fear
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.
It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be (New York: Phaidon, 2003), 57.
Most people, after one success, are so cringingly afraid of doing less well that they rub all the edge off their subsequent work.
Potter quoted in the biography Beatrix Potter: A Life In Nature by Linda Lear (New York: St. Martin’s Griffen, 2008), 246.
If you want to make the right decision for the future, fear is not a very good consultant.
“Publish or Perish,” by Ken Auletta, in The New Yorker, April 26, 2010.
Don’t be afraid.
His last words (texted to his wife in Latin from his hospital bed minutes before he died), “How So Many People Got Seamus Heaney’s Last Words Wrong,” by Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic, September 4, 2013.
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…
The Work of Craft (London: Arcana, 1986), 16.
Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you living in better conditions.
“Your Mother and My Mother,” in The Gift: Poems by the Great Sufi Master, trans. Daniel James Ladinsky (New York: Penguin, 1999).
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.
The Diary of Anaïs Nin (Vol. 4 1944–1947) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 148.
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.
“Eastwood Breaks Another Mold,” by Charles McGrath, The New York Times, October 13, 2010.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Only press on: no feeling is final.
From The Book of Hours in The Poetry of Rilke, trans. and ed. by Edward Snow (New York: North Point Press, 2009), 33.