“The need for success and the fear of failure are two aspects of the same inner attitude. For it isn’t failure that causes the sinking sensation we all know, but the fear of failure. Failure isn’t the enemy—fear is. One learns, after all, by failing. This is elementary; we all know it, except when it applies to ourselves…”
Carla Needleman
more infosource: The Work of Craft (London: Arcana, 1986), 16.
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category: craft, failure, fear, success
medium: Nonfiction
“Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you living in better conditions.”
Hafiz
more infosource: “Your Mother and My Mother,” in The Gift: Poems by the Great Sufi Master, trans. Daniel James Ladinsky (New York: Penguin, 1999).
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category: fear
medium: Poetry
via: Emilia Pisani!“Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the willfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.”
J. K. Rowling
more infosource: Harvard commencement speech, June 2008
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category: agoraphobia, commencement speech, fear, imagination, monster
medium: Speech
“The commander’s words relieve their stricken hearts: ‘My comrades, hardly strangers to pain before now, we all have weathered worse. Some god will grant us an end to this as well. You’ve threaded the rocks resounding with Scylla’s howling rabid dogs, and taken the brunt of the Cyclops’ boulders, too. Call up your courage again. Dismiss your grief and fear. A joy it will be one day, perhaps, to remember even this.'”
Virgil
more infosource: The Aeneid, translated by Robert Fagles (New York: Viking Penguin, 2006), 54.
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category: courage, fear, joy, memory, pain, school of life
medium: poetry
“There is a way of living which makes for greater airiness, space, ease, freedom. It is like an airplane’s rise above the storms. It is a way of looking at obstacles as something to overcome; of looking at what defeats us as a monster created by ourselves, within ourselves, by our fears, and therefore dissolvable and transformable.”
Anaïs Nin
more infosource: The Diary of Anaïs Nin (Vol. 4 1944–1947) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 148.
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category: fear, freedom, living, obstacle, perspective, transform
medium: diary
“If you cannot always do all that you pretend, perhaps you can do more than you fear.”
Rory Stewart
more infosource: “Paths of Glory,” by Ian Parker, The New Yorker, November 15, 2010, 65.
category: fear, politics, pretend
medium: magazine profile
“Clint [Eastwood] is incredibly instinctive and he’s anti-neurosis. It’s like antimatter. He’s totally without neurosis. The set of Hereafter was one of happiest places I’ve ever been. It comes from trusting yourself and eliminating fear.”
Peter Morgan
more infosource: “Eastwood Breaks Another Mold,” by Charles McGrath, The New York Times, October 13, 2010.
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category: Clint Eastwood, creative process, fear, film, matter, neurosis
medium: newspaper article
“It is the speck that makes the cloud that wrecks the vessel, children, yet no one fears a speck.”
Emily Dickinson
more infosource: The Letters of Emily Dickinson vol 2, ed. by Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1958), 490.
category: cloud, danger, fear, speck, storm, vessel
medium: letter
notes: letter to Louise and Frances Norcross, Dickinson's first cousins, early October 1871
“Risks are a measure of people. People who won’t take them are trying to preserve what they have. People who do take them often end up having more.”
Paul Arden
more infosource: It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be (New York: Phaidon, 2003), 57.
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category: fear, preservation, risk
medium: self-help (advertising)
“Most people, after one success, are so cringingly afraid of doing less well that they rub all the edge off their subsequent work.”
Beatrix Potter
more infosource: Potter quoted in the biography Beatrix Potter: A Life In Nature by Linda Lear (New York: St. Martin’s Griffen, 2008), 246.
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category: career, fear, success
medium: biography
“If you want to make the right decision for the future, fear is not a very good consultant.”
Markus Dohle
more infosource: “Publish or Perish,” by Ken Auletta, in The New Yorker, April 26, 2010.
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category: consultant, decision, fear, future
medium: magazine article
fear