I hesitate to use a pathologizing label, but underneath the so-called narcissistic personality is definitely shame and the paralyzing fear of being ordinary.

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.

I don’t know how to live good. I only know how to suffer.

It occurred to me that at one point it was like I had two diseases – one was Alzheimer’s, and the other was knowing I had Alzheimer’s.

The more you live in the present moment, the more the fear of death disappears.

We judge people in areas where we’re vulnerable to shame, especially picking folks who are doing worse than we’re doing.

Nothing is more fearful than imagination without taste.

Do the thing you fear most and the death of fear is certain.

The worst part of success is, to me, adapting to it. It’s scary.

When you get into your car, shut the door and be there for just half a minute. Breathe, feel the energy inside your body, look around at the sky, the trees. The mind might tell you, ‚I don’t have time.‘ But that’s the mind talking to you. Even the busiest person has time for 30 seconds of space.

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.

With the fearful strain that is on me night and day, if I did not laugh I should die.

We have an obligation to help people that cannot help themselves. The mentally retarded, the physically retarded, et cetera.

I’ve had no problem harnessing anger.

I was a grade B housewife, maybe a B minus. But when I got time to write, I would be unable to finish a sentence. I had anxiety attacks. Partly it was a way of personifying the situation because I couldn’t breathe. I was surrounded by people and by duties. I was a housewife and the children’s mother, and I was judged on how I performed those roles.

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

O! Let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven; keep me in temper; I would not be mad!

The truth is that there is no actual stress or anxiety in the world; it’s your thoughts that create these false beliefs. You can’t package stress, touch it, or see it. There are only people engaged in stressful thinking.

Hatred is settled anger.

I was awfully curious to find out why I didn’t go insane.

I get nervous for everything – literally everything.

None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear.

There is no hope unmingled with fear, and no fear unmingled with hope.

One ought to hold on to one’s heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.

Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary.

What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?

My body is weird. I wake up when the sun comes up, and it’s hard for me to go to sleep. My thoughts just take over.

The only failure one should fear, is not hugging to the purpose they see as best.

What I want for my fans and for the world, for anyone who feels pain, is to lean into that pain and embrace it as much as they can and begin the healing process.

Worry – a God, invisible but omnipotent. It steals the bloom from the cheek and lightness from the pulse; it takes away the appetite, and turns the hair gray.

I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.

I’m terrified of losing my voice.

Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man.

It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear.

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.

Paris by night is a nightmare now. It is not a cliche anymore.

I feel connected to my generation through the music, but I also fear for us. We’re in a very self-destructive state where we’re addicted to outside opinions and we all feel like we have fans.

A woman is the only thing I am afraid of that I know will not hurt me.

It is vain for the coward to flee; death follows close behind; it is only by defying it that the brave escape.

Give yourself more opportunities for privacy, when you are not bombarded with duties and obligations. Privacy is not a rejection of those you love; it is your deserved respite for recharging your batteries.

I write songs that are like diary entries. I have to do it in order to feel sane.

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.

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

Men are swayed more by fear than by reverence.

I have a wish. It as a fear as well – that in my end will be my beginning.

Men walk this tightrope where any sign of weakness illicits shame, and so they’re afraid to make themselves vulnerable for fear of looking weak.

Meditation helps me to calm down.

It seems like we wake up and it’s a race until you get to bed. It gets to you after a while and you think, ‚What the hell am I doing?‘

Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.

Music keeps the heart porous in many ways.

There is no such thing as a pure introvert or extrovert. Such a person would be in the lunatic asylum.

I wanted to write a book that talked about the emotions of children, which is the rainbow. We all have moods. We talk about being blue when we’re sad, and being yellow when we’re cowards, and when we’re mad, we’re red.

I try not to think about my life. I have no life. I need therapy.

There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.

I just always wanted to study human behavior because every psychologist that I would talk to would tell me I was bipolar, and I know I’m not bipolar, so I had to perform a psychoanalysis on myself to find out that I have unresolved grief.

Being brought up very religious, I have a fear of people that look to idol gods.

When I get down, I don’t waller around for long.

There’s two sorts of fear: one you embrace and one you should listen to and turn the other way.

I am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion.

You might be tough, but you can only be so tough for so long, you know what I mean? The brain can only take so much damage. The body can only take so much damage.

Just as courage is the danger of life, so is fear its safeguard.