"To hear the phrase "our only hope" always makes one anxious, because it means that if the only hope doesn't work, there is nothing left."
— Lemony Snicket (The Blank Book)

"Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom."
— Søren Kierkegaard

"After all, what is happiness? Love, they tell me. But love doesn't bring and never has brought happiness. On the contrary, it's a constant state of anxiety, a battlefield; it's sleepless nights, asking ourselves all the time if we're doing the right thing. Real love is composed of ecstasy and agony."
— Paulo Coelho (The Witch of Portobello)

"Life is ten percent what you experience and ninety percent how you respond to it."
— Dorothy M. Neddermeyer, PhD

"Worrying is carrying tomorrow's load with today's strength- carrying two days at once. It is moving into tomorrow ahead of time. Worrying doesn't empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength."
— Corrie Ten Boom

"I wondered what you'd have on the side with a plate of Deep Fried Anxiety. Pickles? Coleslaw? Potato-strychnine mash?"
— Robin McKinley (Sunshine)

"The more you pray, the less you'll panic. The more you worship, the less you worry. You'll feel more patient and less pressured."
— Rick Warren (The Purpose of Christmas)

"It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase."
— David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest: A Novel)

"To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose one's self.... And to venture in the highest is precisely to be conscious of one's self."
— Søren Kierkegaard

"The pleasure of living and the pleasure of the orgasm are identical. Extreme orgasm anxiety forms the basis of the general fear of life."
— Wilhelm Reich

"Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith. I don't agree at all. They are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the Passion of Christ"
— C.S. Lewis (Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer)

"But the great artists like Michelangelo and Blake and Tolstoi--like Christ whom Blake called an artist because he had one of the most creative imaginations that ever was on earth--do not want security, egoistic or materialistic. Why, it never occurs to them. "Be not anxious for the morrow," and "which of you being anxious can add one cubit to his stature?"

So they dare to be idle, i.e. not to be pressed and duty-driven all the time. They dare to love people even when they are very bad, and they dare not to try and dominate others to show them what they must do for their own good. "
— Brenda Ueland (If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit)

"Temperamentally anxious people can have a hard time staying motivated, period, because their intense focus on their worries distracts them from their goals."
— Winifred Gallagher (Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life)

"…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

"Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems"
— Epictetus

"Did you have one of those days today, like a nail in the foot? Did the pterodactyl corpse dropped by the ghost of your mother from the spectral Hindenburg forever circling the Earth come smashing through the lid of your glass coffin? Did the New York strip steak you attacked at dinner suddenly show a mouth filled with needle-sharp teeth, and did it snap off the end of your fork, the last solid-gold fork from the set Anastasia pressed into your hands as they took her away to be shot? Is the slab under your apartment building moaning that it cannot stand the weight on its back a moment longer, and is the building stretching and creaking? Did a good friend betray you today, or did that good friend merely keep silent and fail to come to your aid? Are you holding the razor at your throat this very instant? Take heart, comfort is at hand. This is the hour that stretches. Djan karet. We are the cavalry. We're here. Put away the pills. We'll get you through this bloody night. Next time, it'll be your turn to help us.
"Eidolons" (1988)"
— Harlan Ellison

""My heart hurts so lovingly tender, yet, so benzo violently""
— S.K. Torma

"The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray/Audio Cassettes)

"...Some part of me can't wait to see what life's going to come up with next! Anticipation without the usual anxiety. And underneath it all is the feeling that we both belong here, just as we are, right now."
— Alexander Shulgin

"People who are diagnosed as having "generalized anxiety disorder" are afflicted by three major problems that many of us experience to a lesser extent from time to time. First and foremost, says Rapgay, the natural human inclination to focus on threats and bad news is strongly amplified in them, so that even significant positive events get suppressed. An inflexible mentality and tendency toward excessive verbalizing make therapeutic intervention a further challenge."
— Winifred Gallagher (Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life)

"Worry gives a small thing a big shadow."
— Swedish Proverb

""Anyone who has no need of anybody but himself is either a beast or a God."
Aristotle"
— Bruce Wayne Sullivan

"The suspense: the fearful, acute suspense: of standing idly by while the life of one we dearly love, is trembling in the balance; the racking thoughts that crowd upon the mind, and make the heart beat violently, and the breath come thick, by the force of the images they conjure up before it; the desperate anxiety to be doing something to relieve the pain, or lessen the danger, which we have no power to alleviate; the sinking of soul and spirit, which the sad remembrance of our helplessness produces; what tortures can equal these; what reflections of endeavours can, in the full tide and fever of the time, allay them!"
— Charles Dickens (Oliver Twist)

"Chronic anxiety is a state more undesirable than any other, and we will try almost any maneuver to eliminate it. Modern man is living in anxious anticipation of destruction. Such anxiety can be easily eliminated by self-destruction. As a German saying puts it: 'Better an end with terror than a terror without end.'"
— Robert E. Neale (The Art of Dying)