A Quote by Soren Kierkegaard

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

Soren Kierkegaard

Quote Topics

Freedom Anxiety

Quote Author

Soren Kierkegaard
Danish - Philosopher
May 5, 1813 - November 11, 1855

Anxiety is the dizziness we experience when we recognize we hold the freedom and responsibility for our life choices. More than anyone, alcoholics have a very clear sense of this dizziness, especially when we were coming to realize our own powerlessness over alcohol and that we could act differently.

Peg O'Connor

Anxiety affects everyone differently. I spoke to someone who felt like their heart was beating 1,000 times a minute. With me, it was a dizziness, feeling sick, constant, 24 hours a day.

Bojan Krkic

Earthly possessions dazzle our eyes and delude us into thinking that they can provide security and freedom from anxiety. Yet all the time they are the very source of anxiety.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

It is only when we want to take our lives out of the Father’s hands and have them under our own control that we find ourselves gripped with anxiety. The secret of freedom from anxiety is freedom from ourselves and abandonment of our own plans. But that spirit emerges in our lives only when our minds are filled with the knowledge that our Father can be trusted implicitly to supply everything we need.

Sinclair B. Ferguson

Letting go gives us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness. If, in our heart, we still cling to anything - anger, anxiety, or possessions - we cannot be free.

Nhat Hanh

Courage is the capacity to meet the anxiety which arises as one achieves freedom. It is the willingness to differentiate, to move from the protecting realms of parental dependence to new levels of freedom and integration.

Rollo May

A Christian's freedom from anxiety is not due to some guaranteed freedom from trouble, but to the folly of worry and especially to the confidence that God is our Father, that even permitted suffering is within the orbit of His care.

John Stott

Surveillant anxiety is always a conjoined twin: The anxiety of those surveilled is deeply connected to the anxiety of the surveillers. But the anxiety of the surveillers is generally hard to see; it's hidden in classified documents and delivered in highly coded languages in front of Senate committees.

Kate Crawford

I tell Thee that man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creatures is born. But only one who can appease their conscience can take over their freedom […] Instead of taking men's freedom from them, Thou didst make it greater than ever! Didst Thou forget that man prefers peace, and even death, to freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil?

Fyodor Dostoevsky

This is an anxiety driven world - the whole world is driven by anxiety. It is anxiety about the aftermath of the global financial crisis; it's anxiety about inequality and about computers replacing jobs.

Robert J. Shiller

Learning to know anxiety is an adventure which every man has to affront if he would not go to perdition either by not having known anxiety or by sinking under it. He therefore who has leaned rightly to be in anxiety has learned the most important thing.

Soren Kierkegaard

The creative process is often wrapped up in bottomless anxiety, and when the world applauds the product of that process, it soothes the anxiety. Briefly. Then the anxiety returns and even intensifies.

Nell Scovell

Freedom without security portends chaos, perpetual anxiety and fear.

Zygmunt Bauman

The presence of anxiety is unavoidable, but the prison of anxiety is optional. Anxiety is not a sin; it's an emotion. So don't be anxious about feeling anxious. Anxiety can, however, lead to sinful behavior. When we numb our fears with six-packs or food binges, when we spew anger like Krakatau, when we peddle our fears to anyone who will buy them, we're sinning.