“What some call health, if purchased by perpetual anxiety about diet, isn’t much better than tedious disease.”

As with narrow-necked bottles; the less they have in them, the more noise they make in pouring out.

There is but one way I know of conversing safely with all men; that is, not by concealing what we say or do, but by saying or doing nothing that deserves to be concealed.

And seem to walk on wings, and tread in air.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, As those move easiest who have learned to dance.

Women use lovers as they do cards; they play with them a while, and when they have got all they can by them, throw them away, call for new ones, and then perhaps lose by the new all they got by the old ones.

You purchase pain with all that joy can give and die of nothing but a rage to live.

A little learning is a dangerous thing.

To wake the soul by tender strokes of art, To raise the genius, and to mend the heart.

A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.

To be angry is to revenge the faults of others on ourselves.

Truth needs not flowers of speech.

This long disease, my life.

Teach me to feel another’s woe, to hide the fault I see, that mercy I to others show, that mercy show to me.

I never knew any man in my life who could not bear another’s misfortunes perfectly like a Christian.

The world forgetting, by the world forgot. Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d

The most positive men are the most credulous.

A person can meet anxiety to the extent that his values are stronger than the threat.

What anxiety means is it’s as though the world is knocking at your door, and you need to create, you need to make something, you need to do something. I think anxiety, for people who have found their own heart and their own souls, for them it is a stimulus toward creativity, toward courage. It’s what makes us human beings.

Death anxiety is the mother of all religions, which, in one way or another, attempt to temper the anguish of our finitude.

I pass for a hypersensitive, reclusive neurotic, which I may well be, but I hope the year won’t come when my anxieties and fatigue will destroy my love of this life, of all the things that inspire me–a line of music, a face in a Vermeer portrait, a character in an opera, or a model born in Harlem.

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.

Anxiety is essential to the human condition. The confrontation with anxiety can relieve us from boredom, sharpen the sensitivity and assure the presence of tension that is necessary to preserve human existence.

It is well to remind ourselves that anxiety signifies a conflict, and so long as a conflict is going on, a constructive solution is possible.

The path to decision may be hard because it leads into the territory of both finiteness and groundlessness—domains soaked in anxiety.