The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.

Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.

If we don’t know life, how can we know death?

That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful.

Seemingly, man has learned to live without God, preoccupied and indifferent toward Him and concerned only about material security and pleasure.

The time comes upon every public man when it is best for him to keep his lips closed.

The key to success is to focus our conscious mind on things we desire not things we fear.

The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

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

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?

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.

Do the thing you fear to do and keep on doing it… that is the quickest and surest way ever yet discovered to conquer fear.

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

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Meditation can help us embrace our worries, our fear, our anger; and that is very healing. We let our own natural capacity of healing do the work.

The coward wretch whose hand and heart Can bear to torture aught below, Is ever first to quail and start From the slightest pain or equal foe.

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.

I have trust issues with allowing other individuals to know my innermost secrets for fear of how I may be viewed. Everyone has this.

I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know. Civilians would then have to imagine all kinds of deeds of derring-do.

Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.

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

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

To the dumb question, ‚Why me?‘ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply, ‚Why not?‘

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.

It is not these well-fed long-haired men that I fear, but the pale and the hungry-looking.

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

I’ve often stood silent at a party for hours listening to my movie idols turn into dull and little people.

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

To live is to think.

Vulnerability is about showing up and being seen. It’s tough to do that when we’re terrified about what people might see or think.

With compassion you can die for other people, like the mother who can die for her child. You have the courage to say it because you are not afraid of losing anything, because you know that understanding and love is the foundation of happiness. But if you have fear of losing your status, your position, you will not have the courage to do it.

People are terrified of me, and I want them to be.

Boredom is… a vital problem for the moralist, since half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.

You must be afraid, my son. That is how one becomes an honest citizen.

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.

The world would be happier if men had the same capacity to be silent that they have to speak.

Why am I here? I’m not lucky. That’s God.

There is not a truth existing which I fear… or would wish unknown to the whole world.

At first, I was scared to show fear because you can never be sure how people will perceive you. But I dared myself to do that, to stand out. Now I’ll talk about being beaten up or robbed or making a stupid decision because of a girl or whatever.

One of my big goals as a human being is to continue to write what’s really happening to me, even if it’s a tough pill to swallow for people around me… I do fear that if I ever were to have someone in my life who mattered, I would second-guess every one of my lyrics.

Most damage that others do us is out of fear, humiliation and pain. Those feelings occur in all of us, not just in those of us who profess a certain religious or racial devotion.

Whether you like it or not, you’re forced to come to the realisation that death is out there. But I don’t fear death, I’m a fatalist. I believe when it’s your time, that’s it. It’s the hand you’re dealt.

We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all.

Silence is safer than speech.

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

Simulated disorder postulates perfect discipline; simulated fear postulates courage; simulated weakness postulates strength.

Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we’re hardwired not to always think clearly when we’re scared. And the country’s scared.

The last proceeding of reason is to recognize that there is an infinity of things which are beyond it. There is nothing so conformable to reason as this disavowal of reason.

What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature are shot down wholesale.

It is much more secure to be feared than to be loved.

We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.

Saying nothing… sometimes says the most.

We are doomed to cling to a life even while we find it unendurable.

I’m afraid of losing my obscurity. Genuineness only thrives in the dark. Like celery.

Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead.

The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite, and becomes a pure nothing. So our spirit before God, so our justice before divine justice.

O God, O God, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!

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.

Death is not the worst that can happen to men.

If you fear making anyone mad, then you ultimately probe for the lowest common denominator of human achievement.

If I think more about death than some other people, it is probably because I love life more than they do.