c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
I do understand what love is, and that is one of the reasons I can never again be a Christian. Love is not self denial. Love is not blood and suffering. Love is not murdering your son to appease your own vanity. Love is not hatred or wrath, consigning billions of people to eternal torture because they have offended your ego or disobeyed your rules. Love is not obedience, conformity, or submission. It is a counterfeit love that is contingent upon authority, punishment, or reward. True love is respect and admiration, compassion and kindness, freely given by a healthy, unafraid human being.
— Dan Barker, Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist
We always vilify what we don't understand.
— Nenia Campbell, Horrorscape
The things you fear are undefeatablenot by their nature but by your approach
— Jewel, A Night Without Armor
And whosoever fears Allah and keeps his duty to Him, He will make a way for him to get out (from every difficulty).And He will provide him from (sources) he never could imagine.
— Anonymous, The Qur'an / القرآن الكريم
She goes where she pleases. She appears unhoped for, uncalled for. She moves through doors and walls and windows. Her thoughts move through minds. She enters dreams. She vanishes and is still there. She knows the future and sees through flesh. She is not afraid of anything.
— Rachel Klein, The Moth Diaries
Before drifting away entirely, he found himself reflecting---not for the first time---on the peculiarity of adults. Thet took laxatives, liquor, or sleeping pills to drive away their terrors so that sleep would come, and their terrors were so tame and domestic: the job, the money, what the teacher will think if I can't get Jennie nicer clothes, does my wife still love me, who are my friends. They were pallid compared to the fears every child lies cheek and jowl with in his dark bed, with no one to confess to in hope of perfect understanding but another child. There is no group therapy or psychiatry or community social services for the child who must cope with the thing under the bed or in the cellar every night, the thing which leers and capers and threatens just beyond the point where vision will reach. The same lonely battle must be fought night after night and the only cure is the eventual ossification of the imaginary faculties, and this is called adulthood.
— Stephen King, 'Salem's Lot: Illustrated Edition
Screw your courage to the sticking-place
— William Shakespeare, Macbeth
But it's hard to leave a place when you're tied to it by fear, when it's broken you with fear, when it's all you've ever known.
— Claire Legrand, The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls
If you don't learn how to be scared, you'll never really learn how to be brave.
— Simon Holt, The Devouring
There is a great difference between being fearless and being brave.
— Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind
Why does it take fear to move you? Why does it take chaos to make us understand exactly what we need to do?
— Laura Dave, The Divorce Party
I am too sick to lay downthe sidewalks frighten methe whole damned city frightens me,what I will becomewhat I have becomefrightens me.
— Charles Bukowski, Mockingbird Wish Me Luck
I'll tell them that on bad mornings, it feels impossible to take pleasure in anything because I'm afraid it could be taken away.
— Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay
No man should leave in the universe anything of which he is afraid.
— G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday
it feels so scary getting old.
— Lorde, Lorde - Pure Heroine Songbook
When you no longer perceive the world as hostile, there is no more fear, and when there is no more fear, you think, speak and act differently.
— Eckhart Tolle
The fear of loss . . . it can destroy you as much as the loss itself.
— Sarah J. Maas, Empire of Storms
Nervous means you want to play. Scared means you don't want to play.
— Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
My whole life, I had thought that my story was, again and again: Once upon a time, there was a boy, and he had to risk everything to keep what he loved. But really, the story was: Once upon a time, there was a boy, and his fear ate him alive.
— Maggie Stiefvater, Forever
No one vinces me, baby
— Michael  Grant, Fear
If you dont know learn how to be scared, you'll never really learn how to be brave.
— Simon Holt, The Devouring
Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. Live in silence.
— Jalaluddin Rumi
I remember my own childhood vividly...I knew terrible things. But I knew I mustn't let adults know I knew. It would scare them
— Maurice Sendak
That's what tears are for, you know, to wash away the fear and cool the hate.
— Laurie R. King
Though my friends envied me because I always seemed so cheerful and confident, I was secretly terrified of practically everything.
— Erica Jong, Fear of Flying
…there is also an underlying, less specific fear - what some might call an ontological or existential anxiety - that shrouds our days and seeps into our dreams. We feel empty and seek meaning. We feel empty and seek meaning. We yearn and know not what we yearn for. There is a black hole at the center of our understanding that engulfs and crushes our every attempt to explore it. Something is missing. 
— Jesse Browner
If art made you think, then this was Art. Staring at the ball, made of layers and layers of cloth, I wondered about the glass marble at its heart. What if you wanted to reach that marble? Make sure it was still whole?You'd have to remove the layers. You'd have to risk breaking the ball for a chance at freeing it. Fear, knowledge, certainty - you'd have to be willing to let them all go.
— Justina Chen, North of Beautiful
When someone is stalking you because they think you are stalking them, it makes you wonder who really is the true stalker?
— Shannon L. Alder
Fear is the State's psychological weapon of choice to frighten citizens into sacrificing their basic freedoms and rule-of-law protections in exchange for the security promised by their all-powerful government.
— Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil
Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level.
— Don DeLillo, White Noise
My mind is the only sanctuary that has not been stolen from me.
— Christopher Paolini
The hoopoe said: 'Your heart's congealed like ice;When will you free yourself from cowardice?Since you have such a short time to live here,What difference does it make? What should you fear?The world is filth and sin, and homeless menMust enter it and homeless leave again.They die, as worms, in squalid pain; if weMust perish in this quest, that, certainly,Is better than a life of filth and grief.If this great search is vain, if my beliefIs groundless, it is right that I should die.So many errors throng the world - then whyShould we not risk this quest? To suffer blameFor love is better than a life of shame.No one has reached this goal, so why appealTo those whose blindness claims it is unreal?I'd rather die deceived by dreams than giveMy heart to home and trade and never live.We've been and heard so much - what have we learned?Not for one moment has the self been spurned;Fools gather round and hinder our release.When will their stale, insistent whining cease?We have no freedom to achieve our goalUntil from Self and fools we free the soul.To be admitted past the veil you mustBe dead to all the crowd considers just.Once past the veil you understand the WayFrom which the crowd's glib courtiers blindly stray.If you have any will, leave women's stories,And even if this search for hidden gloriesProves blasphemy at last, be sure our questIs not mere talk but an exacting test.The fruit of love's great tree is poverty;Whoever knows this knows humility.When love has pitched his tent in someone's breast,That man despairs of life and knows no rest.Love's pain will murder him and blandly askA surgeon's fee for managing the task -The water that he drinks brings pain, his breadIs turned to blood immediately shed;Though he is weak, faint, feebler than an ant,Love forces him to be her combatant;He cannot take one mouthful unawareThat he is floundering in a sea of care.
— Farid ud-Din Attar, The Conference of the Birds
You can see real attitude of man when he's terrified.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
Fear is a bird that refuses to fly, and each time she neglects to use her wings, she consents to the slow death of her destiny.
— Nadia Janice Brown
Why does it scare me to think I might be ordinary? I remember when I started first grade and I could hardly pay attention for fear I wouldn't learn to read and write. I didn't want to be like everyone else. I didn't want to have to learn. I wanted to know everything already
— Margaret Sartor, Miss American Pie: A Diary of Love, Secrets and Growing Up in the 1970s
If you want to see how far we have not come from the cave and the woods, from the lonely and dangerous days of the prarie or the plain, witness the reaction of a modern suburban family, nearly ready for bed, when the doorbell rings or the door is rattled. They will stop where they stand, or sit bolt upright in their beds, as if a streak of pure lightning has passed through the house. Eyes wide, voices fearful, they will whisper to each other, "There's someone at the door," in a way that might make you believe they have always feared and anticipated this moment - that they have spent their lives being stalked.
— Alice McDermott
A criminal remains a criminal whether he uses a convict's suit or a monarch's crown.
— Victor Hugo
Fear? What has a man to do with fear? Chance rules our lives, and the future is all unknown. Best live as we may, from day to day.
— Sophocles, Oedipus Rex
You don't know where you are or where your dreams end and the world begins.
— Rachel Klein, The Moth Diaries
I am as silent as death. Do this: Go to your bedroom. Your nice, safe, warm bedroom that is not a glass coffin behind a morgue door. Lie down on your bed not made of ice. Stick your fingers in your ears. Do you hear that? The pulse of life from your heart, the slow in-and-out from your lungs? Even when you are silent, even when you block out all noise, your body is still a cacophony of life. Mine is not. It is the silence that drives me mad. The silence that drives the nightmares to me. Because what if I am dead? How can someone without a beating heart, without breathing lungs live like I do? I must be dead. And this is my greatest fear: After 301 years, when they pull my glass coffin from this morgue, and they let my body thaw like chicken meat on the kitchen counter, I will be just like I am now. I will spend all of eternity trapped in my dead body. There is nothing beyond this. I will be locked within myself forever. And I want to scream. I want to throw open my eyes wake up and not be alone with myself anymore, but I can't. I can't.
— Beth Revis, Across the Universe
He prefers the security of known misery to the misery of unfamiliar insecurity.
— Sheldon B. Kopp, If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him: The Pilgrimage Of Psychotherapy Patients
There is fear hanging in the air of the sleeping halls, and the air of the streets. Fear walks through the city, fear without name, without shape. All men feel it and none dare speak.
— Ayn Rand, Anthem
Give into love or live in fear.
— Jonathan Larson
The pain of the narcissist is that, to him, everything is really a threat. What doesn't surrender in reverence is blasphemous to a high opinion of oneself - the burden of self-importance. The narcissist reconstructs his own law of gravity which states that all things and all creatures must adhere to his personal satisfaction, but when they do not, the pain is far more intense than it is for one who is free from the clamors of 'I'.
— Criss Jami, Killosophy
Courage is not the absence of fear or despair; it is the capacity to continue on despite them, no matter how great or overwhelming they become.
— Robert Fanney
Don't you see? You can't be brave without being afraid. The brave ones are always afraid. But they do what they must, even so.
— Teri Hall, The Line
You don't look so much like a great hero,' Jarrah said. 'I'm pretty sure I'm not,' Mack said wearily. 'My throat is hoarse from screaming in terror. I don't think heroes have that problem.
— Michael  Grant, The Call
For, so inconsistent is human nature, especially in the ideal, that not to undertake a thing at all seems better than to undertake and come short.
— Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin
From the dear comes grief; From the dear comes fear.If you're freed from the dear You'll have no grief, let alone fear.
— Anonymous, The Dhammapada
Fear has made them sloppy. The world teeters at a precipe. All scared to take a step in case they put a foot into empty air. The instinct of self-preservation. It can destroy a man's efficiency.
— Joe Abercrombie, Last Argument of Kings
The human mind is often, and I think it is for the most part, in a state neither of pain nor pleasure, which I call a state of indifference.
— Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
Fear plants the whisper to beware but doesn't look to see who's there.
— Vanna Bonta, Degrees: Thought Capsules
I've loved you for a long time, ' she said. 'But there was always something holding me back. Maybe it was that I was afraid of an emotion that was so consuming. It still frightens me,' she admitted in a whisper. Tamani chuckled. 'If it makes you feel any better, it scares the daylights out of me on a regular basis.
— Aprilynne Pike, Destined
No power so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.
— Edmund Burke
You're afraid of your own anger.
— Kristin Cashore, Graceling
I never feared the night, not even as a child, but Blackcliff’s night is different, heavy with a silence that makes you look over your shoulder, a silence that feels like a living thing.
— Sabaa Tahir, An Ember in the Ashes
Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or on some desolate street or even in the comforts of your own home, you'll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You'll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or unconscious. And for better or worse you'll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist you still will, fighting with everything you've got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name.And then the nightmares will begin.
— Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
This is our big chance to see what people think of us. The real us. We have to show em there's nothing to be afraid of. If we don't get over our fears, they never will.
— Lisi Harrison, Monster High
You can figure out what the villain fears by his choice of weapons.
— Connie Brockway, The Bridal Season
Fear has a lot of flavors and textures. There's a sharp, silver fear that runs like lightning through your arms and legs, galvanizes you into action, power, motion. There's heavy, leaden fear that comes in ingots, piling up in your belly during the empty hours between midnight and morning, when everything is dark, every problem grows larger, and every wound and illness grows worse. And there is coppery fear, drawn tight as the strings of a violin, quavering on one single note that cannot possibly be sustained for a single second longer—but goes on and on and on, the tension before the crash of cymbals, the brassy challenge of the horns, the threatening rumble of the kettle drums. That's the kind of fear I felt. Horrible, clutching tension that left the coppery flavor of blood on my tongue. Fear of the creatures in the darkness around me, of my own weakness, the stolen power the Nightmare had torn from me. And fear for those around me, for the folk who didn't have the power I had.
— Jim Butcher, Grave Peril
There is nothing to fear. Nothing to worry about. Grieve nothing in this transitory world," he says softly.
— Tahereh Mafi, Ignite Me
I clench my teeth as tears come. I am fed up. I am fed up with tears and weakness. But there isn't much I can do to stop them. ~ 'Tris
— Veronica Roth, Divergent
Grandfather : Death is nothing to be afraid of.Renee : It's not death I'm afraid of.Grandfather: What is it,
— Yvonne Wood, Dead Beautiful
Mari remembered what she had read in the young girl's eyes the moment she had come into the refectory: fear.Fear. Veronika might feel insecurity, shyness, shame, constraint, but why fear? That was only justifiable when confronted by a real threat: ferocious animals, armed attackers, earthquakes, but not a group of people gathered together in a refectory.But human beings are like that,' she thought. 'We've replaced nearly all our emotions with fear.
— Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die
To acknowledge the presence of fear is to give birth to failure.
— Katherine Mansfield
We cannot be too cautious, Hannelore. Just because someone knocks on the door doesn't mean you have to open it. Sometimes, sweet girl, there are wolves at the door. If we are not careful, they might eat us.
— Ruta Sepetys, Salt to the Sea
In the land of the blind the one eyed man is king. In the darkness the man with a candle is an easy target.
— Michael  Grant
When faced with something I fear, I tend to eat spaghetti.
— Mark Helprin, Memoir from Antproof Case
The people can be forced to fear, but not to love.
— Steve Berry, The Romanov Prophecy
Suddenly, like a thing falling upon me from without, came fear.
— H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds
No, no, no, so not getting the point of fear. Because fear wasn't about what made sense. Fear was about possibilities. Not things that happened. Things that might.
— Michael  Grant, Fear
I told myself: 'I am surrounded by unknown things.' I imagined man without ears, suspecting the existence of sound as we suspect so many hidden mysteries, man noting acoustic phenomena whose nature and provenance he cannot determine. And I grew afraid of everything around me – afraid of the air, afraid of the night. From the moment we can know almost nothing, and from the moment that everything is limitless, what remains? Does emptiness actually not exist? What does exist in this apparent emptiness?
— Guy de Maupassant, Complete Works
It takes me a while to figure things out, doesn't it?" Edilio grinned. "Do me a favor. When you find Astrid, repeat that to her, word for word, the part about how it takes you a while. Then remember her exact reaction and tell me.
— Michael  Grant, Fear
He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.
— Shannon L. Alder
We fear men so much, because we fear God so little.
— William Gurnall
All I insist on, and nothing else, is that you should show the whole world that you are not afraid. Be silent, if you choose; but when it is necessary, speak—and speak in such a way that people will remember it.
— Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
A naked blade hid nothing, feared nothing. She wanted to be like that. Because that was how you found yourself, created yourself. You didn't hide. You didn't wait for the perfect moment to settle on you like a butterfly, like 
— Sarah Cross, Kill Me Softly
Good words," I replied. "But deeds must prove it also; and after he is well, remember you don't forget resolutions formed in the hour of fear.
— Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
It is a true saying, that what you fear you find.
— Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry
Never be afraid to be sexy!
— Alysha Speer
The waitress had the appearance of a very old hooker who had finally found her place in life
— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
You might be afraid of the dark, but the dark is not afraid of you. That’s why the dark is always close by.
— Lemony Snicket, The Dark
Surrender to your fear so you may triumph over it.
— Simon Holt, The Devouring
The number of ways you can live in one lifetime is limitless. So why limit yourself? The sky is NOT the limit. Beyond the universe is.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Unable to attribute misfortune to chance, unable to accept their ultimate insignificance within the greater scheme, the people looked for monsters in their midst.
— Bernard Beckett, Genesis
To others, the universe seems decent because decent people have welded eyes. That is why they fear lewdness. They are never frightened by the crowing of a rooster or when strolling under a starry heaven. In general, people savor the "pleasures of the flesh" only on the condition that they may be insipid.
— Georges Bataille
Fear kills more dreams than failure ever will.
— Suzy Kassem
Maybe it was inertia -or worse, fear- that was keeping me in the same place.
— Jennifer Weiner, Certain Girls
When you're scared, you stay as you are!
— Stephen Richards
... you sometimes had to force people to say things they would rather not articulate, just so they could hear their own words. It was interesting the way people could know things and not know them at the same time. Denial, he said, was like a thick stone wall.
— Nell Freudenberger, The Dissident
So many bad things have happened to them that they can't trust the good things. They have to shove them away before someone can get it back.
— Wally Lamb, The Hour I First Believed
I didn't like anything. Maybe I was afraid. That was it - I was afraid. I wanted to sit alone in a room with the shades down. I feasted upon that. I was a crank. I was a lunatic.
— Charles Bukowski, Women
If you're afraid of everything out there, you quit going out there.
— Jesse Eisenberg
Fear is the thief of dreams.
— Brian Krans, A Constant Suicide
Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.
— Siri Hustvedt, The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves
Face your fears or they will climb over your back.
— Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune
There's a lot youdon't know, Sam. There's a lot I don't tell you. I know who I am. I know what I do, and what I am to this place.I know what I am to you, and how much you depend on me.You may be the symbol, and you may be the one everyone turns to when something goes bad, and you're the big badass, but I'm the guy doing the day-in, day-out work of running things. So I don't make this about me.
— Michael  Grant, Fear
All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.
— Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale
Do research. Feed your talent. Research not only wins the war on cliche, it's the key to victory over fear and it's cousin, depression.
— Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting
Turn on the faucet. Wash yourself with the emotion. It won’t hurt you. It will only help. If you let the fear inside, if you pull it on like a familiar shirt, then you can say to yourself, “All right, it’s just fear, I don’t have to let it control me. I see it for what it is".
— Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
If you're are paralyzed with fear it's a good sign. It shows you what you have to do.
— Steven Pressfield
It's a secret code," said Calvin. "Girls are not not like boys. If a boy wants to kill you, he says 'I'm going to kill you.' If a girl wants to kill you, she says, 'We need to talk.' That's the code."I gasped. "Has a girl ever wanted to talk to you?" I asked. "Yup," said Calvin."How come you're still alive?" I asked."I vomited," said Calvin.
— Lenore Look, Allergic to Birthday Parties, Science Projects, and Other Man-made Catastrophes
The most effective weapon a parent has to control a child is the withdrawal of love or its threat. A young child between the ages of three and six is too dependent on parental love and approval to resist this pressure. Robert's mother, as we saw earlier, controlled him by "cutting him out." Margaret's mother beat her into submission, but it was the loss of her father's love that devastated her. Whatever the means parents use, the result is that the child is forced to give up his instinctual longing, to suppress his sexual desires for one parent and his hostility toward the other. In their place he will develop feelings of guilt about his sexuality and fear of authority figures. This surrender constitutes an acceptance of parental power and authority and a submission to the parents' values and demands. The child becomes "good", which means that he gives up his sexual orientation in favor of one directed toward achievement. Parental authority is introjected in the form of a superego, ensuring that the child will follow his parents' wishes in the acculturation process. In effect, the child now identifies with the threatening parent. Freud says, "The whole process, on the one hand, preserves the genital organ wards off the danger of losing it; on the other hand, it paralyzes it, takes its function away from it.
— Alexander Lowen, Fear of Life
Cancer. The word meant the same to me as tsunami or piranha. I had never seen them; I wasn't even quite sure what they were, but I knew they were bad and I knew in many cases they were deadly.
— Natalie Palmer, Second Kiss
Remember that fear always lurks behind perfectionism. Confronting your fears and allowing yourself the right to be human can, paradoxically, make you a far happier and more productive person.
— David M. Burns
Plagiarism is the fear of a blank page.
— Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Hate is an automatic response to fear, for fear humiliates.
— Graham Greene, The Human Factor
But think of how much worse it would be to sit here, not knowing. Until the Dead choke the Ratterlin and Hedge walks across the dry bed of the river to batter down the door.
— Garth Nix, Abhorsen
You always have two choices: your commitment versus your fear.
— Sammy Davis Jr.
Fear, left unchecked, can spread like a virus.
— Lish McBride, Necromancing the Stone
That's the thing about fear. Death will kill you once, but fear kills you over and over and over, if you let it.
— Marcus Allen
The world can be such a fright, but it belongs to us tonight.
— Craig Ferguson
There lay between them, separating them, that same terrible line of the unknown and of fear, like the line separating the living from the dead.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
He rubbed his hands up and down, warming her. “Then that’s all you need to know. I have you. If there are beasties in the dark, they have to get through me.
— Tessa Dare, Romancing the Duke
Beethoven said that it's better to hit the wrong note confidently, than hit the right note unconfidently. Never be afraid to be wrong or to embarrass yourself; we are all students in this life, and there is always something more to learn.
— Mike  Norton
I remeber asking a wise man, once . . . 'Why do Men fear the dark?' . . . 'Because darkness' he told me, 'is ignorance made visable.' 'And do Men despise ignorance?' I asked. 'No,' he said, 'they prize it above all things--all things!--but only so long as it remains invisible.
— R. Scott Bakker, The Judging Eye
I am quite sure I am more afraid of people who are themselves terrified of the devil than I am of the devil himself.
— Teresa of Ávila, The Life of Saint Teresa of Ávila by Herself
Sometimes we have to step out of our comfort zones. We have to break the rules. And we have to discover the sensuality of fear. We need to face it, challenge it, dance with it.
— Kyra Davis
The world we see that seems so insane is the result of a belief system that is not working. To perceive the world differently, we must be willing to change our belief system, let the past slip away, expand our sense of now, and dissolve the fear in our minds.
— Gerald G. Jampolsky, Love Is Letting Go of Fear
Anger prepares us to fight and fear prepares us to flee.
— Chip Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
He leans in, resting his weathered hand on the bed. "Treat all the bad things like dreams, Kenzie. That way, no matter how scary or dark they get, you just have to survive until you wake up.
— Victoria Schwab, The Unbound
Talking about my fears to others feeds it.
— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
Oliver: Fear is the natural state of anything that dies.
— Rachel Caine, Last Breath
The gift of willingness is the only thing that stands between the quiet desperation of a disingenuous life and the actualization of unexpressed potential.
— James Patrick McDonald, Who Would I Be Without: Based on a True Story of a Little Willingness
They don't know the meaning of danger or fear or pain. It's only their pride that can be truly hurt.
— Victoria Aveyard, Red Queen
Living a life somewhere else in your mind is nothing more than being a prisoner where you are.
— Shannon L. Alder
At other times, at the edge of a wood, especially at dusk, the trees themselves would assume strange shapes: sometimes they were arms rising heavenwards, , or else the trunk would twist and turn like a body being bent by the wind. At night, when I woke up and the moon and the stars were out, I would see in the sky things that filled me simultaneously with dread and longing. I remember that once, one Christmas Eve, I saw a great naked women, standing erect, with rolling eyes; she must have been a hundred feet high, but along she drifted, growing ever longer and ever thinner, and finally fell apart, each limb remaining separate, with the head floating away first as the rest of her body continued to waver
— Gustave Flaubert, November
A thousand times today I've started to open my mouth, started to squeak out, "Can you tell me...? But then I'd look into the front seat, at my mother's silent shaking, my father's grim profile, the mournful bags under his eyes, and all the questions I might ask seemed abusive. Assault and battery, a question mark used like a club. My parents are old and fragile. I'd have to heartless to want to hurt them.
— Margaret Peterson Haddix, Double Identity
Fear is an enemy that can be killed only at close range. The closest range of all is intimacy. The deeper the fear is embedded in one’s spirit, the more vulnerable it is.
— Andrew Vachss, Haiku
Guilt and rage, hatred and fear were pathways to weakness and clumsy choices.
— Jonathan Maberry, Dust & Decay
I hated the quiet. I could hear my fears that much louder for it.
— Alwyn Hamilton, Traitor to the Throne
A warrior fears the battle he missed. More than any fight he can make his own, he fears the fight that’s gone, that ended without him, that no feat of arms can change.
— Mark  Lawrence, Prince of Fools
If a train is coming at you, closing your eyes won't save you ... but if you look right at it, you at least have a chance to jump.
— Andrew Vachss, The Weight
I know, from the three visits I made to him, the blended composite of love and fear that exists only in a boy's notion of his father.
— Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
….it was a brave man’s fear. I knew what he meant. What must a brave general feel when he knows the battle has gone against him and nothing remains but death?
— Anne Rice, Blood And Gold
With a hangover and with fear, it is difficult to put a helmet on your head.
— Tim O'Brien, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home
There's no better cure for the fear of taking after one's father, than not to know who he is.
— André Gide, The Counterfeiters
Simple shifts in points of view can open doors to expansions of consciousness as easily as rigid dispositions can close hearts and minds to such elevated awareness. It generally depends on whether you allow fear and violence to rule your actions or whether you give wisdom, courage, and compassion the authority to do so.
— Aberjhani, Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays
Every persisting marriage is based on fear', said Peregrine. 'Fear is fundamental, you dig down in human nature and what's at the bottom? Mean spiteful cruel self-regarding fear, whether it makes you to put the foot in it or whether it makes you to cower...
— Iris Murdoch
The corporations that profit from permanent war need us to be afraid. Fear stops us from objecting to government spending on a bloated military. Fear means we will not ask unpleasant questions of those in power. Fear permits the government to operate in secret. Fear means we are willing to give up our rights and liberties for promises of security. The imposition of fear ensures that the corporations that wrecked the country cannot be challenged. Fear keeps us penned in like livestock.
— Chris Hedges, The Death of the Liberal Class
Remember that fear causes to happen the very things it fears. That's why fear should be unknown to us.
— Louis de Bernières
You see, the strangeness of my case is that now I no longer fear the invisible, I’m terrified by reality.
— Jean Lorrain
Nothing can describe the withering horror of this. You feel lost, sick at heart before such unmasked hatred, not so much because it threatens you as because it shows humans in such an inhuman light. You see a kind of insanity, something so obscene the very obscenity of it (rather than its threat) terrifies you. It was so new I could not take my eyes from the man's face. I felt like saying: "What in God's name are you doing to yourself?
— John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me
There are many roles that people play and many images that they project. There is, for example, the "nice" man who is always smiling and agreeable. "Such a nice man," people say. "He never gets angry." The facade always covers its opposite expression. Inside, such a person is full of rage that he dares not acknowledge or show. Some men put up a tough exterior to hide a very sensitive, childlike quality. Even failure can be a role. Many masochistic characters engage in the game of failure to cover an inner feeling of superiority. An outward show of superiority could bring down on them the jealous wrath of the father and the threat of castration. As long as they act like failures they can retain some sexuality, since they are not a threat to her father.
— Alexander Lowen, Fear of Life
If you are facing a new challenge or being asked to do something that you have never done before don’t be afraid to step out. You have more capability than you think you do but you will never see it unless you place a demand on yourself for more.
— Joyce Meyer
Would that thy love, beloved, had less trust in me, that it might be more anxious!
— Héloïse d'Argenteuil, The Letters of Abélard and Héloïse
Fear has no brains it is an idiot. The dismal witness that it bears and the cowardly counsel that it whispers are unrelated. 
— Ambrose Bierce, The Moonlit Road and Other Ghost and Horror Stories
Whatever it is you're scared of doing, Do it.
— Neil Gaiman
We are fast moving into something, we are fast flung into something like asteroids cast into space by the death of a planet, we the people of earth are cast into space like burning asteroids and if we wish not to disintegrate into nothingness we must begin to now hold onto only the things that matter while letting go of all that doesn't. For when all of our dust and ice deteriorates into the cosmos we will be left only with ourselves and nothing else. So if you want to be there in the end, today is the day to start holding onto your children, holding onto your loved ones; onto those who share your soul. Harbor and anchor into your heart justice, truth, courage, bravery, belief, a firm vision, a steadfast and sound mind. Be the person of meaningful and valuable thoughts. Don't look to the left, don't look to the right; we simply don't have the time. Never be afraid of fear.
— C. JoyBell C.
Fear is the cancer
— Simon Holt, The Devouring
At the heart of all anger, all grudges, and all resentment, you'll always find a fear that hopes to stay anonymous.
— Donald L. Hicks, Look into the stillness
It is for your own good to love a dare-devil rather than a holy coward. A dare-devil is a unique devil, battling your fears, your pains, conquering your uncertainties, carrying you his arms, and flying out of the corrosive fire. The coward is a trickster serpent, which vanishes in your time of despair, and appears in time of equanimity.
— Michael Bassey Johnson
We think there are limits to the dimensions of fear. Until we encounter the unknown. Then we can all feel boundless amounts of terror.
— Peter Høeg, Smilla's Sense of Snow
But I was afraid of the questions (much more than the accusations) you might both put to me. 
— J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
You don't need to be so fierce and bluffing..if you already know that I can't be intimidated.
— Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
Then what are you? An electronic Hannibal Lector? You can't eat my liver with fava beans through a modem, you know.
— Dean Koontz, Demon Seed
I believe that courage is all too often mistakenly seen as the absence of fear. If you descend by rope from a cliff and are not fearful to some degree, you are either crazy or unaware. Courage is seeing your fear, in a realistic perspective, defining it, considering alternatives and choosing to function in spite of risks.
— Leonard Zunin
We'll know we've got it right when they choose for themselves," he used to say. That doesn't make sense. 'That's what I thought too. I asked him what he meant, but he just shrugged. I don't think he knew himself. But I keep thinking maybe that stray is making exactly the kind of choice he talked about. We're talking about an adult dog, a dog that's been out in the woods for a long time, trying to decide whether or not we can be trusted. Whether this is his place. And it matters to him - he'd rather starve than make the wrong decision.
— David Wroblewski, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
Dissident Natan Sharansky writes that there are two kinds of states -- "fear societies" and "free societies," two kinds of consciousness. The consciousness derived of oppression is despairing, fatalistic, and fearful of inquiry. It is mistrustful of the self and forced to trust external authority. It is premised on a dearth of self-respect. It is cramped.In contrast, the consciousness of freedom is one of expansiveness, trust of the self, and hope. It is a consciousness of limitless inquiry. It builds up in a citizen a wealth of self-respect.
— Naomi Wolf, Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries
All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life.
— Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale
I believe fear of what we do not know may be the devil's best tool, meant to keep us back from those we long to approach.
— Vicki Grove, Rhiannon
They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressure; there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves.
— Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles
The thing I fear most is fear.
— Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays
There's nothing in the sea this fish would fear. Other fish run from bigger things. That's their instinct. But this fish doesn't run from anything. He doesn't fear.
— Peter Benchley, Jaws
What is fear after all? It is indecision. You seek some way to resist, escape. There is none.
— Anne Rice, The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty
But fear is confusing. It tears you in two. Half of you wants to run far, far away, but the other half is paralyzed, frozen, immovable. And the hard part is that you never know which half is going to win.
— Melody Carlson, Finding Alice
To live with fear and not be afraid is the final test of maturity.
— Edward Weeks
Fear is never a good counselor and victory over fear is the first spiritual duty of man.
— Nikolai A. Berdyaev
Beyond the clouds, above people, beneath the skin, inside people, we’re waiting for you. We see you now, as you read. We’ll see you when you stop thinking about these words. Above and inside your face, we know your secrets. We know what you hide from yourself. You can’t escape us. We hold your heart in the palm of our hand. If we like, we can squeeze it. If we like, we can crush it. There’s nothing you can do to stop us. Our gaze notices your every single move and your every single word. Say a word now. Make a move. We smile at your words, as we smile at your silence. No one will be able to protect you. No one can protect you now. You’re even less than you imagine. We’ve seen a thousand generations of men like you. It was our pleasure to let them walk on the lines of our hands. It was our pleasure to take everything away from them. We guided entire generations of men through tunnels we built that led nowhere. And when they arrived at nothing, we smiled. You’re just like them. We’re waiting for you above and inside your face. Continue on your way. Follow that line of our hand. We know where that tunnel you walk through will end. Keep on walking. We see you and smile. Beyond the clouds, we are fear. Beneath the skin, we are fear.
— José Luís Peixoto, Antídoto
An intense cold swept over them all. Harry felt his own breath catch in his chest. The cold went deeper than his skin. It was inside his chest, it was inside his very heart. . . .Harry’s eyes rolled up into his head. He couldn’t see. He was drowning in cold. There was a rushing in his ears as though of water. He was being dragged downward, the roaring growing louder . . .And then, from far away, he heard screaming, terrible, terrified, pleading screams. He wanted to help whoever it was, he tried to move his arms, but couldn’t . . . a thick white fog was swirling around him, inside him —
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Fear clogged human potential.
— Toba Beta, Master of Stupidity
It's the unknown that I fear, the bites of memories that still have no connections.
— Mary E. Pearson, The Adoration of Jenna Fox
Everyone is running from something. But if we’re lucky, really lucky, fate intervenes and presents an opportunity to conquer our fears. Only then, if triumphant, can a destiny bestowed become a destiny fulfilled.
— Rome Sims
The only thing I am afraid of is fear.
— Arthur Wellesley
Superstition is the need to view the world in terms of simple cause and effect. As I have already said, religious fundamentalism was on the rise, but that is not the type of superstition I am referring to. The superstition that held sway at the time was a belief in simple causes. Even the plainest of events is tied down by a thick tangle of permutation and possibility, but the human mind struggles with such complexity. In times of trouble, when the belief in simple gods breaks down, a cult of conspiracy arises. So it was back then. Unable to attribute misfortune to chance, unable to accept their ultimate insignificance within the greater scheme, the people looked for monsters in their midst. The more the media peddled fear, the more the people lost the ability to believe in one another. For every new ill that befell them, the media created an explanation, and the explanation always had a face and a name. The people came to fear even their closest neighbors. At the level of the individual, the community, and the nation, people sought signs of others’ ill intentions; and everywhere they looked, they found them, for this is what looking does. This was the true challenge the people of this time faced. The challenge of trusting one another. And they fell short
— Bernard Beckett
For sometime now I have believed that it is our own force, all our own force that is still too great for us. It is true that we do not know it; but is it not just that which is most our own of which we know the least?
— Rainer Maria Rilke
Can't figure women. Sometimes they're afraid of a spider, other times they're not afraid to stand right up to the devil.
— Donal Harding, Leaving Summer
Good.I need you to be scared.Very,very scared.And then you'll never be scared again.
— Simon Holt, The Devouring
From this arises the following question: whether it is better to be loved than feared, or the reverse. The answer is that one would like to be both the one and the other, but because they are difficult to combine, it is far better to be loved than feared if you cannot be both.
— Niccolò Machiavelli
The process of breaking down fear was always my greatest challenge and it was made easier by the careful work and gentle voices of my female workers.
— Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty
That's interesting," Bitterblue said. "You think a conscience requires fear?
— Kristin Cashore, Bitterblue
He cared less, so they cared more. He said it was beautiful. I knew he was broken.This was his game.
— Coco J. Ginger
I am convinced that the deepest desire within each of us is to be liberated from the controlling influences of our own psychic madness or patterns of fear. All other things—the disdain of ordinary life, the need to control others rather than be controlled, the craving for material goods as a means of security and protection against the winds of chaos—are external props that serve as substitutes for the real battle, which is the one waged within the individual soul.
— Caroline Myss
He hated being filled with terror. It was embarrassing.
— Rick Riordan, The Blood of Olympus
That's because only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear - the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness.
— H.P. Lovecraft, Pickman's Model
Fear is an insidious and deadly thing. It can warp judgment, freeze reflexes, breed mistakes. Worse, it's contagious.
— Jimmy Stewart
Nico remembered something Jason Grace had told him in the palace of Notus: Maybe it’s time you come out of the shadows. If only I could, he thought. For the first time in his life, he had begun to fear the dark, because he might melt into it permanently.
— Rick Riordan, The Blood of Olympus
Your lack of fear is based on your ignorance.
— Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem
To be feared of a thing and yet to do it, is what makes the prettiest kind of a man.
— Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped and Catriona
Amaranta, however, whose hardness of heart frightened her, whose concentrated bitterness made her bitter, suddenly became clear to her in the final analysis as the most tender woman who had ever existed, and she understood with pitying clarity that the unjust tortures to which she had submitted Pietro Crespi had not been dictated by a desire for vengeance, as everyone had thought, nor had the slow martyrdom with which she had frustrated the life of Colonel Gerineldo Márquez been determined by the gall of her bitterness, as everyone had thought, but that both actions had been a mortal struggle between a measureless love and an invincible cowardice, and that the irrational fear that Amaranta had always had of her own tormented heart had triumphed in the end.
— Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
As Grams treaded water, she tapped my forehead. 'What's in here, Poppy, is scarier than anything you'll encounter in the depths of the ocean. An imagination is a powerful thing.
— Shelley Coriell, Welcome, Caller, This Is Chloe
Devour your fear.
— Simon Holt, The Devouring
I am afraid a monster is grown that will devour all of us. Yet we must fight him.
— Isaac Asimov, Foundation and Empire
The world can do nothing to a Christian who has no fear of man.
— Brother Yun, The Heavenly Man: The Remarkable True Story of Chinese Christian Brother Yun
Failure seldom stops you. What stops you is the fear of failure.
— Jack Lemmon
Now I lay facedown on the bed, sobbing for the womanwho once slept here not knowing that someday one of herworst fears would come true
— Jennifer Castle, The Beginning of After
The fear for oneself, that one can do something about. Upon it one can turn the light of awareness. But when one is no longer worrying about oneself, then the fear comes for other people and, after that, for the world.There are no fearless people, only fearless moments.
— Peter Høeg