Quotes & Sayings About Imagination And Fear

You see, this would be a death by the imagination. And though the imagination feeds on phantoms, it needs a premise in reality to begin with. Then it can go on from there under its own power.
("Mind Over Murder") — Cornell Woolrich

Think of what's scary in a movie ... The unseen, the imagined, is always more frightening than what's graphically portrayed.The same holds true in your head. Face your fear, step into it, look at it head-on and it will diminish in stature, lose its hold on your imagination. But run, and it'll grow wings, breather fire, and fly after you. — Norah Vincent

America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination, and unbeatable determination to do the job at hand. — Harry Truman

Imagination, of course, can open any door - turn the key and let terror walk right in. — Truman Capote

What you couldn't see and only imagined was always scarier than what was real. — Ilsa J. Bick

Not unlike most people. When I dwell with you, I do so in the present - I live in the present. Not the past, although much can be remembered and learned by looking back, but only for a visit, not an extended stay. And for sure, I do not dwell in the future you visualize or imagine. Mack, do you realize that your imagination of the future, which is almost always dictated by fear of some kind, rarely, if ever, pictures me there with you? — Wm. Paul Young

Relax and breathe. The trouble with imaginative people is that we're good at picturing the worst that could happen to us. Fear is often just the imagination taking a wrong turn. Bad criticism is not the end of the world. As far as I know, no one has ever died from a bad review. Take a deep breath and accept whatever comes. — Austin Kleon

Not my biggest fear, but my biggest problem onstage is over-emphasizing what I do. I'm pushing too hard. You need to engage an audience. They need to be able to involve their own imaginations as well. They don't need everything thrust down their throat, and I have a tendency to do that. I always have had a tendency to do that. — Nick Cave

A dread of white people now came to live permanently in my feelings and imagination. As the war drew to a close, racial conflict flared over the entire South, and though I did not witness any of it, I could not have been more thoroughly affected by it if I had participated directly in every clash. The war itself had been unreal to me, but I had grown able to respond emotionally to every hint, whisper, word, inflection, news, gossip, and rumor regarding conflicts between the races. Nothing challenged the totality of my personality so much as this pressure of hate and threat that stemmed from the invisible whites. I would stand for hours on the doorsteps of neighbors' houses listening to their talk, learning how a white woman had slapped a black woman, how a white man had killed a black man. It filled me with awe, wonder, and fear, and I asked ceaseless questions. One evening I heard a tale that rendered — Richard Wright

I've had stupid teachers, lazy teachers, boring teachers, teachers who were teachers because their parents were and they hadn't the imagination to think of anything else, teachers who were teachers because of cowardice, because of fear, because of the holidays, because of the pensions, because they were never called to account, never had to actually be any good, ones who could not survive in any other profession, who were not aware they had trod on butterflies. But none of those compared to Mr Maurice Crossan. He was the one who first stamped on my brother's soul. He was dark, as they say here. For those who want more of him visit the dark character of Orlick Dolge in Great Expectations and cross that with a ginger-headed weasel. — Niall Williams

By the end of Barber's talk, this event she's celebrating sounds like a product of the imagination of some master of speculative fiction like Philip K. Dick or Ray Bradbury - a mad dystopia in which feminist dreams have led to a forest full of separate clearings in which more and more women keep to smaller and smaller groups for fear of encountering difference. — Bruce Bawer

Fear is an unavoidable element of the mortal condition. Creation in all its ravishing beauty, with its infinite baroque embellishments and subtle charms, with all the wonders that it offers from both the Maker and the made, with all its velvet mystery and with all the joy we receive from those we love here, so enchants us lack we lack the imagination, less than the faith, to envision an even more dazzling world beyond, and therefore even if we believe, we cling tenaciously to this existence, to sweet familiarity, fearful that all conceivable paradises will prove wanting by comparison. — Dean Koontz

Without ... the creative imagination rushing in where bureaucratic angels fear to tread - without this, life is a mockery and a disgrace. — E.F. Schumacher

Write every day, line by line, page by page, hour by hour. Do this despite fear. For above all else, beyond imagination and skill, what the world asks of you is courage, courage to risk rejection, ridicule and failure. As you follow the quest for stories told with meaning and beauty, study thoughtfully but write boldly. Then, like the hero of the fable, your dance will dazzle the world. — Robert McKee

Rational thinking is an important aspect of human nature, but we have imagination, we have ambition, we have irrational fear, we are swayed by other people, we get indoctrinated and we get influenced by advertising. — Ha-Joon Chang

I came to believe it not true that "the
coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave man
only one." I think it is the other way around:
It is the brave who die a thousand deaths.
For it is imagination, and not just conscience,
which doth make cowards of us all. Those
who do not know fear are not truly brave.
— Leo Rosten

Laws of silence don't work ... . When something is festering in your memory or your imagination, laws of silence don't work, it's just like shutting a door and locking it on a house on fire in hope of forgetting that the house is burning. But not facing a fire doesn't put it out. — Tennessee Williams

When Eleanor's arm touched his he felt his hands grow cold with deadly fear lest he should lose the shadow brush with which his imagination was painting wonders of her. He watched her from the corners of his eyes as ever he did when he walked with her
she was a feast and a folly and he wished it had been his destiny to sit forever on a haystack and see life through her green eyes. — F Scott Fitzgerald

His so-fucking-vivid imagination rarely gave him the horrors, but when it did, God help him. God help him once it was warmed up. It was not only warmed up now, it was hot and running on full choke. That there was no sense at all in what he was thinking made not a whit of difference in the dark. In the dark, rationality seemed stupid and logic a dream. In the dark he thought with his skin. — Stephen King

I imagined, too. And so imagination became my nemesis; my mind created monsters out of nothing. — Samantha Shannon

I am amazed that without any hesitation whatsoever I can completely believe myself to be on a grand journey of massive vistas and bold ascents, only to find that they are nothing more than a figment of a frightened imagination that needed a journey but could not admit to the fear of actually taking one. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

The scariest, most terrifying thing that I fear?"
Yes."
My Imagination."
I thought you were going to say "Fear, itself."
Then you have a small imagination."
Roland and Eddie — Stephen King

I've come to the conclusion that it's all about fear- fear that your kid won't come out on top, be a success. Forcing him into these brutal encounters will a) make a dame sure he is a success, and b) all you to see evidence of that success with the added bonus of a cheering crowd. This means that sports are supported with an almost desperate enthusiasm. The football team gets catered dinners before a fame. Honor Society is lucky if it gets a cupcake. Academic success-forget it. That requires too much imagination. There's no scoreboard. — Deb Caletti

Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.
Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him for a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear. — G.K. Chesterton

If you can bring yourself to apply your imagination to finding the possible favorable outcomes of undesired developments, even if only as an exercise, you'll see that it fosters creativity. This suggestion is much more than a way to find the silver lining our grandmothers encouraged us to look for. I include it in this book because creativity is linked to intuition, and intuition is the way out of the most serious challenges you might face. Albert Einstein said that when you follow intuition, The solutions come to you, and you don't know how or why. — Gavin De Becker

If you could only speak the devil fair enough, he might save you the cost of the doctor. Such strange lingering echoes of the old demon-worship might perhaps even now be caught by the diligent listener among the grey-haired peasantry; for the rude mind with difficulty associates the ideas of power and benignity. A shadowy conception of power that by much persuasion can be induced to refrain from inflicting harm, is the shape most easily taken by the sense of the Invisible in the minds of men who have always been pressed close by primitive wants, and to whom a life of hard toil has never been illuminated by any enthusiastic religious faith. To them pain and mishap present a far wider range of possibilities than gladness and enjoyment: their imagination is almost barren of the images that feed desire and hope, but is all overgrown by recollections that are a perpetual pasture to fear. — George Eliot

Tell the image makers and magazine sellers and the plastic surgeons that you are not afraid. That what you fear the most is the death of imagination and originality and metaphor and passion. Then be bold and LOVE YOUR BODY. STOP FIXING IT. It was never broken. — Marion Woodman

What you accomplish in life is limited only by your imagination and the fear of reprisal. Life is too fleeting and unrewarding to have to live with the added anus of indignity. The denial of one's inevitable demise is what causes most of the astringent blandness in the world. When your existence ends most certainly in death, there is no such thing as 'going too far'. There are no 'lines' you should fear to cross except the finish line. Playing it safe is the most dangerous thing you could do. — Jim Goad

Imagination is a pretty powerful thing, and when you're in the moment and you're riding a train and you're asked to look scared, I don't know, it just kind of works out. And in those moments where you're actually doing some of the stunts, then it's not so hard at all, because there's an actual fear there. — Chris Pine

The idea that the spirits of those once tortured in the house might still be there was the avenue his imagination began to explore. The groaning of the wood sounded like screams from the dungeon and the clunking pipes were the implements of torture. His bedcovers seemed to offer less protection than they had done in his younger years, he felt naked and at the mercy of his thoughts, and it wasn't long before the skull he'd seen in the cellar had a face, manifested by fear and imagination. — Matthew Williams

My imagination persisted in sticking horrors into the dark- so I stuck my imagination into the dark instead, and let it look out at me. — F Scott Fitzgerald

So you will not kneel to me?" He said.
I will kneel to no man, "She answered, preparing herself for the push that would send her toppling to her death and ready to haul him with her.
You interest me, girl. There is no fear in you."
Nor in you, apparently, King Priam."
He looked surprised. "Fear if for weaklings. Look around you. This is Troy. My Troy. The richest and most powerful city in the world. It was not built by fearful men, but my men with imagination and courage. It's wealth grows Daily, and with it the influence that wealth brings. — David Gemmell

How often is my tidy and well-appointed world nothing but the thin veneer of an imagination that I've chosen to use in the service of denial, rather than a gift I've chosen to exercise out of a passion for change? — Craig D. Lounsbrough

Well, that's why smart people get tripped up with worry and fear. Worry ... fear ... is just a misuse of the creative imagination that has been placed in each of us. Because we are smart and creative, we imagine all the things that could happen, that might happen, that will happen if this or that happens. See what I mean? — Andy Andrews

There's a psychological mechanism, I've come to believe, that prevents most of us from imagining the moment of our own death. For if it were possible to imagine fully that instant of passing from consciousness to nonexistence, with all the attendant fear and humiliation of absolute helplessness, it would be very hard to live. It would be unbearably obvious that death is inscribed in everything that constitutes life, that any moment of your existence may be only a breath away from being the last. We would be continuously devastated by the magnitude of that inescapable fact. Still, as we mature into our mortality, we begin to gingerly dip our horror-tingling toes into the void, hoping that our mind will somehow ease itself into dying, that God or some other soothing opiate will remain available as we venture into the darkness of non-being. — Aleksandar Hemon

It is precisely when we hear little from our partner which frightens, shocks, or sickens us that we should begin to be concerned, for this may be the surest sign that we are being gently lied to or shielded from the other's imagination, whether out of kindness or from a touching fear of losing our love. It may mean that we have, despite ourselves, shut our ears to information that fails to conform to our hopes - hopes which will thereby be endangered all the more. My view of human nature is that all of us are just holding it together in various ways - and that's okay, and we just need to go easy with one another, knowing that we're all these incredibly fragile beings. — Alain De Botton

But it isn't only the terror everywhere, and the fear of being conscious of it, that freezes people. It's more than that. People know they are in a society dead or dying. They are refusing emotion because at the end of every emotion are property, money, power. They work and despise their work, and so freeze themselves. They love but know that it's a half-love or a twisted love, and so they freeze themselves.
It is possible that in order to keep love, feeling, tenderness alive, it will be necessary to feel these emotions ambiguously, even for what is false and debased, or for what is still an idea, a shadow in the willed imagination only ... or if what we feel is pain, then we must feel it, acknowledging that the alternative is death. Better anything than the shrewd, the calculated, the non-committal, the refusal of giving for fear of the consequences ... — Doris Lessing

I can't make you understand
because you don't know the meaning of fear. You have the heart of
a lion and an utter lack of imagination and I envy you both of
those qualities. You'll never mind facing realities and you'll
never want to escape from them as I do. — Margaret Mitchell

Dolls fire our collective imagination, for better and - too often - for worse. From life-size dolls the same height as the little girls who carry them, to dolls whose long hair can 'grow' longer, to Barbie and her fashionable sisters, dolls do double duty as child's play and the focus of adult art and adult fear. — Ellen Datlow

My name is Ferrum. I was the first, born of the forges, when mankind first began to experiment with iron. I rose from their imagination, from their ambition to conquer the world with a metal that could slice through bronze like paper. I was there when the world started to shift, when humans took their first steps out of the Dark Ages into civilization. For many years, I thought I was alone. But mankind is never satisfied. Others came, risen from these dreams of a new world ... Then, with the invention of computers, the gremlins came, and the bugs. Given life by the fear of monsters lurking in machines, these were more chaotic than the other fey, violent and destructive. They spread to every part of the world. As technology became a driving force in every country, powerful new fey rose into existence. Virus. Glitch. And Machina, the most powerful of all. — Julie Kagawa

The fear and anxiety of baring my soul is transcended by the thrill and honor and wonderfulness of being able to touch and affect so many people ... having people look into my mind, my imagination ... into my heart and soul. — Elizabeth Kim

Underneath my imagination there didn't seem to be anything solid except for the space where I shoved my pain and sadness. Besides that, there were only twisted steel threads of axiety, woven through my body and brain, wired into me like a constant warning. Watch out, stay still, move away, stay silent, fight back, run and hide. Even when I was dreaming, but more so when I was awake, there was the constant fear of being caught off-guard, or by the wrong person at the wrong time. — Jane Devin

Once you realize that the world is your own projection, you are free of it. You need not free yourself of a world that does not exist, except in your own imagination! However is the picture, beautiful or ugly, you are painting it and you are not bound by it. Realize that there is nobody to force it on you, that it is due to the habit of taking the imaginary to be real. See the imaginary as imaginary and be free of fear. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Imagination and the pure delight in stories drive out fear. — William Paton Ker

Not since the Lord himself showed his stuff to Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones had anyone shown such grace and skill in the reconstruction of animals from disarticulated skeletons. Charles R. Knight, the most celebrated of artists in the reanimation of fossils, painted all the canonical figures of dinosaurs that fire our fear and imagination to this day. — Stephen Jay Gould

We knot our imagination to fear to creat aham. Tapasya and yagna are two tools that can help us unknot the mind, outgrow fear and discover atma, our true self. — Devdutt Pattanaik

Teachers' using grades and the fear of failure mould the brains of the young until they have lost every ounce of imagination they might once have possessed. — Paul Karl Feyerabend

Much-Afraid, don't ever allow yourself to begin trying to picture what it will be like. Believe me, when you get to the place which you dread you will find that they are as different as possible from what you have imagined, just as was the case when you were actually ascending the precipice. I must warn you that I see your enemies lurking among the trees ahead, and if you ever let Craven Fear begin painting a picture on the screen of your imagination, you will walk with fear and trembling and agony, where no fear is. — Hannah Hurnard

Thus it is brought prominently before us, that superstition's chief victims are those persons who greedily covet temporal advantages; they it is, who (especially when they are in danger, and cannot help themselves) are wont with prayers and womanish tears to implore help from God: upbraiding Reason as blind, because she cannot show a sure path to the shadows they pursue, and rejecting human wisdom as vain; but believing the phantoms of imagination, dreams, and other childish absurdities, to be the very oracles of Heaven. As though God had turned away from the wise, and written His decrees, not in the mind of man but in the entrails of beasts, or left them to be proclaimed by the inspiration and instinct of fools, madmen, and birds. Such is the unreason to which terror can drive mankind! Superstition, then, is engendered, preserved, and fostered by fear. — Christopher Hitchens

I have turned away from the thought of writing fiction in the past through what I suppose is, actually, fear. The direct, raw invitation for the reader to come in and explore my imagination is fairly scary for me so I have busied myself with so much else. — Dawn French

Fear is a distorting mirror in which anything can appear as a caricature of itself, stretched to terrible proportions; once inflamed, the imagination pursues the craziest and most unlikely possibilities. What is most absurd suddenly seems the most probable. — Stefan Zweig

This is what it means to be an adventurer in our day: to give up creature comforts of the mind, to realize the possibilities of imagination. Because everything around us says no you cannot do this, you cannot live without that, nothing is useful unless it's in service to money, to gain, to stability. The adventurer gives in to tides of chaos, trusts the world to support her - and in doing so turns her back on the fear and obedience she has been taught. She rejects the indoctrination of impossibility. — Hib Chickena

Fear festers in the imagination. It's not fear's fault. That's just the way it's made. Nightmares breed. Allies become enemies. Subversives are everywhere. Paranoia justifies any persecution, and privacy is a luxury when the Reds have the bomb. — Lauren Beukes

You're only limited by your lack of imagination and fear of appearing stupid. — Susan Messing

Gloom and sadness are poison to us, and the origin of hysterics. You are right in thinking that this disease is in the imagination; you have defined it perfectly; it is vexation which causes it to spring up, and fear that supports it. — Marie De Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise De Sevigne

A game like sardines is scary, not so much for the hider but for the seekers. It's scary because you lose your companions and the whole world creeps up quiet and you slowly realize you're going to stumble upon a secret place where everyone will jump out at you. And then, when you are the very last seeker, you start to wonder if you're the only person in the world. If the hiding place somehow sucked up the players and the last one has to decide to run away or get sucked up, too. — Suzanne Palmieri

In the false American imagination, West Virginia is a joke or else it's a charity case; but more than anything it is unseen, an invisible architecture of labor and struggle; and incarceration shares this invisibility, hidden at the center of everything; our slipshod remedy for an abiding fear, danger pinned to human bodies and then slotted into bunk beds you can't see from any highway. — Lauren F. Winner

They would make the 'Church ' their great meeting-point, rather than the Atonement of Christ. As far as my experience goes, they have more devoutness and less devotion, more fear and less love, more feeling of duty than of desire, laying more stress on Phil. ii. 12 than ver. 13, and in practice working upon the intellect and imagination rather than aiming at the heart, skirmishing among the outworks rather than assaulting the citadel. — Frances Ridley Havergal

The Dutchman [Brannenburg] was hard ... he was stone. His brain was eroded granite where the few ideas he had carved deep their ruts of opinion. There was no way for another idea to seep in, no place for imagination, no place for dreams, none for compassion or mercy or even fear.
He knew no shadings of emotion, he knew no half-rights or half-wrongs or pity or excuse, nor had he any sense of pardon. The more I thought of him the more I knew he was not evil in himself, and he would have been shocked that anybody thought of him as evil. Shocked for a moment only, then he'd have shut the idea from his mind as nonsense. For the deepest groove worn into that granite brain was the one of his own rightness.
And that scared me. — Louis L'Amour

Each is liable to panic, which is exactly, the terror of ignorance surrendered to the imagination. Knowledge is the encourager, knowledge that takes fear out of the heart, knowledge and use, which is knowledge in practice. They can conquer who believe they can. It is he who has done the deed once who does not shrink from attempting again. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fear is not real. The only place that fear can exist is in our thoughts of the future. It is a product of our imagination, causing us to fear things that do not at present and may not ever exist. That is near insanity. Do not misunderstand me danger is very real but fear is a choice. We are all telling ourselves a story. — Will Smith

Your body talks to you in sensations; feelings of tension, fear, hunger, pleasure, aliveness, and pain are just some of the ways it attempts to communicate with you. This is why staying connected to your physical self - with as little conflict as possible - is fundamental to health and wellbeing. If you spend copious amounts of energy attempting to diminish your body, or if your imagination is limited such that you cannot see beauty in yourself, then you become disconnected from the world around you. You lose perspective and purpose. — Connie Sobczak

Do not build up obstacles in your imagination. Difficulties must be studied and dealt with, but they must not be magnfiied by fear — Norman Vincent Peale

No fear is unbearable, she concluded, unless you've got time on your hands and a healthy imagination. — Arturo Perez-Reverte

Religion has no power if God is not truly 'dangerous,' but religion also seeks to manage God, and make God safe.
The second commandment speaks against the management of God. We cannot help but make our images of God, for God has given us imagination. But every image we make of God is finally a box: a cage, potentially an idol, from which the living God keeps breaking out. And if we try to keep God there, then God comes out with 'jealousy' to overturn our careful construction.
The third commandment speaks against the management of God. To take God's name in vain is to make God useful to our projects and ourselves. We are wont to trivialize the truth of God and then disparage it for being trivial. We are told God's name in order to love this God, but loving God is not managing God but fearing [respecting] God. And with God, the attitudes of love and fear [respect] are not contradictory but complementary. — Daniel James Meeter

Who is the brave man
he who feels no fear? If so, then bravery is but a polite term for a mind devoid of rationality and imagination. — Geraldine Brooks

We are often like rivers: careless and forceful, timid and dangerous, lucid and muddied, eddying, gleaming, still. Lovers, farmers, and artists have one thing in common, at least - a fear of 'dry spells,' dormant periods in which we do no blooming, internal droughts only the waters of imagination and psychic release can civilize. — Gretel Ehrlich

And because when you die, the world dies, too, at least for you, they assume the world will die for everybody. It's a failure of imagination, in a way - an inability to conceive of the universe without you in it. That's why old people get apocalyptic: they're facing apocalypse, and that part, the private apocalypse, is real. So the closer their personal oblivion gets, the more certain geriatrics project impending doom on their surroundings. Also, there's almost a spitefulness, sometimes. I swear, for some of these bilious Chicken Littles, imminent Armageddon isn't a fear but a fantasy. Like they want the entire planet to implode into a giant black hole. Because if they can't have their martinis on the porch anymore then nobody else should get to sip one, either. — Lionel Shriver

The child I was is the only child I really know.' That's it. I can still feel what it was like to be that child of the 1940s from inside; I am still the same mixture of insecurity and determination, shyness and arrogance, curiosity and fear. I have the same talent she had; the same imagination. I write for her, for that child, and so it is true when I say I write for myself. — Susan Cooper

I began to discriminate between fear and excitement. The two, though very close, are completely different. Fear is negative excitement, choking your imagination. Real excitement produces an energy that overcomes apprehension and makes you want to close in on your goal. — Twyla Tharp

All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry. — Edgar Allan Poe

I'm not the girl men chose.
I'm the girl who's charming and funny and then drives home wondering what she did wrong. I'm the girl who meets someone halfway decent and then fills in the gaps in his character with my own imagination, only to be shocked when he's not the man I thought he was.
I'm the girl who hides who she really is for fear I'll fall short. — Liza Palmer

The hand of God is wonderfully evident at those times when He pens stories whose lines we ourselves are far too fearful to pen or whose imaginations are far too limited to envision. And I would unashamedly suggest that the Christmas story is that very story. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

If one hour's work is enough to govern France, four minutes is all that is needed for Italy. There is no nation more easily frightened; even its poetic imagination predisposes it to fear, and they look upon power as on an image that fills them with terror. — Madame De Stael

We have inherited a fear of memories of slavery. It is as if to remember and acknowledge slavery would amount to our being consumed by it. As a matter of fact, in the popular black imagination, it is easier for us to construct ourselves as children of Africa, as the sons and daughters of kings and queens, and thereby ignore the Middle Passage and centuries of enforced servitude in the Americas. Although some of us might indeed be the descendants of African royalty, most of us are probably descendants of their subjects, the daughters and sons of African peasants or workers. — Angela Y. Davis

Chinasa continued to imagine the girl, a small, veil-wearing child with fear written all over her face, running for dear life. Soon she could see herself as the girl, running and running like the girl. But there was only so far her imagination could take her: She herself had never been a runner. And anyway, how fast did one have to run to outrun a bomb? — Chinelo Okparanta

The danger, when not seen, has the imperfect vagueness of human thought. The fear grows shadowy; and Imagination, the enemy of men, the father of all terrors, unstimulated, sinks to rest in the dullness of exhausted emotion. — Joseph Conrad

Life is infinite energy coupled with limitless creative imagination. It is the invisible essence and substance of every visible form. Its nature is goodness, truth, wisdom and beauty, as well as energy and imagination. Our highest satisfaction comes from a sense of conscious union with this invisible Life. All human endeavor is an attempt to get back to first principles, to find such an inward wholeness that all sense of fear, doubt and uncertainty vanishes. — Ernest Holmes

I guess I'm hoping the weapons will make me feel better, grant me some kind of fucking control, especially if I sense the dullness inside me get too heavy and thick, warning me that something is again approaching, creeping slowly towards my room, no figment of my imagination either but as tangible as you and I, never ceasing to scratch, waiting, perhaps for a word or an order or some other kind of sign to at last initiate this violent and by now inevitable confrontation - always as full of wrath as I am full of fear. — Mark Z. Danielewski

Every person's story contains chapters of pain and loss, victory and defeat, love and hate, pride and prejudice, courage and fear, faith and self-distrust, charity and kindness, selfishness and jealously. Every person's story also contains folios of hopefulness and truthfulness, deceit and despair, action and change, passion and compassion, excitement and boredom, birth and creation, mutation and defect, generation and preservation, delusions and illusions, imagination and fantasy, bafflement and puzzlement. What makes a person's selfsame story unique is how he or she organizes the pure and impure forces that comprise them, how they respond to internal and external crisis, if they act in a safeguarding and humble manner, or lead a self-seeking and destructive existence. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Suspense is like a woman. The more left to the imagination, the more the excitement. ... The conventional big-bosomed blonde is not mysterious. And what could be more obvious than the old black velvet and pearls type? The perfect 'woman of mystery' is one who is blonde, subtle and Nordic. ... Although I do not profess to be an authority on women, I fear that the perfect title [for a movie], like the perfect woman is difficult to find. — Alfred Hitchcock

For the Eye altering alters all;
The Senses roll themselves in fear
And the flat Earth becomes a Ball. — William Blake

Growing up, imagination gave way to cynicism. Ignorance was traded in for world weariness. Fears remained, but they were the dull, suburban fears of illness, destitution, and death. The visceral terror of the unknown- of unseen things lurking under the bed or creeping out of the cupboard- became a fuzzy memory. — John McNee

Together we learned why God has given us His name as "I AM" (Exodus 3:14). His grace always proved itself sufficient in the moment of need, but never before the necessary time, and rarely afterwards. As I anticipated suffering in my imagination and thought of what these cruel soldiers would do next, I quivered with fear. I broke out in a cold sweat of horror. As I heard them drive into our village, day or night, my mouth would go dry: my heart would miss a beat. Fear gripped me in an awful vice. But when the moment came for action, He gave me a quiet, cool exterior that He used to give others courage too: He filled me with a peace and an assurance about what to say or do that amazed me and often defeated the immediate tactics of the enemy. — Helen Roseveare

To one degree or another, everybody is connected to the Mystery, and everybody secretly yearns to expand the connection. That requires expanding the soul. These things can enlarge the soul: laughter, danger, imagination, meditation, wild nature, passion, compassion, psychedelics, beauty, iconoclasm, and driving around in the rain with the top down. These things can diminish it: fear, bitterness, blandness, trendiness, egotism, violence, corruption, ignorance, grasping, shining, and eating ketchup on cottage cheese. — Tom Robbins

Then a dog began to howl somewhere in a farmhouse far down the road, a long, agonized wailing, as if from fear. The sound was taken up by another dog, and then another and another, till, borne on the wind which now sighed softly through the Pass, a wild howling began, which seemed to come from all over the country, as far as the imagination could grasp it through the gloom of the night. — Bram Stoker

In speaking thus I have one fear; it is that I may convince the mind before God can win the heart. For this God-above-all position is one not easy to take. The mind may approve it while not having the consent of the will to put it into effect. While the imagination races ahead to honor God, the will may lag behind and the man never guess how divided his heart is. The whole man must make the decision before the heart can know any real satisfaction. God wants us all, and He will not rest till He gets us all. No part of the man will do. — A.W. Tozer

When you will, make a resolution, set your jaw, you are expressing an imaginative fear that you won't do the thing. If you knew you would do the thing, you would smile happily and set about it. And this fear (since the imagination is always creative) comes about presently and you slide down into the complete slump of several weeks or years - the very thing you dreaded and set your jaw against. — Brenda Ueland

What I wanted to express very clearly and intensely was that the reason these people had to invent or imagine heroes and gods is pure fear. Fear of life and fear of death. — Frida Kahlo

Lord. As Blake brought out so beautifully in his poem "Jerusalem": ". . . Babel mocks, saying there is no God or Son of God; That Thou, O Human Imagination, O Divine Body of the Lord Jesus Christ art all A delusion; but I know Thee, O Lord, when Thou arisest upon My weary eyes, even in this dungeon and this iron mill. . . For Thou also sufferest with me, although I behold Thee not. . ." . . .And the Divine Voice answers: ". . . Fear not! Lo, I am with you always. Only believe in me, that I have power to raise from death Thy Brother who sleepeth in Albion. — Neville Goddard

Fear of error which everything recalls to me at every moment of the flight of my ideas, this mania for control, makes men prefer reason's imagination to the imagination of the senses. And yet it is always the imagination alone which is at work. — Louis Aragon

The devil was a great loss in the preternatural world. He was always something to fear and to hate; he supplied the antagonist powers of the imagination, and the arch of true religion hardly stands firm without him. — William Hazlitt

Nowhere has truth such a short life as in Sicily; a fact has scarcely happened five minutes before its genuine kernel has vanished, been camouflaged, embellished, disfigured, squashed, annihilated by imagination and self interest; shame, fear, generosity, malice, opportunism, charity, all the passions, good as well as evil, fling themselves onto the fact and tear it to pieces; very soon it has vanished altogether. — Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

Major barriers to successful planning are fear of change, ignorance, uncertainty about the future, and lack of imagination. — John C. Maxwell

To create worry humans elongate fear with anticipation and memory, expand it in imagination and fuel it with emotion. The uniquely human mental process called worrying depends upon having a brain that can reason, remember, reflect, feel, and imagine. Only humans have a brain big enough to do this simultaneously and do it well. — Edward Hallowell

Now his imagination spun about the hand as about the edge of a vortex; but still he made no effort to draw nearer. He had known the love that is fed on caresses and feeds them; but this passion that was closer than his bones was not to be superficially satisfied. His one terror was to do anything which might efface the sound and impression of her words; his one thought, that he should never again feel quite alone. — Edith Wharton

Narrow minds devoid of
imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped
ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely
fear and loathe. Of course it's important to know what's right and what's wrong.
Individual errors in judgment can usually be corrected. As long as you have the courage
to admit mistakes, things can be turned around. But intolerant, narrow minds with no
imagination are like parasites that transform the host, change form, and continue to
thrive. They're a lost cause — Haruki Murakami

Quite a number of writers comment on the decidedly human character of the fairies, but it must be obvious that practically all supernaturals partake of human traits, more usually unpleasant ones, being as they are the projections of man's fear and imagination and created by him, psychologically, in his own image. Fairies are frequently described as being peevish, irritable, and revengeful to a degree. Grant Stewart says rather unmercifully of the Scottish fairies that their appetites are as keen as their inclinations are corrupt and wicked. — Lewis Spence

I've always had a really developed sense of justice. As a child, I would rotate my dolls' dresses for fear that they might come alive at midnight and one of them would always have the best dress on. Whatever it was that made me worry about my dolls I suppose has paid off in my career because, really, an actor is all about empathy and imagination. And those are the cornerstones of activism. — Susan Sarandon

Death's power lies in fear, which flourishes in the imagination and the unknown. — Wade Davis