Fear Quotes

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.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

The only thing to fear is fear itself.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased by tales, so is the other.

Sir Francis Bacon, "Of Death".

Fear is the tax that conscience pays to guilt.

George Sewell

Security is mostly superstition. It does not exist in nature Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.

Hellen Kelle

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.... You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.

Eleanor Rosevelt

It made our hair stand up in panic fear.

Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus

Fear makes us feel our humanity.

Benjamin Disraeli

We can easily become as much slaves to precaution as we can to fear. Although we can never rivet our fortune so tight as to make it impregnible, we may by our excessive prudence squeeze out of the life that we are guarding so anxiously all the adventurous quality that makes it worth living.

Randolph Bourne

Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Fear not, provided you fear but if you fear not, then fear.

Blaise Pascal

Have no fear of perfection - - You will never reach it.

Salvador Dali

The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - Fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants beyond everything else is safety.

H. L. Mencken

Since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved.

Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will.

James Stephens

Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.

John F. Kennedy

I do not fear computers. I fear lack of them.

Isaac Asimov

Scorching my seared heart with a pain, not hell shall make me fear again.

Edgar Allan Poe, Tamerlane, Part II

Why, you may take the most gallant sailor, the most intrepid airman or the most audacious soldier, put them at a table together - what do you get? The sum of all fears.

Winston Churchill, The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy

Never let the fear of striking out get in your way.

Babe Ruth

The only thing I am afraid of is fear.

Arthur Wellesley Wellington

The whole secret of existence is to have no fear. Never fear what will become of you, depend on no one. Only the moment you reject all help are you freed.

Buddha

Do not fear going forward slowly; fear only to stand still.

Chinese Prove

To him who is in fear everything rustles.

Sophocles, Acrisius

No matter how hard you work for success if your thought is saturated with the fear of failure, it will kill your efforts, neutralize your endeavors and make success impossible.

Baudjuin

We have, I fear, confused power with greatness.

Stewart L. Udall, commencement address, Dartmouth College, June 13, 1965

Let them hate so long as they fear.

Lucius Accius

The heart never grows better by age I fear rather worse always harder. A young liar will be an old one, and a young knave will only be a greater knave as he grows older.

Philip Dormer Stanhope Chesterfield

The more I traveled the more I realized that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends.

Shirley MacLaine

Everyone believes very easily whatever they fear or desire.

Jean de La Fontaine

He who fears something gives it power over him.

Moorish Prove

Fear secretes acids; but love and trust are sweet juices.

Henry Ward Beeche

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Harper Lee

So full of artless jealousy is guilt, It spills itself in fearing to be spilt.

William Shakespeare, "Hamlet", Act 4 scene 5

Do what you fear and fear disappears.

David Schwartz

Hope and fear are inseparable. There is no hope without fear, nor any fear without hope.

La Rochefoucauld

Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for 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