Quotes and Sayings about Anxiety

"Because interrogations are intended to coerce confessions, interrogators feel themselves justified in using their coercive means. Consistency regarding the technique is not important; inducing anxiety and fear is the point."
- Aldrich Ames
(Related: Fear, Consistency, Anxiety)

"My mother speaks of my step being a source of life-long pain to her, that it is a living death, etc. By the same post I had several letters from anxious relatives, telling me that it was my duty to come home and thus ease my mother's anxiety."
- Elizabeth Garrett Anderson
(Related: Home, Death, Mother, Life, Anxiety, Being, Duty, Letters, Living, Pain, Post, Relatives)

"The ancient Greek oral poets all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the Muse to help them remember."
- David Antin
(Related: Anxiety, Help, Memories, Poems, Poets)

"Now is the age of anxiety."
- W. H. Auden
(Related: Age, Anxiety, Now)

"Few men have led a more active life - bodily or mentally - from a constitutional anxiety for regularity, precision, and order, during fifty years' business career, from which I had retired."
- William Banting
(Related: Business, Life, Men, Anxiety, Career, Order, Years)

"Gather experience... Look at what you should not look at. A feeling of anxiety is the sure and certain evidence that you should do this."
- Clive Barker
(Related: Experience, Anxiety, Feeling)

"I always felt that I had anxiety of survival in terms of livelihood even when I was making plenty of money."
- Leonard Baskin
(Related: Money, Survival, Anxiety)

"I think it has other roots, has to do, in part, with a general anxiety in contemporary life... nuclear bombs, inequality of possibility and chance, inequality of goods allotted to us, a kind of general racist, unjust attitude that is pervasive."
- Leonard Baskin
(Related: Life, Attitude, Possibility, Anxiety, Bombs, Chance, Inequality)

"Every tomorrow has two handles. We can take hold of it with the handle of anxiety or the handle of faith."
- Henry Ward Beecher
(Related: Faith, Anxiety, Tomorrow)

"There is always one person on the set who has a lot of anxiety, an actor who is really intense and has to stay in character and holds himself away from the rest of us."
- Maria Bello
(Related: Character, Actor, Anxiety, Rest)

"If I were to sum up the negative reactions to my work, I think there are two primary causes: one is that if there is discourse about anxiety it is necessarily going to induce anxiety. It will represent a return of the repressed for a great many people."
- Harold Bloom
(Related: Work, People, Negative, Anxiety, Will)

"Status anxiety definitely exists at a political level. Many Iraqis were annoyed with the US essentially for reasons of status: for not showing them respect, for humiliating them."
- Alain de Botton
(Related: Anxiety, Respect)

"There is great beauty in going through life without anxiety or fear. Half our fears are baseless, and the other half discreditable."
- Christian Nestell Bovee
(Related: Beauty, Life, Fear, Anxiety)

"When Shakespeare begins his exposition thus he generally at first makes people talk about the hero, but keeps the hero himself for some time out of sight, so that we await his entrance with curiosity, and sometimes with anxiety."
- Andrew Coyle Bradley
(Related: Time, People, Anxiety, Curiosity, First, Shakespeare, Sight, Talk)

"Like dogs in a wheel, birds in a cage, or squirrels in a chain, ambitious men still climb and climb, with great labor, and incessant anxiety, but never reach the top."
- Robert Browning
(Related: Men, Anxiety, Birds, Dogs, Labor)

"I think it is important to ask ourselves as citizens, not as Democrats attacking the administration, but as citizens, whether a world power can really provide global leadership on the basis of fear and anxiety?"
- Zbigniew Brzezinski
(Related: Leadership, Power, Fear, Anxiety, Democrats, World)

"Kindness is the cause of all anxiety."
- David D. Burns
(Related: Anxiety, Cause, Kindness)

"Food can become such a point of anxiety - not because it's food, but just because you have anxiety. That's how eating disorders develop."
- Vanessa Carlton
(Related: Food, Anxiety, Eating)

"Anxiety is the beginning of conscience, which is the parent of the soul but is not compatible with innocence."
- Angela Carter
(Related: Soul, Anxiety, Beginning, Conscience, Innocence)

"And I kind of said to myself if I get my voice back I'm not going to take back the old anxiety about it and just focus on the limitations. I'm really going to enjoy it."
- Rosanne Cash
(Related: Anxiety, Focus, Limitations, Old, Voice)

"Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas."
- Emile M. Cioran
(Related: Ideas, Anxiety)

"When you get over the anxiety, you discover you should have been mad a long time ago."
- Amy Clampitt
(Related: Time, Anxiety)

"I believe a lot of disease comes from anxiety, loneliness."
- Tom Cochrane
(Related: Anxiety, Disease, Loneliness)

"Almost all the ideas we have about being a man or being a woman are so burdened with pain, anxiety, fear and self-doubt. For many of us, the confusion around this question is excruciating."
- Andrew Cohen
(Related: Fear, Ideas, Anxiety, Being, Confusion, Man, Pain, Question, Self, Woman)

"If I'm driving to L.A. and have anxiety about making the drive, if I've got Peggy with me, we're cool."
- Rita Coolidge
(Related: Anxiety, Driving)

"It came home to me indelibly that I was never going to change anything in America by walking around carrying a sign. It was a great revelation. It saved me a lot of anxiety and a lot of wasted energy."
- Peter Coyote
(Related: Change, Home, America, Anxiety, Energy, Walking)

"The real effect of the WTC calamity has been depressed spirits, anxiety, and uncertainty among publishers, and of course those emotions are not restricted to publishers."
- Richard Curtis
(Related: Anxiety, Calamity, Effect, Emotions, Spirits, Uncertainty)

"I tell you, the difference for me is between being victimized, terrorized, numbed by reading about different disasters, or reducing the anxiety by getting up and doing something about it, at whatever level."
- Ted Danson
(Related: Anxiety, Being, Difference, Disasters, Reading)

"Beware lest in your anxiety to avoid war you obtain a master."
- Demosthenes
(Related: War, Anxiety)

"Still today, I cannot cross the threshold of a teaching institution without physical symptoms, in my chest and my stomach, of discomfort or anxiety. And yet I have never left school."
- Jacques Derrida
(Related: Anxiety, School, Teaching, Today)

"Man, so long as he remains free, has no more constant and agonizing anxiety than find as quickly as possible someone to worship."
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Related: Anxiety, Man, Worship)

"Anxiety is part of creativity, the need to get something out, the need to be rid of something or to get in touch with something within."
- David Duchovny
(Related: Creativity, Anxiety)

"I think the dangers are different now. Our abuse of the planet and our resources is an anxiety."
- Carol Ann Duffy
(Related: Abuse, Anxiety, Now)

"There's an insecure part of me that comes out of me, I get nervous. I don't know why, I wish I could overcome it because it gives me an anxiety feeling."
- Fred Durst
(Related: Anxiety, Feeling)

"Comedy is defiance. It's a snort of contempt in the face of fear and anxiety. And it's the laughter that allows hope to creep back on the inhale."
- Will Durst
(Related: Fear, Hope, Anxiety, Comedy, Contempt, Defiance, Laughter)

"The components of anxiety, stress, fear, and anger do not exist independently of you in the world. They simply do not exist in the physical world, even though we talk about them as if they do."
- Wayne Dyer
(Related: Anger, Fear, Anxiety, Stress, Talk, World)

"Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity."
- T. S. Eliot
(Related: Creativity, Anxiety)

"I had a great many sex and love cases where people were absolutely devastated when somebody with whom they were compulsively in love didn't love them back. They were killing themselves with anxiety and depression."
- Albert Ellis
(Related: Love, Sex, People, Anxiety, Depression, Killing)

"When a parent shows up with an attitude of entitlement, understand that under it is a boatload of anxiety."
- Robert Evans
(Related: Attitude, Anxiety)

"Freedom from care and anxiety of mind is a blessing, which I apprehend such people enjoy in higher perfection than most others, and is of the utmost consequence."
- William Falconer
(Related: People, Anxiety, Care, Freedom, Mind, Perfection)

"A large part of the present anxiety to improve the education of girls and women is also due to the conviction that the political disabilities of women will not be maintained."
- Millicent Fawcett
(Related: Education, Women, Anxiety, Conviction, Girls, Present, Will)

"I think there's an anxiety in life where we automatically tend to look to the next thing or we're complaining about the past. Worrying is not going to make it happen or not happen."
- Sherilyn Fenn
(Related: Life, Anxiety, Complaining, Past)

"For success, the author must make the reader care about the destiny of the principals, and sustain this anxiety, or suspense, for about 100,000 words."
- Ken Follett
(Related: Success, Anxiety, Care, Destiny, Suspense, Words)

"The act of birth is the first experience of anxiety, and thus the source and prototype of the affect of anxiety."
- Sigmund Freud
(Related: Experience, Act, Anxiety, First)

"Americans are the only people in the world known to me whose status anxiety prompts them to advertise their college and university affiliations in the rear window of their automobiles."
- Paul Fussell
(Related: People, Americans, Anxiety, Automobiles, College, University, World)

"All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership."
- John Kenneth Galbraith
(Related: Leadership, Time, People, Anxiety)

"Anthropology never has had a distinct subject matter, and because it doesn't have a real method, there's a great deal of anxiety over what it is."
- Clifford Geertz
(Related: Anthropology, Anxiety)

"The other thing is that if you rely solely on medication to manage depression or anxiety, for example, you have done nothing to train the mind, so that when you come off the medication, you are just as vulnerable to a relapse as though you had never taken the medication."
- Daniel Goleman
(Related: Anxiety, Depression, Example, Mind, Nothing)

"On the night before we were married, all of the anxiety in the world came down upon me."
- John C. Hawkes
(Related: Anxiety, Night, World)

"If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life - and only then will I be free to become myself."
- Martin Heidegger
(Related: Death, Life, Anxiety, Will)

"What I wasn't prepared for were the feelings of anxiety that it stirred in me. I wasn't prepared for the initial feeling of I don't want to have to do that again. I was scared."
- Mariel Hemingway
(Related: Feelings, Anxiety, Want)

"I had a lot of time to think, and that is not good for your mind. And when it actually happened, it was not so much a celebration but the relief. It was an exorcism anxiety. After each race there is a procedure in which you get taken off to the podium and the TV interviews."
- Damon Hill
(Related: Time, Anxiety, Mind, Race)

"He was scarcely then a year old, and knew so little of herding that he had never turned a sheep in his life; but as soon as he discovered it was his duty to do so I can never forget with what anxiety and eagerness he learned his different evolutions."
- James Hogg
(Related: Life, Anxiety, Duty, Forget, Old, Sheep)

"I think we all have blocks between us and the best version of ourselves, whether it's shyness, insecurity, anxiety, whether it's a physical block, and the story of a person overcoming that block to their best self. It's truly inspiring because I think all of us are engaged in that every day."
- Tom Hooper
(Related: Anxiety, Day, Insecurity, Inspiring, Overcoming, Self, Shyness)

"With the coming of radio as a mass medium, suddenly the world changed. It became about, 'can this leader project emotional connection through the way he speaks on the radio?' And the anxiety about whether he could do that, we've inherited."
- Tom Hooper
(Related: Leader, Anxiety, Connection, Project, World)

"I use the music to vent, and a lot of the stuff that I am writing about or was writing about contained a lot of anger and anxiety, stress and depression, so that's how the album came out so dark."
- Vanilla Ice
(Related: Anger, Music, Anxiety, Depression, Stress, Writing)

"It was about this time that I began experiencing the beginnings of my battles with an anxiety disorder. We were touring a lot and there were some developing personal problems within the band."
- Jack Irons
(Related: Time, Anxiety, Beginnings, Disorder, Problems)

"I had turned my anxiety into my profession."
- Francois Jacob
(Related: Anxiety, Profession)

"Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity."
- Chuck Jones
(Related: Creativity, Anxiety)

"Even during the rationing period, during World War II, we didn't have the anxiety that we'd starve, because we grew our own potatoes, you know? And our own hogs, and our own cows and stuff, you know."
- James Earl Jones
(Related: War, Anxiety, Cows, World, World war)

"A mistake in judgment isn't fatal, but too much anxiety about judgment is."
- Pauline Kael
(Related: Mistake, Anxiety, Judgment)

"But sometimes in the midst of worry, anxiety and hard work, it has been pretty hard to bear all these false reports going about the country - to see my friends alienated and being made to believe things that were absolutely false."
- John Harvey Kellogg
(Related: Work, Anxiety, Being, Country, Friends, Hard work, Pretty, Worry)

"What else does anxiety about the future bring you but sorrow upon sorrow?"
- Thomas Kempis
(Related: Anxiety, Future, Sorrow)

"Oh, how great peace and quietness would he possess who should cut off all vain anxiety and place all his confidence in God."
- Thomas Kempis
(Related: Peace, God, Anxiety, Confidence)

"There stands no contradiction between giving voice to legitimate anxiety and at the same time, as and when exchange of fire commences, looking to the rest of the country, as well as all of us in the House, to give full moral support to our forces."
- Charles Kennedy
(Related: Time, Anxiety, Contradiction, Country, Fire, Giving, Rest, Support, Voice)

"Neither comprehension nor learning can take place in an atmosphere of anxiety."
- Rose Kennedy
(Related: Anxiety, Learning)

"Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom."
- Soren Kierkegaard
(Related: Anxiety, Freedom)

"The anxiety of most parents in seeing their sons and daughters enlist does not lie only in the fear of the physical dangers they may encounter."
- William Lyon Mackenzie King
(Related: Lie, Fear, Anxiety, Daughters, May, Parents, Sons)

"Good humor is a tonic for mind and body. It is the best antidote for anxiety and depression. It is a business asset. It attracts and keeps friends. It lightens human burdens. It is the direct route to serenity and contentment."
- Grenville Kleiser
(Related: Business, Humor, Anxiety, Body, Contentment, Depression, Friends, Mind, Serenity)

"Many people today don't want honest answers insofar as honest means unpleasant or disturbing, They want a soft answer that turneth away anxiety."
- Louis Kronenberger
(Related: People, Answers, Anxiety, Today, Want)

"At some stages of your life you will deal with things and at others you are overwhelmed with misery and anxiety."
- Nigella Lawson
(Related: Life, Anxiety, Misery, Will)

"I got a chance to work with Mel Brooks on two of his films: Silent Movie and High Anxiety."
- Barry Levinson
(Related: Work, Anxiety, Brooks, Chance)

"We often hear of people breaking down from overwork, but in nine out of ten they are really suffering from worry or anxiety."
- John Lubbock
(Related: People, Anxiety, Suffering, Worry)

"My mother's suicide attempts were a way to release anxiety and get attention. Some of the attempts were drug reactions she didn't even remember later on."
- Lorna Luft
(Related: Mother, Anxiety, Attention, Suicide)

"The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety."
- Norman Mailer
(Related: Anxiety, Man)

"And to me, it was interesting, some of the people I had interviewed who knew the insides to this program said that they also, to create anxiety and upset in the soldiers, they take Bibles and they trash them."
- Jane Mayer
(Related: People, Anxiety, Soldiers)

"Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with yesterday's tools and yesterday's concepts."
- Marshall McLuhan
(Related: Age, Anxiety, Job, Result, Today, Tools, Trying, Yesterday)

"Money is a strange thing. It ranks with love as our greatest source of joy, and with death as our greatest source of anxiety."
- Joe Moore
(Related: Death, Love, Money, Anxiety, Joy)

"Without anxiety and illness I should have been like a ship without a rudder."
- Edvard Munch
(Related: Anxiety, Illness)

"For as long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art."
- Edvard Munch
(Related: Art, Anxiety, Deep, Feeling)

"I am certainly suffering from a modicum of performance anxiety."
- George Murray
(Related: Performance, Anxiety, Suffering)

"Concentration is a fine antidote to anxiety."
- Jack Nicklaus
(Related: Anxiety)

"Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic."
- Anais Nin
(Related: Love, Anxiety, Man, Want, Will)

"There is no such thing as pure pleasure; some anxiety always goes with it."
- Ovid
(Related: Anxiety, Pleasure)

"Nothing in the affairs of men is worthy of great anxiety."
- Plato
(Related: Men, Anxiety, Nothing)

"What some call health, if purchased by perpetual anxiety about diet, isn't much better than tedious disease."
- Alexander Pope
(Related: Diet, Health, Anxiety, Disease)

"That's the duty of the old, to be anxious on behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old."
- Philip Pullman
(Related: Anxiety, Duty, Old)

"I often thought I was in the wrong business. I was pretty seriously thinking of tossing it in before I shot Shine. I do not know why. I was pretty restless, I had been through a bad period of stress induced anxiety - panic attacks - and I was not sure of what I wanted to do."
- Geoffrey Rush
(Related: Business, Thought, Anxiety, Pretty, Stress, Thinking, Wrong)

"Exploiting people's emotions of fear, envy and anxiety is not hope, it's not change, it's partisanship. We don't need partisanship. We don't need demagoguery, we need solutions."
- Paul Ryan
(Related: Change, People, Fear, Hope, Anxiety, Emotions, Envy)

"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."
- Carly Simon
(Related: Fear, Anxiety, Being)

"To be totally honest, if I could be thinner without it causing a lot of pain and anxiety in my life, I would be. But today the reality is my life is more important to me than my weight - and thank God for that."
- Courtney Thorne Smith
(Related: Life, God, Anxiety, Pain, Reality, Today, Weight)

"When I left home, I was going to ride around a little while and then go to my mom's. As I rode and rode and rode, I felt even more anxiety coming upon me about not wanting to live."
- Susan Smith
(Related: Home, Mom, Anxiety)

"Anxiety does not empty tomorrow of its sorrows, but only empties today of its strength."
- Charles Spurgeon
(Related: Strength, Anxiety, Today, Tomorrow)

"It has been said that our anxiety does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow, but only empties today of its strength."
- Charles Spurgeon
(Related: Strength, Anxiety, Sorrow, Today, Tomorrow)

"It would be great to be able to pass on to someone all of the successes, the failures, and the knowledge that one has had. To help someone, avoid all the fire, pain and anxiety would be wonderful."
- Sylvester Stallone
(Related: Knowledge, Anxiety, Fire, Help, Pain)

"It is not the least anxiety that we have so little powder and lead on hand."
- Peter Stuyvesant
(Related: Anxiety)

"I just can't wait to get out there on stage. There's no anxiety at all. I love being able to take this journey with the audience, because we all have a ball with it - even if we're crying."
- Loretta Swit
(Related: Love, Anxiety, Being, Journey)

"There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature."
- Henry David Thoreau
(Related: Nature, Anxiety, Infinite, Leisure, Moments)

"The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt."
- Paul Tillich
(Related: God, Courage, Anxiety, Doubt)

"The French want no-one to be their superior. The English want inferiors. The Frenchman constantly raises his eyes above him with anxiety. The Englishman lowers his beneath him with satisfaction."
- Alexis de Tocqueville
(Related: Anxiety, English, Eyes, Satisfaction, Want)

"One in six people suffer depression or a chronic anxiety disorder. These are not the worried well but those in severe mental pain with conditions crippling enough to prevent them living normal lives."
- Polly Toynbee
(Related: People, Anxiety, Depression, Disorder, Living, Pain)

"In almost everything that touches our everyday life on earth, God is pleased when we're pleased. He wills that we be as free as birds to soar and sing our maker's praise without anxiety."
- Aiden Wilson Tozer
(Related: Life, God, Anxiety, Birds, Earth, Praise)

"Happiness is not a brilliant climax to years of grim struggle and anxiety. It is a long succession of little decisions simply to be happy in the moment."
- J. Donald Walters
(Related: Happiness, Anxiety, Decisions, Struggle, Years)

"It's a whole different kind of anxiety. But the great thing about doing a theatre job is that once the ball starts rolling you just have to go with it, it's inexorable."
- Emily Watson
(Related: Anxiety, Job, Theatre)

"Aware that his disappointment has its source in a defective education, he looks with anxiety on his other daughters, whose minds, like lovely buds, are beginning to open. Where shall he find a genial soil in which he may place them to expand?"
- Emma Willard
(Related: Education, Anxiety, Beginning, Daughters, Disappointment, May, Open)

"In sharp contrast to the idea that this stage of life is enviable, we hear high levels of anxiety about getting old, anxieties about health, mobility, access to facilities, simple routine care and attention."
- Rowan D. Williams
(Related: Life, Health, Idea, Anxiety, Attention, Care, Contrast, Old, Routine)

"Incidentally, one of the most worrying problems in the impact of Western modernity on traditional culture is that it quite rapidly communicates its own indifference or anxiety or even hostility about age and ageing."
- Rowan D. Williams
(Related: Age, Ageing, Anxiety, Culture, Indifference, Modernity, Problems)

"I try not to worry about the future - so I take each day just one anxiety attack at a time."
- Tom Wilson
(Related: Time, Anxiety, Day, Future, Worry)

"We are living in a new age of energy supply anxiety."
- Daniel Yergin
(Related: Age, Anxiety, Energy, Living)

"A premium in the oil price of somewhere between 10 to 15 dollars a barrel reflects this heightened anxiety."
- Daniel Yergin
(Related: Anxiety, Oil)