought by too many anxious to use it.

Both Arthur Ashe and Billie Jean King used these phrases ("playing out of one's mind," or "over one's head") to describe their performances while winning tghe finals at Wimbledon in 1975. . . . The player loses himself in the action, continually breaki g the false limits placed on is potential. Awareness becomes acutely heightened, while analysis, anxiety and self-conscious thought are compoletly forgotten. Enjoyment is at a peak - pure and unspoiled.

It's not a single idea, but many ideas and attitudes, including a reverence for nature and a preference for country life; a desire for maximum personal self-reliance and creative leisure; a concern for family nurture and community cohesion; a certain hostility toward luxury; a belief that the primary reward of work should be well-being rather than money; a certain nostalgia for the supposed simplicities of the past and an anxiety about the technological and bureaucratic complexities of the present and the future; and a taste for the plain and functional.

A man anxious to tell a dirty story asked, "Are there any ladies present?" Ulysses S. Grant spoke up and replied, "There are no ladies present, but there are gentlemen."

Anxiety is the rust of life, destroying its brightness and weakening its power. A childlike and abiding trust in Providence is its best preventive and remedy.

No man made great by death offers more hope to lowly pride than does Abraham Lincoln; for while living he was himself so simple as often to be dubbed a fool. Foolish he was, they said, in losing his youthful heart to a grave and living his life on married patience; foolish in pitting his homely ignorance against Douglas, brilliant, courtly, and urbane; foolish in setting himself to do the right in a world where the day goes mostly to the strong; foolish in dreaming of freedom for a long-suffering folk whom the North is as anxious to keep out as the South was to keep down; foolish in choosing the silent Grant to lead to victory the hesitant armies of the North; foolish, finally, in presuming that government for the people must be government of the people and by the people. Foolish many said; foolish many, many believed. This Lincoln, whom so many living friends and foes alike deemed foolish, hid his bitterness in laughter; fed his sympathy on solitude; and met recurring disaster with whimsicality to muffle the murmur of a bleeding heart. Out of the tragic sense of life he pitied where others blamed; bowed his own shoulders with the woes of the weak; endured humanely his little day of chance power; and won through death what life disdains to bestow upon such simple souls - lasting peace and everlasting glory.