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.

He not busy being born is busy dying.

Every day that is born into the world comes like a burst of music and rings the whole day through, and you make of it a dance, a dirge, or a life march, as you will.

This industry has been really good to me. It’s been a great life. I’m not through yet. I’m ready when you are, Mr. DeMille.

Life is an exciting business, and most exciting when it is lived for others.

Except for the young or very happy, I can’t say I am sorry for anyone who dies.

The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.

If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.

I am 55 years old now. It takes three years to write one book. I don’t know how many books I will be able to write before I die. It is like a countdown. So with each book I am praying – please let me live until I am finished.

People think, because we’re young, we aren’t complex, but that’s not true. We deal with life and love and broken hearts in the same way a woman a few years older might.

For this generation, ours, life is nuclear survival, liberty is human rights, the pursuit of happiness is a planet whose resources are devoted to the physical and spiritual nourishment of its inhabitants.

Such is the state of life, that none are happy but by the anticipation of change: the change itself is nothing; when we have made it, the next wish is to change again.

Bread without flesh is a good diet, as on many botanical excursions I have proved. Tea also may easily be ignored. Just bread and water and delightful toil is all I need – not unreasonably much, yet one ought to be trained and tempered to enjoy life in these brave wilds in full independence of any particular kind of nourishment.

An unused life is an early death.

Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.

I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.

It is the cause, not the death, that makes the martyr.

I don’t lose any sleep at night over the potential for failure. I cannot even spell the word.

Death is a fearful thing.

The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.

My life is real.

The outer passes away; the innermost is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

When even one American – who has done nothing wrong – is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth – then all Americans are in peril.

Life is the childhood of our immortality.

I have a feeling that I make a very good friend, and I’m a good mother, and a good sister, and a good citizen. I am involved in life itself – all of it. And I have a lot of energy and a lot of nerve.

Fear cannot be without hope nor hope without fear.

The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity.

When good Americans die they go to Paris.

Basically, when you get to my age, you’ll really measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you.

This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it.

You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves.

Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.

Death surrenders us totally to God: it makes us enter into him; we must, in return, surrender ourselves to death with absolute love and self-abandonment since, when death comes, all we can do is to surrender ourselves completely to the domination and guidance of God.

Nature abhors annihilation.

Losers are people who are afraid of losing.

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

Success in life is founded upon attention to the small things rather than to the large things; to the every day things nearest to us rather than to the things that are remote and uncommon.

Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation.

Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.

Each player must accept the cards life deals him or her: but once they are in hand, he or she alone must decide how to play the cards in order to win the game.

Life is to be lived. If you have to support yourself, you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting. And you don’t do that by sitting around.

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.

Red is such an interesting color to correlate with emotion, because it’s on both ends of the spectrum. On one end you have happiness, falling in love, infatuation with someone, passion, all that. On the other end, you’ve got obsession, jealousy, danger, fear, anger and frustration.

One of the things I definitely think of as a driver of me is fear. And it’s fear of failure, fear of being overtaken.

I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn’t, than live as if there isn’t and to die to find out that there is.

The feeling about a soldier is, when all is said and done, he wasn’t really going to do very much with his life anyway. The example usually is: he wasn’t going to compose Beethoven’s Fifth.

Life cannot subsist in society but by reciprocal concessions.

Death is a release from the impressions of the senses, and from desires that make us their puppets, and from the vagaries of the mind, and from the hard service of the flesh.

My friends ask me if I want more kids, and I always say yes, I want more; it’s the best thing you can have in your life.

What life half gives a man, posterity gives entirely.

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

Man alone is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed.

Life without love is like a tree without blossoms or fruit.

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.

Sometimes I think it would be easier to avoid old age, to die young, but then you’d never complete your life, would you? You’d never wholly know you.

Where fear is, happiness is not.

Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.

If you lose a big fight, it will worry you all of your life. It will plague you – until you get your revenge.

I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.

A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.

The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.