"...the only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Invisible Monsters)

""A ship is safe in harbor, but that's not what ships are for."
"
— William Shedd

"So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?"
— Hunter S. Thompson

"There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a duty to take this risk, to love and feel without defense or reserve. "
— William S. Burroughs

""If you don't take risks, you'll have a wasted soul.""
— Drew Barrymore

"Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk."
— Dalai Lama XIV

"Why not go out on a limb? That's where the fruit is."
— Will Rogers

"Vital lives are about action. You can't feel warmth unless you create it, can't feel delight until you play,can't know serendipity unless you risk."
— Joan Erikson

"When we walk to the edge of all the light we have and take a step into the darkness of the unknown, we must believe that one of two things will happen. There will be something solid for us to stand on or we will be taught to fly."
— Patrick Overton

"Far better is it to dare mighty things than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much."
— Theodore Roosevelt

"Fortune sides with him who dares."
— Publius Vergilius Maro

"Il n'est pas certain que tout soit incertain.
(Translation: It is not certain that everything is uncertain.)"
— Blaise Pascal (Pascal's Pensees)

"Most people would rather be certain they're miserable, than risk being happy."
— Robert Anthony

"The only safe thing is to take a chance."
— Elaine May

"Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go."
— T. S. Eliot

"To take that risk, to offer life and remain alive, open yourself like this and become whole."
— Margaret Atwood

"To love is to risk not being loved in return. To hope is to risk pain. To try is to risk failure, but risk must be taken because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing."
— i dont know

"Love's easy to learn. It's like taking a risk. You set your mind on it and refuse to be afraid, and in no time you feel terrifically exhilarated and all your inhibitions fly out of the window."
— Dick Francis (Dead Cert)

"In theory, the risk of business failure can be reduced to a number, the probability of failure multiplied by the cost of failure. Sure, this turns out to be a subjective analysis, but in the process your own attitudes toward financial risk and reward are revealed.

By contrast, personal risk usually defies quantification. It's a matter of values and priorities, an expression of who you are. "Playing it safe" may simply mean you do not weigh heavily the compromises inherent in the status quo. The financial rewards of the moment may fully compensate you for the loss of time and fulfillment. Or maybe you just don't think about it. On the other hand, if time and satisfaction are precious, truly priceless, you will find the cost of business failure, so long as it does not put in peril the well-being of you or your family, pales in comparison with the personal risks of no trying to live the life you want today.

Considering personal risk forces us to define personal success. We may well discover that the business failure we avoid and the business success we strive for do not lead us to personal success at all. Most of us have inherited notions of "success" from someone else or have arrived at these notions by facing a seemingly endless line of hurdles extending from grade school through college and into our careers. We constantly judge ourselves against criteria that others have set and rank ourselves against others in their game. Personal goals, on the other hand, leave us on our own, without this habit of useless measurement and comparison.

Only the Whole Life Plan leads to personal success. It has the greatest chance of providing satisfaction and contentment that one can take to the grave, tomorrow. In the Deferred Life Plan there will always be another prize to covet, another distraction, a new hunger to sate. You will forever come up short."
— Randy Komisar (The Monk and the Riddle : The Education of a Silicon Valley Entrepreneur)

"To win without risk is to triumph without glory."
— Pierre Corneille

"America is a leap of the imagination. From its beginning, people had only a persistent idea of what a good country should be. The idea involved freedom, equality, justice, and the pursuit of happiness; nowadays most of us probably could not describe it a lot more clearly than that. The truth is, it always has been a bit of a guess. No one has ever known for sure whether a country based on such an idea is really possible, but again and again, we have leaped toward the idea and hoped. What SuAnne Big Crow demonstrated in the Lead high school gym is that making the leap is the whole point. The idea does not truly live unless it is expressed by an act; the country does not live unless we make the leap from our tribe or focus group or gated community or demographic, and land on the shaky platform of that idea of a good country which all kinds of different people share.

This leap is made in public, and it's made for free. It's not a product or a service that anyone will pay you for. You do it for reasons unexplainable by economics--for ambition, out of conviction, for the heck of it, in playfulness, for love. It's done in public spaces, face-to-face, where anyone is free to go. It's not done on television, on the Internet, or over the telephone; our electronic systems can only tell us if the leap made elsewhere has succeeded or failed. The places you'll see it are high school gyms, city sidewalks, the subway, bus stations, public parks, parking lots, and wherever people gather during natural disasters. In those places and others like them, the leaps that continue to invent and knit the country continue to be made. When the leap fails, it looks like the L.A. riots, or Sherman's March through Georgia. When it succeeds, it looks like the New York City Bicentennial Celebration in July 1976 or the Civil Rights March on Washington in 1963. On that scale, whether it succeeds or fails, it's always something to see. The leap requires physical presence and physical risk. But the payoff--in terms of dreams realized, of understanding, of people getting along--can be so glorious as to make the risk seem minuscule."
— Ian Frazier (On the Rez)

"When we walk to the edge of all the light we have and take the step into the darkness of the unknown, we must believe that one of two things will happen. There will be something solid for us to stand on or we will be taught to fly."
— Patrick Overton

"There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value."
— Jeanette Winterson (Written on the Body)

"I've long believed that good food, good eating, is all about risk. Whether we're talking about unpasteurized Stilton, raw oysters or working for organized crime 'associates,' food, for me, has always been an adventure"
— Anthony Bourdain (Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly)

"People who don't take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year."
— Peter Drucker

"They were two lovely choices. One of them meant giving up every chance of a decent life forever...and the other one scared me out of my mind."
— Frederik Pohl (Gateway)