Quotes and passages on anxiety

A crust eaten in peace is better
than a banquet partaken in anxiety.

Aesop

Our anxiety does not empty tomorrow of its sorrows, but only empties today of its strengths. Charles H. Spurgeon

Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning person holds on to you. You want to save that person, but you know he or she will strangle you with his or her panic. Anaïs Nin Chronic anxiety is a state more undesirable than any other, and we will try almost any maneuver to eliminate it. Modern humans are living in anxious anticipation of destruction. Such anxiety can be easily eliminated by self-destruction. As a German saying puts it: "Better an end with terror than a terror without end." Robert E. Neale The Art of Dying

Our stresses, anxieties, pains, and problems arise because we do not see the world, others, or even ourselves as worthy of love. Prem Prakash The Yoga of Spiritual Devotion

Temperamentally anxious people can have a hard time staying motivated, period, because their intense focus on their worries distracts them from their goals. Winifred Gallagher Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life

Anxiety's like a rocking chair. It gives you something
to do, but it doesn't get you very far.

Jodi Picoult
Sing You Home

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Each moment of worry, anxiety or stress represents
lack of faith in miracles, for they never cease.

T.F. Hodge
From Within I Rise

Meditation did not relieve me of my anxiety so much as flesh it
out. It took my anxious response to the world, about which I felt
a lot of confusion and shame, and let me understand it more
completely. Perhaps the best way to phrase it is to say that
meditation showed me that the other side of anxiety is desire.
They exist in relationship to each other, not independently.

Mark Epstein
Open to Desire

Anxiety in children is originally nothing other than an expression
of the fact they are feeling the loss of the person they love.

Sigmund Freud

Anxiety is the rust of life, destroying its brightness and weakening
its power. A childlike and abiding trust in Providence
is its best preventive and remedy.

unattributed

Neither comprehension nor learning can take place in an atmosphere of anxiety.

Rose F. Kennedy

Anxiety is fear of oneself.

Wilhelm Stekel

Anxiety is the space between the "now" and the "then."

Richard Abell

Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity.

T.S. Eliot

Anxiety is the essential condition of intellectual and artistic creation.

Charles Frankel

Anxiety about the future never profits; we feel no evil until it comes,
and when we feel it, no counsel helps; wisdom is either too early or too late.

Arthur Somers Roche

Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying
to do today's jobs with yesterday's tools.

Marshall McLuhan

Americans are the only people in the world known to me whose status
anxiety prompts them to advertise their college and university
affiliations in the rear window of their automobiles.

Paul Fussell

Beware of anxiety. . . . there is nothing that so much troubles the mind,
strains the heart, distresses the soul and confuses the judgment.

William B. Ullathorne

Anxiety is the rust of life, destroying its brightness and weakening its power.
A childlike and abiding trust in Providence is its best preventive and remedy.

Tryon Edwards

A fear is a reaction to a specific danger, to which the individual can
make a specific adjustment. But what characterizes anxiety is the
feeling of diffuseness and uncertainty and the experience
of helplessness toward the threat.

Rollo May
The Meaning of Anxiety

No grand inquisitor has in readiness such terrible tortures as has
anxiety and no spy knows how to attack more artfully the person
he suspects, choosing the moment when he is weakest; nor knows
how to lay traps where he will be caught and ensnared as anxiety
knows how, and no sharp-witted judge knows how to interrogate,
to examine the accused, as anxiety does, which never lets him escape.

Sören Kierkegaard

Anxiety is caused by disapproval either of oneself or by others. The
disapproval may not actually occur; anxiety can occur even
with the anticipation of disapproval.

John and Muriel James

Nothing in life is more unspeakable than
the unnecessary anxiety which we endure.

Benjamin Disraeli

We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we
can no longer distinguish between true and false,
between the gangster's whim and the purest ideal.

Ingrid Bergman

The source of anxiety lies in the future. If you can keep the
future out of mind, you can forget your worries.

Milan Kundera

Where there is charity and wisdom, there is neither fear nor ignorance.
Where there is patience and humility, there is neither anger nor vexation.
Where there is poverty and joy, there is neither greed nor avarice.
Where there is peace and meditation, there is neither anxiety nor doubt.

Francis of Assisi

A warrior of the light. . . never confuses tension with anxiety.

Paulo Coelho

Most people believe only in degrees of jeopardy and live in degrees
of greater and lesser anxiety, but never in true relaxation. The
assurance of safety is a vital and wonderful resources
that we need to share with one another.

Paul Richards

The pursuit of wisdom leads to tranquility;
the pursuit of wealth, to anxiety.

Shantidasa

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The experience of separateness arouses anxiety;
it is, indeed, the source of all anxiety.

Erich Fromm

"But this is human life: the war, the deeds,
the disappointment, the anxiety,
Imagination's struggles, far and nigh,
all human; bearing in themselves this good,
that they are still the air, the subtle food,
to make us feel existence."

This is the "goal" of the soul path--to feel existence;
not to overcome life's struggles and anxieties,
but to know life first hand, to exist fully in context.

Thomas Moore
(passage from John Keats' "Endymion")

But people have other needs as well: emotional needs. These, too,
are few, but every bit as important as our physical requirements, yet
not so simple. If they aren't met, they can be as devastating as
physical hunger, as uncomfortable as a lack of shelter, as incapacitating
as thirst. The frustration, isolation and anxiety brought about by unmet
emotional needs can, like physical privation, produce death
or a degree of living death--neurosis and psychosis.

Leo Buscaglia

The physical symptoms of fight or flight are what the human body
has learned over thousands of years to operate efficiently and at the
highest level. . . . anxiety is a cognitive interpretation of that physical response.

John Eliot

The components of anxiety, stress, fear, and anger do not exist
independently of you in the world. They simply do not exist in the
physical world, even though we talk about them as if they do.

Wayne Dyer

Anxiety is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged,
it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained.

Arthur S. Roche

People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them.

George Bernard Shaw
"Family Affection"

I have learned to live each day as it comes, and not to borrow trouble by
dreading tomorrow. It is the dark menace of the future that makes cowards of us.

Dorothy Day

Anxiety is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged,
it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained.

Arthur Somers Roche

From the spiritual side:

Anxiety looks at things and makes you concerned about, even
obsessed with, things that seem impossible. It tries to get you
to worry, to brood about your problems and needs.
It gets your eyes off God.

unattributed

So long as we believe in our heart of hearts that our capacity is
limited and we grow anxious and unhappy, we are lacking in faith.
One who truly trusts in God has no right to be anxious about anything.

Paramananda

Anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity.

Thomas Merton

God did not make us to be eaten by anxiety, but to walk erect,
free, unafraid in a world where there is work to do,
truth to seek, love to give and win.

Joseph Newton