This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Charles Dickens, fully Charles John Huffam Dickens
The suspense - the fearful, acute suspense, of standing idly by while the life of one we dearly love is trembling in the balance; the racking thoughts that crowd upon the mind and make the heart beat violently, and the breath come thick; the desperate anxiety "to be doing something" to relieve the pain or lessen the danger which we have no power to alleviate; and the sinking of soul which the sad sense of our helplessness produces, what tortures can equal these, and what reflections or efforts can, in the full tide and fever of time, allay them.
Anxiety | Anxiety | Balance | Danger | Heart | Life | Life | Love | Mind | Pain | Power | Sense | Soul | Suspense | Time | Danger |
Dale Carnegie, originally spelled Dale Carnegey
One of the most appalling comments on our present way of life is that half of all the beds in our hospitals are reserved for patients with nervous and mental troubles, patients who have collapsed under the crushing burden of accumulated yesterdays and fearful tomorrows. Yet a vast majority of those people would be walking the streets today, leading happy, useful lives, if they had only heeded the words of Jesus: "Have no anxiety about the morrow"; or the words of Sir William Osler; "Live in day-tight compartments.
Anxiety | Anxiety | Day | Happy | Life | Life | Majority | People | Present | Troubles | Words |
Every tomorrow has two handles. We can take hold of it with the handle of anxiety or the handle of faith. We should live for the future, and yet should find our life in the fidelities of the present; the last is only the method of the first.
Anxiety | Anxiety | Faith | Future | Life | Life | Method | Present | Tomorrow |
Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
Numerous studies show that eradicating anxiety and stress and their accompanying cortisol would, in itself, greatly increase longevity and decrease illness.
Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
Infants instinctively resist enculturation because they intuitively sense in it a denial of life that robs us of our spirit and our loving, willing, thinking, being. Resistance is futile. Without exception, these cultural techniques involve carefully masked threats that prey upon the child’s rapidly learned fear of pain, harm, or deprivation, and more primal anxiety over separation or alienation from parent, caregiver, or society. “Do this or you will suffer the consequences.” This threat, in fact, underlies every facet of our life from our first potty training through university exams.
Alienation | Anxiety | Anxiety | Consequences | Fear | Harm | Life | Life | Pain | Sense | Society | Spirit | Thinking | Training | Will |
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
When attention is not focused on a goal, the mind typically begins to be filled by disjointed and depressing thoughts. The normal condition of the mind is chaos. Only when involved in a goal-directed activity does it acquire order and positive moods... Boredom directs us to seek new challenges, while anxiety urges us to develop new skills; the net result is that, in order to avoid such negative feelings, a person is forded to grow in complexity.
Rollo May, fully Rollo Reese May
Anxiety is essential to the human condition. The confrontation with anxiety can relieve us from boredom, sharpen the sensitivity and assure the presence of tension that is necessary to preserve human existence.
Simone de Beauvoir, fully Simone-Ernestine-Lucie-Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir
Society cares about the individual only in so far as he is profitable. The young know this. Their anxiety as they enter in upon social life matches the anguish of the old as they are excluded from it.
Anxiety | Anxiety | Individual | Life | Life | Society | Old |
Sosan Zenji, aka Chien-chih Seng-Tsan or Ch'an Seng-ts'an
One thing, all things: move along and intermingle, without distinction. To live in this realization is to be without anxiety about nonperfection. To live in this faith is the road to nonduality, because the nondual is one with the trusting mind.
Anxiety | Anxiety | Distinction | Faith | Mind |
Do not concern yourself with anxiety for the shadow of a great name.
Pride is a reaction formation to the feeling of inferiority, of the experience of powerlessness, of not being worthy enough of love. Only anxiety compels a person to lose moderation and to want to be more than he is. Out of fear of being an animal, he has to become an angel. Out of fear of being a nothing, a god. Anxiety never allows him to be simply a man.
Anxiety | Anxiety | Enough | Experience | Fear | Moderation | Moderation |
Fyodor Dostoevsky, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski
Man, so long as he remains free, has no more constant and agonizing anxiety than find as quickly as possible someone to worship.
The death anxiety of many people is fueled ... by disappointment at never having fulfilled their potential. Many people are in despair because their dreams didn't come true, and they despair even more that they did not make them come true. A focus on this deep dissatisfaction is often the starting point in overcoming death anxiety.
Anxiety | Anxiety | Death | Despair | Dreams | Focus | People |