Censorship is the tool of those who have the need to hide actualities from themselves and from others. Their fear is only their inability to face what is real, and I can’t vent any anger against them; I only feel this appalling sadness. Somewhere in their upbringing, they were shielded against the total facts of our existence.

We can come to look upon the deaths of our enemies with as much regret as we feel for those of our friends, namely, when we miss their existence as witnesses to our success.

I come from a family of 12, so I kind of got a little lost as a child.

My dad had a church of 90 people when I was born. It was just, over the years it continued to grow.

I was brought up differently than the average American child because the average child is brought up expecting to be happy.

Anger makes dull men witty, but it keeps them poor.

Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.

There’s a long way to fall when you pretend that you’re so far away from the earth, far away from reality, floating in a bubble that’s protected by fame or success. It’s scary, and it’s the thing I fear the most: to be swallowed up by that bubble. It can be poison to you, fame.

Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true.

Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.

Let me spell it out: with the psychotic boss, nothing you do is ever quite right. They set traps, asking you to do things, and no matter how hard you think of accomplishing it in their way, it is wrong and you are to blame. This tends to instill a lot of fear in you.

We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.

I’m sure the feeling of fear, as long as you can take advantage of it and not be rendered useless by it, can make you extend yourself beyond what you would regard as your capacity. If you’re afraid, the blood seems to flow freely through the veins, and you really do feel a sense of stimulation.

For me life is continuously being hungry. The meaning of life is not simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead, to go up, to achieve, to conquer.

The walls we build around us to keep sadness out also keeps out the joy.

Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.

There are more things to alarm us than to harm us, and we suffer more often in apprehension than reality.

One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

Many Communist government officials have a rigid, dictatorial power, but they live in constant suspicion and fear of anything that might undermine the power they have.

I think so many people live their whole life in fear and doubt and shame.

Death obsesses me, yes it does. I can’t really understand why it doesn’t obsess everyone – I think it does really, I’m just a little more out about it.

Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It meets a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts that is something on which to pride yourself but poverty itself is romanticized by fools.

Fear seems to have many causes. Fear of loss, fear of failure, fear of being hurt, and so on, but ultimately all fear is the ego’s fear of death, of annihilation. To the ego, death is always just around the corner. In this mind-identified state, fear of death affects every aspect of your life.

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?

I’m kind of claustrophobic… It’s not even like enclosed spaces. It’s like I hate being stuck in one band, you know? Just being stuck is the biggest drag, for fear that, you know, just that you can’t get out.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

The sadness of the women’s movement is that they don’t allow the necessity of love. See, I don’t personally trust any revolution where love is not allowed.

Do not meddle in the affairs of Wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.

Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.

I think what’s important is for us to decipher what is honest and what is dishonest and be accepting of those things and not operating from fear.

The realities are that, you know, as a black man, you know, Barack can get shot going to the gas station, you know.

If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth.

Fear is present when we forget that we are a part of God’s divine design. Learning to experience authentic love means abandoning ego’s insistence that you have much to fear and that you are in an unfriendly world. You can make the decision to be free from fear and doubt and return to the brilliant light of love that is always with you.

The South is very beautiful but its beauty makes one sad because the lives that people live here, and have lived here, are so ugly.

The more you can increase fear of drugs and crime, welfare mothers, immigrants and aliens, the more you control all the people.

I think music is one of the hero/sheroes of the African-American existence.

Timidity makes a person modest. It makes him or her say, ‚I’m not worthy of being written up in the record of deeds in heaven or on earth.‘ Timidity keeps people from their good. They are afraid to say, ‚Yes, I deserve it.‘

You may say, ‚Well, dragons don’t exist.‘ It’s, like, yes they do – the category ‚predator‘ and the category ‚dragon‘ are the same category. It absolutely exists. It’s a superordinate category. It exists absolutely more than anything else. In fact, it really exists.

The display of grief makes more demands than grief itself. How few men are sad in their own company.

There is an orderliness in the universe, there is an unalterable law governing everything and every being that exists or lives. It is no blind law; for no blind law can govern the conduct of living beings.

Football is a sad game.

We fear to know the fearsome and unsavory aspects of ourselves, but we fear even more to know the godlike in ourselves.

I’m terrified of losing my voice.

The mind of America is seized by a fatal dry rot – and it’s only a question of time before all that the mind controls will run amuck in a frenzy of stupid, impotent fear.

It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.

Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on. It is not man.

What was God doing before the divine creation?

The ‚public‘ scares me, but people I trust.

You’re born. You suffer. You die. Fortunately, there’s a loophole.

I’m afraid that reason will triumph and that the world will become a place where anyone who doesn’t fit that will become unnecessary.

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

After your death you will be what you were before your birth.

There are only two forces that unite men – fear and interest.

Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause.

The topic of leadership is a touchy one. A lot of leaders fail because they don’t have the bravery to touch that nerve or strike that chord. Throughout my years, I haven’t had that fear.

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

Only he can take great resolves who has indomitable faith in God and has fear of God.

I’m not afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

Black people comprehend the South. We understand its weight. It has rested on our backs… I knew that my heart would break if ever I put my foot down on that soil, moist, still, with old hurts. I had to face the fear/loathing at its source or it would consume me whole.