Anxiety Quotes

“Empathy has to be forged by personal suffering.”
― The School of Life, Anxiety: Meditations on the Anxious Mind

“But that is just as illusory. It doesn’t matter what goals we have: they will never be enough. Life is a process of replacing one anxiety and one desire with another. No goal spares us renewed goal seeking. The only stable element in our lives is craving; the only destination is the journey.”
― The School of Life, Anxiety: Meditations on the Anxious Mind

“You are but a blip in eternal cosmic time; whether your speech unfolds well or badly, or you soil your trousers or not, is a matter of sublime, beautiful indifference to planet Kepler-22b, 587 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Cygnus.”
― The School of Life, Anxiety: Meditations on the Anxious Mind

“We underestimate the strength we immediately acquire upon admitting that we’re presently feeling very weak.”
― The School of Life, Anxiety: Meditations on the Anxious Mind

“Our mass media continuously inflames our passions and fears while blinding us to the quiet, steady, undramatic kindness and hope all around us.”
― The School of Life, Anxiety: Meditations on the Anxious Mind

“It is not poverty or illness as such that drive us to the ultimate act of despair–it is the sense that we don’t mean anything outside of what we’ve been able to achieve.”
― The School of Life, Anxiety: Meditations on the Anxious Mind

“We should naturally try to give the journey more attention: we should look out of the window and appreciate the view whenever we can. But we should also understand why this can only ever be a partial solution. Our longing is too powerful a force. The greatest wisdom we’re capable of is to know why true wisdom won’t be fully possible – and instead pride ourselves on having at least a slight oversight on our madness. We can accept the ceaselessness of certain anxieties and rather than aim for a calm, yogic state, serenely accept that we will never be definitely calm. Our goal should not be to banish anxiety but to learn to manage, live well around and – when we can – heartily laugh at, our anxious state.”
― The School of Life, Anxiety: Meditations on the Anxious Mind

“We can never properly be secure, because so long as we are alive, we will be alert to danger and, in some way, at risk. The only people with full security are the dead; the only people who can be truly at peace are under the ground. Cemeteries are the only definitively calm places around.”
― The School of Life, Anxiety: Meditations on the Anxious Mind

“This is an essential Stoic tenet. We must always try to picture the worst that could happen – and then remind ourselves that the worst is survivable. The goal is not to imagine that bad things don’t unfold; it is to see that we are far more capable of enduring them than we currently think.”
― The School of Life, Anxiety: Meditations on the Anxious Mind

“We hear no end of reminders as to the benefits of intellectual work. We need, along the way, to rediscover the art of knowing when to cease trying to think.”
― The School of Life, Anxiety: Meditations on the Anxious Mind

“We should not torture ourselves with manic, insistent rumination on what cannot yet be known or commanded.”
― The School of Life, Anxiety: Meditations on the Anxious Mind

“We need to recognise that what is physically possible for us to achieve in a day is not psychologically wise or plausible. It may well be feasible to nip over to a foreign capital or two in a day, and run a company alongside managing a household, but we shouldn’t be surprised if such routines ultimately contribute to a breakdown.”
― The School of Life, Anxiety: Meditations on the Anxious Mind

“A contented couple should make regular room, perhaps as often as once a day, for a discussion around the theme of, ‘What scares me about depending on you is…’. That would be the start of a properly relaxing, and loving, way to live.”
― The School of Life, Anxiety: Meditations on the Anxious Mind

“The moment anyone becomes famous should always be considered – by those who really care for them – as a time for mourning.”
― The School of Life, Anxiety: Meditations on the Anxious Mind

“Lastly, don’t avoid everything that scares you; don’t let the panic reduce you. Don’t accord the fear so much respect that you start to listen to its tyrannical dictates.”
― The School of Life, Anxiety: Meditations on the Anxious Mind

“Second, accept the fear; don’t fight it. It’s like trying to wrestle with the current – best to let the waves carry one this way and that; they’ll tire eventually and set one back on shore. Never struggle against a rip tide. Accept that maybe the speech won’t happen; you might faint in your seat or be forced to run out of the room. So what? Refuse to be humiliated by the panic. You don’t have to be competent all the time. Everyone is allowed some failures, and this just happens to be one of your well-earned ones.”
― The School of Life, Anxiety: Meditations on the Anxious Mind

“It doesn’t mean that we don’t like other people, rather that we have too ambitious a conception of social contact to put up with what is on offer at most parties. The mark of a truly sociable person might, in many situations, simply be a strong desire to stay at home.”
― The School of Life, Anxiety: Meditations on the Anxious Mind

“Happy people unmarked by life can be many things: a good friend is not one of them.”
― The School of Life, Anxiety: Meditations on the Anxious Mind

“Boethius was killed, as he feared, a few months after being imprisoned. His grave lies in the church of San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro in Pavia, half an hour from Milan. In his honour, we should leave space for Lady Philosophy occasionally to come and visit us – and, when we are facing the worst turns of Fortune’s wheel, let her strengthen our resolve to depend a little less on what was, in fact, never really ours to rely upon.”
― The School of Life, Anxiety: Meditations on the Anxious Mind

“True philosophers rise above their immediate circumstances, become indifferent to their own fate and identify with the vast forces of history and nature.”
― The School of Life, Anxiety: Meditations on the Anxious Mind

“Fortune herself pipes up at this point and says with chilling candour: ‘Inconstancy is my very essence; it is the game I never cease to play as I turn my wheel in its ever changing circle…. Yes, rise up on my wheel if you like, but don’t count it an injury when by the same token you begin to fall, as the rules of the game will require…. Isn’t this what tragedy commemorates with its tears and tumult?”
― The School of Life, Anxiety: Meditations on the Anxious Mind

“Lady Philosophy sits with Boethius in his cell and reminds him of his appalling exposure to Fortune’s deceptive charm: ‘I know the many disguises of that monster, Fortune, and the extent to which she seduces with friendship the very people she is striving to cheat, until she overwhelms them with unbearable grief at the suddenness of her desertion.’ But”
― The School of Life, Anxiety: Meditations on the Anxious Mind

“In older, more religious societies, there was the possibility of apology before a divine being, a period of penance and then, eventually, forgiveness. But that is one of the handy mechanisms we unknowingly dismantled when we decided that God was a fiction. We have been left with only one tool, the legal system, which levies fines and prison sentences but isn’t in the business of restoring reputation – and doesn’t get involved in most of the errors that cause it to be lost in the first place. There is, quite literally, in most cases, no way to recover reputation. The sentence is life-long.”
― The School of Life, Anxiety: Meditations on the Anxious Mind

“Reputation will rise and fall according to how closely we track or depart from the ideals of our society – and these tend to be pegged to financial success, sexual propriety, decorum, marriage, sobriety, the sanctity of family and the purity of children. The more of these ideals one flouts, the harsher will be the penalties.”
― The School of Life, Anxiety: Meditations on the Anxious Mind

“Reputation can’t buy us love, but it can provide us with those valuable proxies: respect, honour and politeness. Those who are kind to us may not mean it, but they are at least making an effort. Not all of us crave equally the warmth that comes with a good reputation. Those with a particularly strong need for applause tend to be those with a weak sense of their own acceptability. The cheer of the crowd is asked to compensate for an innate feeling of shame. We seek the validation of the world when we are, inside, unconvinced that we are quite deserving. The more we have been humiliated, especially when young, the more the goodwill of strangers will matter; and – conversely – the more we have tasted genuine affection, the less interesting reputation can be.”
― The School of Life, Anxiety: Meditations on the Anxious Mind

“Panic may be invited to shield us from more profound sources of self-aware agony.”
― The School of Life, Anxiety: Meditations on the Anxious Mind