Anxiety is practising failure in advance. Anxiety is needless and imaginary. It's fear about fear, fear that means nothing.
Anxiety and fear are cousins but not twins. Fear sees a threat. Anxiety imagines one.
Doesn't our knowledge of death make life more precious?' What good is a preciousness based on fear and anxiety? It's an anxious quivering thing
I see that I am inwardly fashioned for faith and not for fear. Fear is not my native land; faith is. I am so made that worry and anxiety are sand in the machinery of life; faith is oil. I live better by faith and confidence than by fear and doubt and anxiety. In anxiety and worry my being is gasping for breath - these are not my native air. But in faith and confidence I breath freely - these are my native air.
Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives. Cancerphobia taught us the fear of a polluting environment; now we have the fear of polluting people that AIDS anxiety inevitably communicates. Fear of the Communion cup, fear of surgery: fear of contaminated blood, whether Christ's blood or your neighbor's.
Fear results in fight or flight. Anxiety creates doom and gloom. Fear is the pulse that pounds when you see a coiled rattlesnake in your front yard. Anxiety is the voice that tells you, Never, ever, for the rest of your life, walk barefooted through the grass. There might be a snake...somewhere.
A mature person should disconnect himself from anything that is connected with fear. That`s how maturity comes. Just watch all your acts, all your beliefs, and find out whether they are based in reality, in experience, or based in fear. And anything based in fear has to be dropped immediately, without a second thought. It is your armor. I cannot melt it. I can simply show you how you can drop it.
We are dominated on this planet by a fear-based rather than a love-based thought system. Enlightenment involves relinquishing the thought system based on fear and instead accepting a thought system based on love.
Anxiety is an extension of the dynamics of fear. It's the feeling of fear without an awareness of the object of your fear. All you know is that you're fearful, but you can't specify exactly what you are afraid of. You just worry about everything.
We have become a nation ruled by fear. Since the end of the Second World War, various political leaders have fostered fear in the American people--fear of communism, fear of terrorism, fear of immigrants, fear of people based on race and religion, fear of gays and lesbians in love who just want to get married and fear of people who are somehow different. It is fear that allows political leaders to manipulate us all and distort our national priorities.
Religion is based ... mainly upon fear ... fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.
I remember being onstage once when I didn't have fear: I got so scared I didn't have fear that it brought on an anxiety attack.
Anxiety is not fear, exactly, because fear is focused on something right in front of you - a real and objective danger.
Anxiety is your creativity turned into a weapon that you use to beat yourself up. And this is because anxiety is mostly storytelling - repeating poisonous stories that you've inherited from others. It feeds on your fear.
Behind every flinch is a fear or an anxiety - sometimes rational, sometimes not. Without the fear, there is no flinch. But wiping out the fear isn't what's important - facing it is.
Fear, as opposed to anxiety, has a definite object, which can be faced, analyzed, attacked, endured... anxiety has no object, or rather, in a paradoxical phrase, its object is the negation of every object.