Great Throughts Treasury

"He who is too much afraid of being duped has lost the power of being magnanimous." -

"Even the best of men get knocked down many times in a lifetime. Occasional knocks aren't anything to be afraid of. In fact, they make the game of life interesting; they are the hazards and the bunkers and sandtraps that force us to keep our mind on the game and play our best." -

"Try to become as great as you can. Some people are afraid to accomplish because they might make mistakes and those mistakes will be more serious than if they remained simple. This is not valid reasoning. Each person is obligated to develop himself to the best of his ability. The smallest person has potential for greatness if he utilizes all that is within him." - Yosef Leib Bloch, fully R' Yosef Yehudah Leib Bloch

"We hope to grow old, and yet we fear old age; that is, we are willing to live, and afraid to die." - Jean de La Bruyère

"Aversion from reproof is not wise. It is a mark of a little mind. A great man can afford to lose; a little, insignificant fellow is afraid of being snuffed out." - Richard Cecil

"Everyone is really responsible to all men for all men and for everything... Remember particularly that you cannot be a judge of anyone. For no one can judge a criminal, until he recognizes that he is just such a criminal as the man standing before him, and that he perhaps is more than all men to blame for the crime. When he understands that, he will be able to be a judge... But there are other 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, fully Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky or Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevski

"When man knows how to live dangerously, he is not afraid to die. When he is not afraid to die, he is, strangely, free to live. When he is free to live, he can become bold, courageous, self-reliant." -

"Some people are so afraid to die that they never begin to live." - Henry Van Dyke, fully Henry Jackson Van Dyke

"A man who is willing to accept restriction and barriers and is not afraid of them is free. A man who does nothing but fight restrictions and barriers will usually be trapped." - L. Ron Hubbard, fully Lafayette Ron Hubbard

"Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create that fact." - William James

"Never be afraid to challenge an axiom." - A. E. Mander, fully Alfred Ernest Mander

"Fear is like fire: If controlled it will help you; if uncontrolled, it will rise up and destroy you. Men's actions depend a great deal upon fear. We do things either because we enjoy doing them or because we are afraid not to do them. This sort of fear has not relation to physical or moral courage. It is inspired by the knowledge that we are not adequately prepared to face the future and the events it may bring - poverty perhaps, or injury, or death." - John F. Milburn

"Success in business does not depend upon genius. Any young man of ordinary intelligence who is normally sound and not afraid to work should succeed in spite of obstacles and handicaps if he plays the game fairly and keeps everlastingly at it." - J. C. Penney, formally James Cash Penney

"Most men are afraid of a bad name, but few fear their consciences." - Pliny the Elder, full name Casus Plinius Secundus NULL

"Courage is doing what you're afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you're scared." -

"The one and only serious mistake is to be afraid of making mistakes." - Christopher A. Smart

"It is not easy to surround life with any circumstances in which youth will not be delightful; and I am afraid that, whether married or unmarried, we shall find the vesture of terrestrial existence more heavy and cumbrous the longer it is worn." - Richard Steele, fully Sir Richard Steele

"The minute you know that you are not afraid to die is the minute you begin to live." - H. F. White

"Is any man afraid of change? Why what can take place without change? What then is more pleasing or more suitable to the universal nature? And canst thou take a bath unless the wood undergoes a change? And canst thou be nourished, unless the food undergoes a change? And can anything else that is useful be accomplished without change? Dost thou not see then that for thyself also to change is just the same, and equally necessary for the universal nature?" - Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus

"The professors laugh at themselves, they laugh at life; they long ago abjured the bitch-goddess Success, and the best of them will fight for his scholastic ideals with a courage and persistence that would shame a soldier. The professor is not afraid of words like truth; in fact he is not afraid of words at all." - Catherine Bowen, née Catherine Shober Drinker

"We hope to grow old, yet we fear old age; that is, we are willing to live, and afraid to die." - Jean de La Bruyère

"It is death, and not what comes after death, that men are generally afraid of." - Samuel Butler

"Only paper flowers are afraid of the rain. We are not afraid of the noble rain of criticism because with it will flourish the magnificent garden of music." - Konstanin Dankevich or Dankevych

"It was said of one of the most intelligent men who ever lived in New England, that when asked how he came to know so much about everything, he replied, by constantly realizing my own ignorance, and never being afraid or ashamed to ask questions." - Tyron Edwards

"We must be afraid of neither poverty nor exile nor imprisonment; of fear itself only should we be afraid." -

"One of the greatest discoveries a man makes, one of his great surprises, is to find he can do what he was afraid he couldn't do." - Henry Ford

"It is pleasant to be transferred from an office where one is afraid of a sergeant-major into an office where one can intimidate generals, and perhaps this is why History is so attractive to the more timid among us. We can recover self-confidence by snubbing the dead." - E. M. Forster, fully Edward Morgan Forster

"We all know individuals who make their lives the exact realization of what they are afraid of." - Waldo Frank

"A minister, without boldness, is like a smooth file, a knife without an edge, a sentinel that is afraid to let off his gun. If men will be bold in sin, ministers must be bold to reprove." - William Gurnall

"People are afraid to think, or they don't know how. They fail to realize that, while emotions can't be surpressed, the mind can be strengthened. All over the world people are seeking peace of mind, but there can be no peace of mind without strength of mind." - Erich Gutkind

"O you who would learn the marvels of Love from the copybook of reason, I am afraid that you will never really see the point." - Hafiz, pen name of Shams-ud-din Muhammad NULL

"Nobody who is afraid of laughing, and heartily too, at his friend, can be said to have a true and thorough love for him." - Julius Charles Hare (1795-1855) and his brother Augustus William Hare

"What a man generally means when he says that he is not a politician I am afraid is this - that he has been all his life enjoying his political privileges and neglecting his political duties." - Hugh Price Hughes

"Men know that woman are an overmatch for them, and therefore they choose the weakest or the most ignorant. If they did not think so, they never could be afraid of women knowing as much as themselves." -

"Let us not be afraid of debate or dissent - let us encourage it. For if we should ever abandon these basic American traditions in the name of fighting Communism, what would it profit us to win the whole world when we have lost our soul?" - John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy

"A champion is afraid of losing; everyone else is afraid of winning." - Billy Jean King (née Moffitt)

"Modern man seems to be afraid of silence. We are conditioned by radio and television on which every minute must be filled with talking, or some kind of sound. We are stimulated by the American philosophy of keeping on the move all the time - busy, busy, busy. This tends to make us shallow. A person's life can be deepened tremendously by periods of silence, used in the constructive ways of meditation and prayer. Great personalities have spent much time in the silence of life." - Robert E. Lyon

"Education is a persistent dream often interrupted by the nightmare of a sobering actuality. We should not be afraid to dream, for today's dream of a better world may be tomorrow's reality." - Frederick Mayer

"God is a comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh." - H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

"Love is more afraid of change than destruction." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"I’m not afraid of facts, I welcome facts but a congeries of facts is not equivalent to an idea. This is the essential fallacy of the so-called “scientific” mind. People who mistake facts for ideas are incomplete thinkers, they are gossips." - Cynthia Ozick

"Education consists of being afraid at the right time." - Angelo Patri

"The inexperienced teacher, fearing his own ignorance, is afraid to admit it. Perhaps that courage only come when one knows to what extent ignorance is almost universal." -

"In our civilization men are afraid they will not be men enough, and women are afraid they might be considered only women." - Theodor Reik

"Conscience is the voice of the soul, the passions are the voice of the body. Is it astonishing that often these two languages contradict each other, and then to which must we listen? Too often reason deceives us; we have only to listen too much acquired the right of refusing to listen to it; but conscience never deceives us; it is the true guide of man; it is to man what instinct is to the body, which follows it, obeys nature, and never is afraid of going astray." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"We do that in our zeal our calmer moment would be afraid to answer." -

"What is death? Either a transition or an end. I am not afraid of coming to an end, this being the same as never having begun, nor of transition, for I shall never be in confinement quite so cramped anywhere else as I am here." -

"Research teaches a man to admit he is wrong and to be proud of the fact that he does so, rather than try with all his energy to defend an unsound plan because he is afraid that admission of error is a confession of weakness when rather it is a sign of strength." - H. E. Stocher

"Never be afraid of the moments - thus sings the voice of the ever-lasting." -

"This is what a father ought to be about: helping his son to form the habit of doing right on his own initiative, rather than because he's afraid of some serious consequence." - Terence, full Latin name Publius Terentius Afer NULL