This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Fear betrays unworthy souls." - Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL
"Happy the man who has learned the cause of things and has put under his feet all fear, inexorable fate, and the noisy strife of the hell of greed." - Virgil, also Vergil, fully Publius Vergilius Maro NULL
"If we work upon marble, it will perish; if we work upon bronze, time will efface it; if we build temples, they will crumble into dust; but if we work upon immortal souls, if we imbue them with just principles of action, with fear of wrong and love of right, we engrave on those tables something which no time can obliterate, and which will brighten and brighten through all eternity." - Daniel Webster
"Fear of God builds churches but love of God builds men." - Louis O. Williams
"We have nothing to fear but sanity itself." - Robin Williams, fully Robin McLaurin Williams
"One should seek virtue for its own sake and not from hope or fear, or any external motive. It is in virtue that happiness consists, for virtue is the state of mind which tends to make the whole of life harmonious." - Zeno of Citium NULL
"Virtue is worth seeking for its own sake, and not from hope or fear or any external motive." - Zeno of Citium NULL
"I believe that courage is all too often mistakenly seen as the absence of fear... Courage is seeing your fear, in a realistic perspective, defining it, considering alternatives and choosing to function in spite of risks." - Leonard M. Zunin
"There are those who are fearful to be alone with themselves. They run with the crowd not out of love for others but out of fear to remain alone with themselves, terrified lest they hear the voice of their own spirit, or fearful of remaining alone with their own void." - Morris Adler
"One butcher does not fear many sheep." - Alexander The Great NULL
"While an open mind is priceless, it is priceless only when its owner has the courage to make a final decision which closes the mind for action after the process of viewing all sides of the question has been completed. Failure to make a decision after due consideration of all the facts will quickly brand a man unfit for a position of responsibility. Not all of your decisions will be correct. None of us is perfect. But if you get into the habit of making decisions, experience will develop your judgment to a point where more and more of your decisions will be right. After all, it is better to be right 51 percent of the time and get something done, than it is to get nothing done because you fear to reach a decision." - H. W. Andrews
"Only he is free who cultivates his own thoughts... and strives without fear of man to do justice to them." - Berthold Auerbach
"It is with the desire for peace that wars are waged, even by those who take pleasure in exercising their warlike nature in command and battle. And hence it is obvious that peace is the end sought for by war. For every man seeks peace by waging war, but no man seeks war by making peace... Even wicked men wage war to maintain the peace of their own circle, and wish that, if possible, all men belonged to them, that all men and things might serve but one head, and might, either through love or fear, yield themselves to peace with him!" - Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL
"The brave man is not he who feels no fear, for that would be stupid and irrational; but he whose noble soul subdues its fear, and bravely dares the danger nature shrinks from." - Joanna Baillie
"Cruelty and fear shake hands together." - Honoré de Balzac
"Four men climbed a mountain to see the view. The first wore new and expensive shoes which did not fit, and he complained constantly of his feet. The second had a greedy eye and kept wishing for this house or that farm. The third saw clouds and worried for fear it might rain. But the fourth really saw the marvelous view. His mountain top experience was looking away from the valley out of which he had just climbed to higher things." - Howard D. Bare
"Fear is an insidious virus. Given a breeding place in our minds, it will permeate the whole body of our work; it will eat away our spirit and block the forward path of our endeavors. Fear is the greatest enemy of progress... Fear is met and destroyed with courage." - James Ford Bell
"The lie of fear is the refuge of cowardice, and the lie of fraud, the device of the cheat. The inequalities of men and the lust of acquisition are a constant premium of lying." - Edward Bellamy
"There is nothing to fear but fear." - Ludwig Börne, fully Karl Ludwig Börne
"There is great beauty in going through life without anxiety or fear. Half our fears are baseless, and the other half discreditable." - Christian Nestell Bovee
"There is great beauty in going through life without anxiety or fear. Half our fears are baseless, and the other half discreditable." - John Christian Bovee
"Never fear spoiling children by making them too happy. Happiness is the atmosphere in which all good affections grow - the wholesome warmth necessary to make the heart-blood circulate healthily and freely; unhappiness - the chilling pressure which produces here an inflammation, there an excrescence and worst, of all, "the mind's green and yellow sickness" - ill temper." -
"Never fear to bring the sublimest motive to the smallest duty, and the most infinite comfort to the smallest trouble." - Phillips Brooks
"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
"We must laugh before we are happy, for fear of dying without having laughed at all." - Jean de La Bruyère
"The most drastic and usually the most effective remedy for fear is direct action." - William Burnham
"Any path is only a path. There is no affront to yourself or others in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you to do. But your decision to keep on the path or to leave it must be free of fear and ambition. I warn you, look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself and yourself alone one question. It is this: Does the path have a heart? Does this path have a heart is the only question. If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use." -
"I extend the circle of real religion very widely. Many men fear God, and love God, and have sincere desire to serve him, whose views of religious truth are very imperfect, and in some points utterly false. But may not many such persons have a state of heart acceptable before God?" - Richard Cecil
"Despair is the offspring of fear; of laziness, and impatience; it argues a defect of spirit and resolution, and often of honesty too. I would not despair unless I saw my misfortune recorded in the book of fate; and signed and sealed by necessity." - Jeremy Collier
"Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate it; a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noise." - Cyril Connolly, fully Cyril Vernon Connolly
"There is no hate without fear. Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivises. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear is lurking. Thus we hate what threatens our person, our liberty, our privacy, our income, popularity, vanity and our dreams and plans for ourselves. If we can isolate this element in what we hate we may learn to cease from hating." - Cyril Connolly, fully Cyril Vernon Connolly
"We fear something before we hate it; a child who fears noises becomes a man who hates noise." - Cyril Connolly, fully Cyril Vernon Connolly
"Why fear tomorrow, timid heart? Why tread the future's way? We only need to do our part Today, dear child, today. The past is written! Close the book On pages sad and gay; Within the future do not look, But live today-today. "Tis this one hour that God has given; His now we must obey; And it will make our earth his heaven To live today-today." - Lydia Avery Coonley Ward
"When we abandon the thought of immortality we at least have cast out fear. We gain a certain dignity and self-respect. We regard our fellow travelers as companions in the pleasures and tribulations of life... We gain kinship with the world." - Clarence Darrow, fully Clarence Seward Darrow
"It is good... to try in imagination to give to any one species an advantage over another. Probably in no single instance should we know what to do. This ought to convince us of our ignorance on the mutual relations of all organic beings; a conviction as necessary as it is difficult to acquire. All that we can do, is to keep steadily in mind that each organic being is striving to increase in a geometrical ration; that each at some period of its life, during some season of the year, during each generation or at intervals, has to struggle for life and to suffer great destruction. When we reflect on this struggle, we may console ourselves with the full belief, that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply." - Charles Darwin, fully Charles Robert Darwin
"Anticipate our sorrows? 'Tis like those that die for fear of death." - John Denham, fully Sir John Denham
"If a man harbors any sort of fear, it percolates through all his thinking, damages his personality, makes him landlord to a ghost." - Lloyd C. Douglas, fully Lloyd Cassel Douglas, born Doya C. Douglas
"An Arab folk tale relates that Pestilence once met a caravan upon the desert way to Baghdad. "Why," asked the Arab chief, "must you hasten to Baghdad?" "To take five thousand lives." Pestilence replied. Upon the way back to the City of the Caliphs, Pestilence and the caravan met again. "You deceived me," the chief said angrily. "instead of five thousand lives you took fifty thousand." "Nay," said Pestilence. "Five thousand and not one more. It was Fear who killed the rest."" - Maurice Duhamel, pen name of Maurice Bourgeaux
"Fear builds prison walls around a man and bars him in with dreads, anxieties and timid doubts. Faith is the great liberator from prison walls. Fear paralyzes, faith empowers; fear disheartens, faith encourages, fear sickens, faith heals; fear puts hopelessness at the heart of life, while faith sees beyond the horizon and rejoices in its God." - Lewis L. Dunnington
"Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice; but for those who love, Time is Eternity." - Henry Van Dyke, fully Henry Jackson Van Dyke
"It was the experience of mystery - even if mixed with fear - that engendered religion." - Albert Einstein
"The development from a religion of fear to moral religion is a great step in a nation's life." - Albert Einstein
"The fear of losing one's job has kept education in America fifty years behind its possible improvement." - Charles W. Eliot