Fear is a universal emotion and vital response to threats and danger. But in a world swirling with uncertainty and turmoil, feeling anxious and fearful can take over our lives. Offering a range of perspectives and wealth of wisdom, as well as practical advice and humor, these 75+ quotes from eclectic authors make fear a little less scary and, hopefully, easier to face and overcome.
On fear of change
“Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.” -Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
"So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future." -Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
“People are usually afraid of change because they fear the unknown. But the single greatest constant of history is that everything changes.” -Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
“When we really delve into the reasons for why we can’t let something go, there are only two: an attachment to the past or a fear for the future.” -Marie Kondo, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up
"The changes we dread most may contain our salvation." -Barbara Kingsolver, Small Wonder
“It’s not true that men are unwilling to change. It’s true that many men are afraid to change.” -bell hooks, The Will to Change
“How strange that the nature of life is change, yet the nature of human beings is to resist change. And how ironic that the difficult times we fear might ruin us are the very ones that can break us open and help us blossom into who we were meant to be.” -Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow
"People felt too frightened to take a step outside the invisible regulations that guided everyone's lives." -Paulo Coehlo, Veronika Decides to Die
"Avoidance will make you feel less vulnerable in the short run, but it will never make you less afraid." -Brené Brown, Atlas of the Heart
“If I let myself really understand another person, I might be changed by that understanding. And we all fear change. So as I say, it is not an easy thing to permit oneself to understand an individual." -Carl R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy
"Some people will always fear change. But we can't indulge them." -Veronica Roth, Allegiant
On fear of failure
“There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.” -Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
"An opportunity means change. An opportunity means action. But most of all, an opportunity means the chance of failure. And it's the potential of failure, more than failure itself, that stops so many people from beginning anything.” -Mateo Askaripour, Black Buck
“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.” -Theodore Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life
“Losing yourself does not happen all at once. Losing yourself happens one no at a time." -Shonda Rhimes, Year of Yes
"If we didn't have fear, imagine the creativity in the world. Fear holds us back every step of the way." -Lily King, Writers & Lovers
"We spend so much time being afraid of failure, afraid of rejection. But regret is the thing we should fear most. Failure is an answer. Rejection is an answer. Regret is an eternal question you will never have the answer to." -Trevor Noah, Born a Crime
"Don’t think for a moment that successful people don’t have fears." -Steve Harvey, Jump
"Adventure requires something of us, puts us to the test. Though we may fear the test, at the same time we yearn to be tested, to discover that we have what it takes." -John Eldredge, Captivating
“Failure is a feeling long before it becomes an actual result. It’s vulnerability that breeds with self-doubt and then is escalated, often deliberately, by fear.” -Michelle Obama, Becoming
“Sometimes, when we want something so badly, we fear failure more than we fear being without that thing.” -Matthew J. Kirby, Icefall
"Most of the old moles I know wish they had listened less to their fears and more to their dreams." -Charlie Mackesy, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse
On fear of the unknown
“People are supposed to fear the unknown, but ignorance is bliss when knowledge is so damn frightening.” - Laurell K. Hamilton, The Laughing Corpse
"Parenthood was never knowing what was going to hurt your kids, but knowing only that something, inevitably, would." -Rumaan Alam, Leave the World Behind
“It’s the silence that scares me. It’s the blank page on which I can write my own fears. The spirits of the dead have nothing on it. The dead one tried to show me hell, but it was a pale imitation of the horror I can paint on the darkness in a quiet moment.” -Mark Lawrence, Prince of Thorns
“We meet fear ... We greet the unexpected visitor and listen to what he has to tell us. When fear arrives, something is about to happen.” -Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom
"It is always easier to be afraid of something you cannot see.” -Neil Gaiman, Coraline
"The unknown awakens in us a reptilian dread that plays out with the same ferocity on scales personal, societal, and civilizational, whether triggered by a new life-chapter or a new political regime or a new world order." - Maria Popova, Figuring
"If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate." -George Orwell, 1984
“There are several ways to react to being lost. One is to panic ... Another is to abandon yourself to lostness, to allow the fact that you've misplaced yourself to change the way you experience the world.” -Audrey Niffenegger, Her Fearful Symmetry
"I wanted to find one law to cover all of living, I found fear. A list of my nightmares is the map of the way out of here." -Jessamine Chan, The School for Good Mothers
“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” -H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature
“Look, everyone talks about the unknown like it's some big scary thing, but it's the familiar that's always bothered me. It's heavy, builds up around you like rocks, until it’s walls and a ceiling and a cell.” -V.E. Schwab, A Gathering of Shadows
"But I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different—unimagined, unprepared for, unknown." -Karen Thompson Walker, The Age of Miracles
On fear and love
“Love is scary! Taking a vow to love someone through sickness and health, for richer for poorer, forsaking all others, until death do us part, is the most terrifying experience a person can have. Why pretend any differently?” -Elin Hilderbrand, Beautiful Day
“I had learned early to assume something dark and lethal hidden at the heart of anything I loved. When I couldn't find it, I responded, bewildered and wary, in the only way I knew how: by planting it there myself.” -Tana French, In the Woods
"How does she explain that she used to be afraid to love anyone because there’s a well at the center of her chest and she doesn’t know where the bottom is?" -Casey McQuiston, One Last Stop
"I know it’s scary, being vulnerable, but you can allow yourself to care." -Ali Hazelwood, The Love Hypothesis
"Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more." -Erica Jong, Fear of Flying
“I've spent most of my life and most of my friendships holding my breath and hoping that when people get close enough they won't leave, and fearing that it's a matter of time before they figure me out and go.” -Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet
“Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.” -Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness
"And I remember my mother holding herself back from David, refusing to shine for fear of his desiring her." -Lisa Jewell, The Family Upstairs
"Love didn't grow very well in a place where there was only fear, just as plants didn't grow very well in a place wher it was always dark." -Stephen King, The Stand
"I learned at a young age that love requires a kind of ... dismantling. One learns to make the object of your hunger love you. Because when they love you, they’ll do the emotional butchery themselves." -Alexis Henderson, House of Hunger
"There’s so much pain everywhere, and we just close our eyes to it. The truth is we’re all scared. We’re terrified of each other." -Alex Michaelides, The Silent Patient
"Afraid of everything. If the people who were supposed to protect you played so fast and loose with your life ... then how did you survive?" -Suzanne Collins, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
“Love quiets fear." -Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents
On fear itself
"Fear is a phoenix. You can watch it burn a thousand times and still it will return.” -Leigh Bardugo, Crooked Kingdom
“There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man.” -Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear
“I am afraid. Not of life, or death, or nothingness, but of wasting it as if I had never been.” -Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon
“He thought with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment when a special effort is needed.” -George Orwell, 1984
“Ignorance is the parent of fear.” -Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
"Fear wears many different outfits—and none of them are cute." -Cara Alwill Leyba, Girl Code
"In time we hate that which we often fear.” -William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra
"Hate, I found out on the ride home, was a less embarrassing way to say fear." -Emily Henry, Beach Read
“Men go to far greater lengths to avoid what they fear than to obtain what they desire.” -Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code
“Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration." -Frank Herbert, Dune
"Man is the creature he fears." -Josh Malerman, Bird Box
“Eddie discovered one of his childhood's great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought.” -Stephen King, It
“Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are things people are scared of. Some of them are things that look like things people used to be scared of a long time ago. Sometimes monsters are things people should be scared of, but they aren't.” -Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
On facing and conquering fear
"If we fear something, it is all the more imperative we study it thoroughly." -Celeste Ng, Our Missing Hearts
"It seems to me that the less I fight my fear, the less it fights back. If I can relax, fear relaxes, too." -Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic
“Bran thought about it. 'Can a man still be brave if he's afraid?' 'That is the only time a man can be brave,' his father told him.” -George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
“A man that flies from his fear may find that he has only taken a shortcut to meet it.” -J.R.R. Tolkien, The Children of Húrin
"If you try to get rid of fear and anger without knowing their meaning, they will grow stronger and return.” - Deepak Chopra, The Third Jesus
“There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me.” -Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
"Linking an unwarranted fear to its ultimate terrible destination usually helps alleviate that fear." -Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear
"That is the way fear serves us: it always sides with the thing we are afraid of." -George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin
“Fear ... is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unnerving ease. It begins in your mind, always ... so you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don't, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.” -Yann Martel, Life of Pi
"What I have since realized is that if people expect you to be brave, sometimes you pretend that you are, even when you are frightened down to your very bones. ” -Sharon Creech, Walk Two Moons
“Fear doesn't shut you down; it wakes you up.” -Veronica Roth, Divergent
“It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.” -Marcus Aurelius, Thoughts of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
"If something can´t hurt me, then why should it scare me?" -Jia Jang, Rejection Proof
“Don't be ashamed of being scared. To be afraid is a sign of common sense. Only complete idiots are not afraid of anything.” -Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel’s Game
“He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.” -Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne
“Fear's useless. Either something bad happens or it doesn't: If it doesn't, you've wasted time being afraid, and if it does, you've wasted time that you could have spent sharpening your weapons.” -Sarah Rees Brennan, The Demon’s Lexicon
"Your fears are not walls, but hurdles. Courage is not the absence of fear, but the conquering of it." -Dan Millman, Way of the Peaceful Warrior
“A witch ought never to be frightened in the darkest forest, Granny Weatherwax had once told her, because she should be sure in her soul that the most terrifying thing in the forest was her.” -Terry Pratchett, Wintersmith
