Great Throughts Treasury

"I'm proof against that word failure. I've seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best." - George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans

"There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music." - George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans

"The fear of losing one's job has kept education in America fifty years behind its possible improvement." - Robert Eliot

"Happiness is not in strength, or wealth, or power, or all three. It lies in ourselves, in true freedom, in the conquest of every ignoble fear, in perfect self-government, in a power of contentment and peace, and the even flow of life, even in poverty, exile, disease, and the very valley of the shadow of death." -

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

"Where fear is, shame is." -

"Most people like praise. Many people have an unreasonable fear of administering it; it is part of the puritanical dislike for anything that is agreeable - to others. When it is really deserved, most people expand under it into richer and better selves." - Joseph Farrell, fully Joseph Patrick Farrell

"A man who experiences no genuine satisfaction in life does not want peace. People court war to escape meaninglessness and boredom, to be relieved of fear and frustration." -

"Fear is an acid which is pumped into one's atmosphere. It causes mental, moral and spiritual asphyxiation, and sometimes death; death to energy and all growth." - Horace Fletcher, nicknamed "The Great Masticator"

"There can be no security where there is fear." - Felix Frankfurter

"Money never made a man happy yet, nor will it. There is nothing in its nature to produce happiness. The more a man has, the more he wants. Instead of its filling a vacuum, it makes one. If it satisfies one want, it doubles and trebles that want another way. That was a true proverb of the wise man, rely upon it; "Better is little with the fear of the Lord, than great treasure, and trouble therewith."" - Benjamin Franklin

"This age of childhood, in which the sense of shame is unknown, seems a paradise when we look back upon it alter, and paradise itself is nothing but the mass-phantasy of the childhood of the individual. This is why in paradise men are naked and unashamed, until the moment arrives when shame and fear awaken; expulsion follows, and sexual life and cultural development begin." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

"When the law contradicts what most people regard as moral and proper, they will break the law - whether the law is enacted in the name of a noble ideal... or in the naked interest of one group at the expense of another. Only fear of punishment, not a sense of justice and morality, will lead people to obey the law." -

"Fear must not motivate a decision." - Simeon ben Gamaliel

"Fear gone, there can be no hatred." -

"Fear has its use, but cowardice has none. I may not put my finger into the jaws of a snake, but the very sight of the snake need not strike terror into me." -

"Life and death are but phases of the same thing, the reverse and obverse of the same coin... I want you all to treasure death and suffering more than life and to appreciate their cleansing and purifying character. Death which is an Eternal verity is revolution, as birth and after is slow and steady evolution. Death is as necessary for man's growth as life itself... All fear is a sign of want of faith... Hate the sin and love the sinner." -

"Possession of arms implies an element of fear, if not cowardice." -

"War is an unmitigated evil. But it certainly does one good thing. It drives away fear and brings bravery to the surface." -

"A peace that comes from fear and not from the heart is the opposite of peace." - Gersonides, abbreviation of first letters as RalBaG from Levi ben Gerson NULL

"Moral courage is a virtue of higher cast and nobler origin than physical. It springs from a consciousness of virtue, and renders a man, in the pursuit of defense of right, superior to the fear of reproach, opposition, or contempt." - S. G. Goodrich, fully Samuel Griswold Goodrich, pen name Peter Praley

"We prate of freedom; we are in deadly fear of life." -

"The most rational cure after all for the inordinate fear of death is to set a just value on life." - Julius Charles Hare (1795-1855) and his brother Augustus William Hare

"It is never safe to look in to the future with eyes of fear." - E.H. (Edward Henry) Harriman, fully Edward Henry "Ned" Harriman

"Every affection of the mind that is attended with either pain or pleasure, hope or fear, is the cause of an agitation whose influence extends to the heart, and there induces change from the natural constitution, in the temperature, the pulse and the rest, which impairing all nutrition in its source and abating the powers at large, it is no wonder that various forms of incurable disease in the extremities and in the trunk are the consequence, inasmuch as in such circumstances the whole body labors under the effects of vitiated nutrition and want of native heat." - William Harvey

"It belongs only to tyrants to be always in fear." - Henry IV of France, also Henry of Navarre NULL

"Whatever therefore is consequent to a tie of war, where every man is enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such a condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." - Thomas Hobbes

"The end of worship amongst men is power. For where a man seeth another worshipped, he supposeth him powerful, and is the readier to obey him; which makes his power greater. But God has no ends: the worship we do him proceeds from our duty and is directed according to our capacity by those rules of honor that reason dictateth to be done by the weak to the more potent men, in hope of benefit, for fear of damage, or in thankfulness for good already received from them." - Thomas Hobbes

"I had a "near death experience" and remember thinking, "If only people knew what it was like to die, they wouldn't be afraid." I reached a point at which a voice began to ask me if I thought I'd completed what I'd come to do. was I going to leave my son, then age three, behind? There was no sense of threat or coercion. An absolute acceptance that whatever I did was all right, but pointing out that the moment of choice was now. The relief and release from the fear of dying changed my life. The reminder that "I am not my body" freed me to live my life in a different way. The understanding that no matter what is going on in our bodies, the essence of who we are is unaffected; this wisdom has enabled me to help other see their bodies in a different way. To see the body in illness not as an enemy, but as a faithful fried, programmed by; the soul to react in that exact way. To see illness as a confrontation in the physical of what one is reluctant to confront on the mental or emotional levels. In other words, a message, a communication, a time to listen and therefore a unique and powerful opportunity for transformation." - Soozi Holbeche

"Let us fear the worst, but work with faith; the best will always take care of itself." - Victor Hugo

"A propensity to hope and joy is real riches; one to fear and sorrow, real poverty." - David Hume

"To be happy, the temperament must be cheerful and gay, not gloomy and melancholy. A propensity to hope and joy, is real riches; one to fear and sorrow is real poverty." - David Hume

"Fear of life in one form or another is the great thing to exercise." - William James

"There are a good many pious people who are as careful of their religion as of their best service of china, only using it on holy occasions, for fear it should get chipped or flawed in working-day wear." -

"Fear breeds lack of experience, lack of experience breeds ignorance, ignorance breeds more fear. It is a vicious cycle." -

"We are reluctant to admit that we owe our liberties to men of a type that today we hate and fear - unruly men, disturbers of the peace, men who resent and denounce what Whitman called “the insolence of elected persons” - in a word, free men... Freedom is always purchased at a great price, and even those who are willing to pay it have to admit that the price is great." -

"As man increases his knowledge of the heavens, why should he fear the unknown on earth? As man draws nearer to the stars, why should he not also draw nearer to his neighbor?" - Lyndon Johnson, fully Lyndon Baines Johnson, aka LBJ

"Objects imperfectly discerned take forms from the hope or fear of the beholder." -

"If fear is cultivated it will become stronger. If faith is cultivated it will achieve mastery." - John Paul Jones

"Intelligence is derived from two words - inter and legere - inter meaning "between" and legere meaning "to choose." An intelligent person, therefore, is one who has learned "to choose between." He knows that good is better than evil, that confidence should supersede fear, that love is superior to hate, that gentleness is better than cruelty, forbearance than intolerance, compassion than arrogance and that truth has more virtue than ignorance." - J. Martin Klotsche

"I find no foeman in the road but fear; to doubt is failure and to dare success." -

"Hate and fear can poison the body as surely as any toxic chemicals." - Joseph Krimsky,fully Joseph Hayyim Krimsky

"The constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear." - Jiddu Krishnamurti

"A miser is sometimes a grand personification of fear. He has a fine horror of poverty; and he is not content to keep want from the door, or at arm’s length, but he places it by heaping wealth upon wealth, at a sublime distance!" - Charles Lamb

"Life is first boredom, then fear. Whether or not we use it, it goes, and leaves what something hidden from us chose, and age, and then the only end of age... Time has transfigured them into untruth. The stone fidelity they hardly meant has come to be their final blazon, and to prove our almost-instinct almost true: what will survive of us is love." - Philip Larkin, fully Philip Arthur Larkin

"What is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another... Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom... The world fears a new experience more than it fears anything. Because a new experience displaces so many old experiences... the world doesn't fear a new idea. It can pigeonhole any idea. It can't pigeon-hole a new experience." - D. H. Lawrence, fully David Herbert "D.H." Lawrence

"I found that a hospital is probably the most difficult environment in which to afford a really good death. Hospitals are meant to preserve life; death is an enemy there. Death is not treated with much respect, with much compassion. There’s a lot of fear surrounding death. Death is a failure in a hospital." -

"Although generalizations are dangerous, I venture to say that at the bottom of most fears, both mild and severe, will be found an overactive mind and an underactive body. Hence, I have advised many people, in their quest for happiness, to use their heads less and their arms and legs more... in useful work or play. We generate fears while we sit; we overcome them in action. Fear is nature's warning signal to get busy." - Henry C. Link

"Between hope and fear, love makes her home. She lives on thought, and then she is forgotten, dies. So unlike the pleasure of this world are their foundations." - Ramon Llul, aka Raymond Lully, Raymond Lull, Raimundus, Raymundus Lullus or Lullius

"By sadness you destroy the divine image in your soul. God is joy. All nature rejoices in him, and would you be sad? A true joy makes the heart fear God." - Ambroise de Lombez, Jean de La Peyrie, aka Brother Ambrose, Father Ambrose of Lombez the Enlightenment