People are just afraid of things too much. Afraid of things that don’t necessarily merit fear.

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

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

Just as courage imperils life, fear protects it.

Nothing scares me more than people with some doll collection.

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.

The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work.

I’m not one of those guys that has a great worldview. I kind of deal with terror and fear and isolation and abandonment.

There are so many emotions that you’re feeling, you can get stifled by them if you’re feeling them all at once. What I try to do is take one moment – one simple, simple feeling – and expand it into three-and-a-half minutes.

People use irony as a defense mechanism.

If it’s stress of things that we cannot control, what you have to do is you mitigate that stress as much as possible. You’ve planned, you’ve trained, you’ve done everything you can in your power to mitigate the stress that’s facing you. And then after that, there’s nothing you can do. So, you have to let that one go.

I worked with someone who told me they’d never like me. But for some reason, I just felt like I needed her approval. So I started changing myself to please her. It made me stop being social and friendly. I was so unhappy.

Whatever deceives men seems to produce a magical enchantment.

Like the experience of warfare, the endurance of grave or terminal illness involves long periods of tedium and anxiety, punctuated by briefer interludes of stark terror and pain.

Give yourself a gift of five minutes of contemplation in awe of everything you see around you. Go outside and turn your attention to the many miracles around you. This five-minute-a-day regimen of appreciation and gratitude will help you to focus your life in awe.

If I relaxed, if I took my foot off the gas, I would probably die.

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

Mind over mattress.

If one has fear, there can be no initiative in the creative sense of the word. To have initiative in this sense is to do something original – to do it spontaneously, naturally, without being guided, forced, controlled. It is to do something which you love to do.

There’s no reason for the establishment to fear me. But it has every right to fear the people collectively – I am one with the people.

For me, there have been times when an action movie, even a ‚Tomb Raider,‘ has helped me get out of myself and be physical again. It’s like therapy.

He who dreads hostility too much is unfit to rule.

When you combine boring with fear, you have fun.

Since it is difficult to join them together, it is safer to be feared than to be loved when one of the two must be lacking.

As a vulnerability researcher, the greatest barrier I see is our low tolerance for vulnerability. We’re almost afraid to be happy. We feel like it’s inviting disaster.

I’ve often felt depressed; everyone feels depressed.

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.

Frank and explicit – that is the right line to take when you wish to conceal your own mind and confuse the minds of others.

We do not see people as they are, but as they appear to us. And these appearances are usually misleading.

Just what is it that academics have to fear if they stand up for common decency, instead of letting campus barbarians run amok?

Our brains are either our greatest assets or our greatest liabilities.

I really believed that fear is contagious.

Fear is not a lasting teacher of duty.

It is wise to persuade people to do things and make them think it was their own idea.

Happiness is the cessation of suffering.

I don’t want to wake up and be bored. That’s probably my greatest fear is to have nothing to do. What better job is there than to play quarterback for an NFL team, and certainly one that I’ve been on for a long time and had success with? I don’t plan on giving it up any time soon.

It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.

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.

I have lost my mental faculties but am perfectly well.

There’s a schizoid streak within the family anyway so I dare say that I’m affected by that. The majority of the people in my family have been in some kind of mental institution, as for my brother he doesn’t want to leave. He likes it very much.

It doesn’t take much to make me angry.

In the West, as well as some other parts of the world, the personal sense of ego tends to predominate, whereas in other areas, there is a more collective sense of ego. This collective ego emphasizes the ‚we‘ rather than the ‚I.‘

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.

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.

We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

Behavior is what a man does, not what he thinks, feels, or believes.

We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.

When you begin to worry, go find something to do. Get busy being a blessing to someone; do something fruitful. Talking about your problem or sitting alone, thinking about it, does no good; it serves only to make you miserable. Above all else, remember that worrying is totally useless. Worrying will not solve your problem.

It’s human nature to blame someone else for your shortcomings or upsets.

Without exercise, I don’t feel like my head works right.

If you’re going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you’re going to be locked up.

I usually make up my mind about a man in ten seconds, and I very rarely change it.

The generality of men are naturally apt to be swayed by fear rather than reverence, and to refrain from evil rather because of the punishment that it brings than because of its own foulness.

Our envy always lasts longer than the happiness of those we envy.

I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.

I don’t need therapy. I’m not going to see a therapist; comedy acts as my therapy. I put my problems out there. I talk about them. I talk about everything before anybody has a chance.

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

The dieting wars have got to stop.

Isn’t it funny how babies laugh a lot? I read a toddler, a young child laughs 300 times a day. The average adult laughs, like, four times a day. God put it in them. He put the laugh in us, but I think sometimes we let life get us down, you know, have bad breaks, and we lose our breaks.