Fear

“ Fear leap in a babe's face, and take his breath,
⁠Fear, like the fear of eld
That knows the price of life, the name of death.
⁠What is it justifies
This thing, this dread, this fright that has no tongue,
⁠The terror in those eyes
When only eyes can speak—they are so young? ”

“ I see her still—the piteous mouth,
The great eyes fixt with fear.
Not an hour since upon my knee
Her good-night pranks were play’d,
And now—to face Death . . . and alone . . .
God! and afraid? “Afraid!” ”

“ Lord, what a thing is fear! it transforms the creatur's of the world and the craft of man, making that which is ugly, seemly in our eyes, and that which is beautiful, unsightly! Lord, Lord, what a thing is fear! ”

“ Then the great fear surges in your soul, the real fear—the fear beside which other fears are vain imaginings; the fear lest right there and then you are losing your own soul; that you are losing your own soul and the soul of a people; that millions of unborn children, black and gold and mauve, are being there and then despoiled by you because you are a coward and dare not fight! ”

“ I shall remind you of that when under the myriad eyes of the all-seeing sky you are again confused with fear. And how not have fear! The thing that we purposed was great and dreadful, and it would have given a glory to our names in far posterity. ”

“ Fear scares me from my sleep; and in the night I, like a troubled spirit, roam and try The strength of every bolt, and put to proof Each guard's fidelity:—I see, with fear, The dawning of each morn, which may confirm My apprehensions:—yet, thank God, there's hope That all my fears will soon be at an end ”

“ Gradually this first sense of utter and unspeakable loss changed into a startled consciousness of fear;—some awful transformation of things familiar was about to be consummated;—and he felt the distinct approach of some unnameable Horror which was about to convulse and overwhelm all mankind. ”

“ I might boast that during all this scene of horror not a sigh or expression of fear escaped from me, had not my support been found in that miserable, though strong, consolation, that all mankind were involved in the same calamity, and that I imagined I was perishing with the world itself. ”

“ I have stretched out my hand, and no man regarded;
25 But ye have set at nought all my counsel, and would none of my reproof:
26 I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh;
27 When your fear cometh as desolation, and your destruction cometh as a whirlwind; when distress and anguish cometh upon you. ”

“ Take and fear not the cates, although of earth,
Which to thy hands celestial hands extend,
Take and fear not: such vulgar meats of life
Thy spirit lips no more must scorn to pass;
The seeming ill, contaminating joys,
Thy sense divine no more be loth to allow;
The pleasures as the pains of our strange life
Thou art engaged, self-compromised, to share. ”

“ For those fine lady “ah’s” and “oh’s” of fear
So much assumed (when any man is near) .
But God implanted in each human heart
A natural horror, and a sickly dread
Of that accursèd, slimy, creeping thing
That squirms a limbless carcass o’er the ground. ”

“ When anyone sees me, he flees with fear. But, for what does he fear me? I have not vexed him. So, I pursue the one that fears me. I want to ask him, 'Why do you fear me?' But, when I pursue it, it goes on fleeing more rapidly. ”

“ God planted fear in the soul as truly as He planted hope or courage. Fear is a kind of bell, or gong, which rings the mind into quick life and avoidance upon the approach of danger. It is the soul's signal for rallying.—Beecher. ”

“ And spiritual fear—which is one of the noblest of all affections, as bodily fear is one of the basest—is, if properly defined, nothing less or more than the fear of doing wrong; of becoming a worse man.
But what has that to do with mere fear of the unseen? The fancy which conceives the fear is physical, not spiritual. Think for yourselves. What difference is there between a savage’s fear of a demon, and a hunter’s fear of a fall? ”

“ 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. ”

“ And knowing by experience how much stronger than love is fear, he frequently threatened, browbeat, and overawed them with the rod and the tongue, with the terrors of this world, and with the horrors of the next, that they might be kept in the right way by dread of falling into the bottomless pits that bound it on both sides. ”

“ Oh, fear not in a world like this,
And thou shalt know erelong,
Know how sublime a thing it is
To suffer and be strong. ”

“ Her own terror rushed upon me, and in that moment of fear, - the most terrible fear a man can experience, - I knew that in inexpressible ways she was dear to me. ”

“ Your hairy ears hear, not him who speaks best, but him who shouts loudest. And fear, that natural fear which was the counsellor of your ancestors and mine when they were cave-dwellers, the fear which created gods and crimes, makes you the enemy of the unfortunate and deprives you of pity. ”

“ It was fear, rather than anger that sounded in their voices, the deadly terror of that unconquerable enemy, free-thinking, so often beaten down but always raising its head again. Men looked at each other with dread and suspicion in their eyes. ”

“ To depress or discourage with fear; to impress with fear in such a manner that the mind shrinks, or loses its firmness; to overcome with sudden terror or horror; to dismay; as, the sight appalled the stoutest heart. ”

“ What kind of an emotion of fear would be left if the feeling neither of quickened heart-beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of gooseflesh nor of visceral stirrings, were present, it is quite impossible for me to think. ”

“ Fear is more demonstrative, and as it is essentially destructive, its effects are more sudden and visible. In its acuter forms, as Fright and Terror, it may blanch the hair in a night, blight the mind and destroy the life of the individual. ”

“ For years they had lived with some species of fear—of honest men or vengeance, of pursuit, of starvation, of lack of drink or gold, of blood and death, of stronger men, of luck, of chance, of fate, of mysterious nameless force. ”

“ Fear no more, says the heart in the body; fear no more. ”

“ Don't you think that her fears, her terrors, may have haunted you as well as your own? I believe in the powers of thought. I believe that fear—remorse—regret—may materialise into a very ghost at your elbow. ”

“ Once or twice having resolutely refrained from showing your terror, you will be surprised and pleased to find the terror itself lessening.
I know persons who go through life in a sort of bondage to fear of various kinds. They tremble and turn pale, or grow hysterical and cry, when the dark clouds gather and the thunders roll. ”

“ We grope in vain. We strain our eyes in vain. “Oh, death is, after all, a fearful thing,” so we say with the old cringing fear that clings to the known, the familiar scene, and abhors the untravelled bourne. ”

“ So far from perceiving any moral courage, in those, who fight duels, nothing seems more apparent, than the triumph of one fear, over four other fears—the fear of shame, over the fear of bringing misery upon parents, wives and children—the fear of the law—the fear of God—and the fear of death. ”

“ the terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear ourselves! Until then we have not lived. ”

“ Consternation is, then, fear at a strange apparition, or at an unlooked-for representation—such as, for example, a message; while fear is an excessive wonderment on account of something which arises or is. ”

“ Fear'd am I more than lov'd;—let me be fear'd, And, when I frown, make all the court look pale. ”

“ And extreme fear can neither fight nor fly,
But coward-like with trembling terror die. ”

“ Fear was growing—growing—that peculiar fear of the dark which is the heritage of those who have taken human life.
"What was that? Something lay gleaming queerly ahead, with a dull phosphorescent glow. I stooped and picked it up—and flung it from me shuddering. It was the skeleton of a human foot! ”

“ And the many people who, impatient of perpetual alarms of fear, have hanged or drowned themselves, or dashed themselves to pieces, give us sufficiently to understand that fear is more importunate and insupportable than death itself. ”

“ Fear and a certain tender solicitude mingle in our regard for every child; not a lad we pass in the street but may presently be called to face such pain and stress and danger as no ancient hero ever knew. ”

“ Fear gets possession of me under circumstances in which my suspicions are, for some reason or other, aroused to activity, all the more so if the suspicions of possible impending evil are awakened suddenly. ”

“ Therefore fear not them who will torture the body but cannot torture or harass the mind. Fear not men in the sufferings you will be called upon to receive at their hands. Be faithful, be calm and steadfast. Then He tells them whom they should fear. "Fear him who is able to destroy"---here is the stronger word, meaning to destroy totally, to be lost, to perish, to be annihilated. ”

“ To know for an hour you were mine completely—
Mine in body and soul, my own—
I would bear unending tortures sweetly,
With not a murmur and not a moan.
A lighter sin or a lesser error
Might change through hope or fear divine;
But there is no fear, and hell has no terror,
To change or alter a love like mine. ”

“ But when fear has once possessed you, God ye good even! You think you are flying towards the poop when you are running towards the prow, and for one enemy think you have ten before your eyes, as drunkards who see a thousand candles at once. ”

“ Such an extravagant cast of mind engages multitudes of people not only in impertinent terrors, but in supernumerary duties of life; and arises from that fear and ignorance which are natural to the soul of man. ”

“ Fear, that is the prospect of pain, the latter: fear, the offspring of superstitious fancy: the fear of future punishment at the hands of a splenetic and revengeful Deity. I say in this case fear: for of the invisible future, fear is more powerful than hope. ”

“ Next, the happy believers in the supernatural owed to their simplicity delicious throbs of fear,—not craven cowardice, but that more refined and complex feeling, which is of all sensations the most enthralling, the most elusive, and the most impossible to define. Fear, like all other treacherous gifts, must be handled with discrimination: a thought too much, and we are brutalized and degraded ”

“ If the stimulus of fear be repeated from day to day, whether in the case of a mother anxious on account of the illness of a child; a business man struggling against failure; a politician under contest for appointment; a broker in the daily hazard of his fortune; litigants in legal battle, or a jealous lover who fears a rival; the countless real as well as the baseless fears in daily life, in fact, all forms of fear, as it seems to me, express themselves in like terms of ancestral physical contests. On this law, fear dominates the various organs and parts of the body. ”

“ Do we fear suffering or apathy most? Is it from experience or the monotony of a commonplace existence that we quickest flee? ”

“ Fear, or terror, which is an apprehension of pain or death, exhibits exactly the same effects, approaching in violence to those just mentioned, in proportion to the nearness of the cause, and the weakness of the subject. ”