Fear Is Inadequate Quotes & Sayings

She seemed to know, to accept, to welcome her position, the citadel of the family, the strong place that could not be taken. And since old Tom and the children could not know hurt or fear unless she acknowledged hurt or fear, she had practiced denying them in herself. And since, when a joyful thing happened, they looked to see whether joy was on her, it was her habit to build laughter out of inadequate materials ... She seemed to know that if she swayed the family shook, and if she ever deeply wavered or despaired the family would fall. — John Steinbeck

The practice of overcoming hope is recognizing our positive qualities. With excessive hope, we begin to belittle what we have achieved. We might then feel inadequate and have fear of not achieving more. — Sakyong Mipham

Volatile expressions of anger and hostility combined with a tendency to blame others often result from feeling shame ... If you are shame-prone, any accusation directed at you, regardless of how mildly it may be delivered, has the potential to make you feel that you have failed or that you are inadequate. Rather than simply admit wrongdoing, you get angry and accusatory in order to hold yourself blameless. Using anger or hostility for self-protection hides your vulnerability and needs. Unfortunately, since most people are repelled by an angry response, this method may be effective.
Your anger may drive away the very people who should know your real feelings, and it may deprive you of the opportunity to allow others to be aware of your needs. Behaving in an offensive or frightening way toward others can cause them to retreat out of fear. But, actually, the fear is your own, which you have turned against someone else in the form of anger. — Mary C. Lamia

Beautiful people make even those of us who proudly consider ourselves unmoved by another's appearance dumb with admiration and fear and delight, and struck by the profound, enervating awareness of how inadequate we are, how nothing, not intelligence or education or money, can usurp or overpower or deny beauty. — Hanya Yanagihara

Now as always - humility and terror. Fear that the working of my pen cannot capture the grinding of my brain. It is so easy to understand why the ancients prayed for the help of a Muse. And the Muse came and stood beside them, and we, heaven help us, do not believe in Muses. We have nothing to fall back on but our craftsmanship and it, as modern literature attests, is inadequate. May I be honest; may I be decent; may I be unaffected by the technique of hucksters. If invocation is required, let this be my invocation - may I be strong and yet gentle, tender and yet wise, wise and yet tolerant. May I for a little while, only for a little while, see with the inflamed eyes of a God. — John Steinbeck

Do not fear death so much, but rather the inadequate life — Bertolt Brecht

And yet ... ' he said, 'and yet, father, I am terribly afraid. I am afraid that the things the Landlord really intends for me may be utterly unlike the things he has taught me to desire.'
'they will be very unlike the things you imagine. But you already know that the objects which your desire imagines are always inadequate to that desire. Until you have it, you will not know what you wanted. — C.S. Lewis

Because of media hype and woefully inadequate information, too many people nowadays are deathly afraid of their food, and what does fear of food do to the digestive system? I am sure that an unhappy or suspicious stomach, constricted and uneasy with worry, cannot digest properly. — Julia Child

It was us they were talking about, with the objectivity of businessmen completing a routine transaction. In Barrett there wasn't even the hint of remorse or conscience. Some folks, they say, are born incapable of those things. Often they behave beyond suspicion, those sick people, until it's too late. Sometimes they're good-looking, charming, intelligent. Maybe they liked to pull the wings off flies more than other kids. But boys will be boys. If they served in the Army they made lousy soldiers, complaining and griping all the time about discipline, until they got a taste of combat. They often won medals, then, and were afraid but didn't go stiff and inadequate with fear like some of their buddies. They felt above the crowd. They were arrogant. Laws didn't apply to them. They could kill you with an absolute lack of concern if it suited them. They were called psychopathic personalities, P.P.'s, and Barrett was one of them.

It looked as if we were going to die. — Stephen Marlowe

Our fear is not that we are inadequate, but that we are powerful beyond measure. — Nelson Mandela

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. — Marianne Williamson

And so too, in later years, when I began to write a book of my own, and the quality of some sentences seemed so inadequate that I could not make up my mind to go on with the undertaking. I would find the equivalent in Bergotte. But it was only then, when I read them in his pages, that I could enjoy them; when it was I myself who composed them, in my anxiety that they should exactly reproduce what I had perceived in my mind's eye, and in my fear of their not turning out "true to life," how could I find time to ask myself whether what I was writing was pleasing! — Marcel Proust

What would behoove me to instantly declare God not to be God unless He followed my script in some tediously exacting manner? I must confess that I am less likely to believe that it's a matter of some narcissistic demand that I freely pen my own script. Rather, I think it's fear that I'm too inadequate to follow God's. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

What in the world would ever lead to me believe that life is a series of opportunities that are readily available to everyone else but me? What really leads me to believe such an atrocious lie is that I don't believe in myself sufficiently to engage those opportunities in the first place. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

What do you want?
I want to stop living in fear. I want to stop coming up with excuses about why I'm not interested in dating. I want my family to know me. I want to get to learn more about Lisa. I want to stop feeling like everything I am is inadequate or makes me unworthy of love because of something I can't help. — Sara Farizan

Anger is a response that can lead to harm if we don't evaluate what we are upset about. Ask yourself what you are afraid of, as anger is almost always fear in disguise. If we think something or someone threatens us, we feel fear-fear that we are inadequate, that our lives are out of control, that things won't go our way. Then we fight. Find out what you're upset about. We rarely are upset for the reason we think. — Jennifer James

If you feel inadequate to face challenges, unworthy of love or respect, untitled to happiness, and fear assertive thought, wants, or needs- if you lack basic self trust, self-respect, and self-confidence- your self-esteem deficiency will limit you, no matter what other assets you possess. — Nathaniel Branden

(...) performance anxiety [in the worplace] is connected to other, more general fears which have to do with feeling inadequate and defenseless in the world: the fear of retaliation from someone with whom one disagrees; the fear of being critisized for doing something wrong; the fear of saying "no"; the fear of stating one's needs clearly and directly, without manipulating. These are the kinds of fears that affect women in particular, because we were brought up to believe that taking care of ourselves, asserting ourselves, is unfeminine. We wish (...) to feel attractive to men: non-threatening, sweet, "feminine". This wish crimps the joy and productiveness with which women could be leading their lives. — Colette Dowling

WORTH IT?
It is no credit to our phase of civilization if it is fear rather than ambition that drives most of those who bankrupt themselves on the vanities, or who end up under the surgeon's knife. It is the fear of falling short, of being inadequate in the eyes of others, including loved ones. [ ... ]
It is unfitting, one might say, improper, treating one's owm body as a tool rather than a part of oneself. [ ... ]
The bottom line is that it dishonors ourselves, for we ought to think better of ourselves than that. — Simon Blackburn

Separation of function is not to be despised, but neither should it be exalted. Separation is not an unbreakable law, but a convenience for overcoming inadequate human abilities, whether in science or engineering. As D'Arcy Thompson, one of the spiritual fathers of the general systems movement, said: As we analyze a thing into its parts or into its properties, we tend to magnify these, to exaggerate their apparent independence, and to hide from ourselves (at least for a time) the essential integrity and individuality of the composite whole. We divided the body into its organs, the skeleton into its bones, as in very much the same fashion we make a subjective analysis of the mind, according to the teaching of psychology, into component factors: but we know very well that judgement and knowledge, courage or gentleness, love or fear, have no separate existence, but are somehow mere manifestations, or imaginary coefficients, of a most complex integral.10 The — Gerald M. Weinberg