Bob Greene Quotes

When people get scared, they quit giving.

You can give me 400,000 hostile people and I won't even break sweat. If you give me 200 adoring people, my mouth will dry out.

Fear creates fear.

Don't do anything for fear, because fear will never do anything for you.

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.

I always think there will be that time that people will find out that I'm crap at what I do.

I've often met people who are terrified, you know, in a straight jacket of their own making because they'd rather do anything that fail. They don't want to try for fear of failing.

Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act.

The main trouble with despair is that it is self-fulfilling. People who fear the worst tend to invite it. Heads that are down can't scan the horizon for new openings. Bursts of energy do not spring from a spirit of defeat. Ultimately, helplessness leads to hopelessness.

When people restrain themselves out of fear, their lives are by necessity diminished. They become rigid and defensive, and their self stops growing.

Dread of disaster makes everybody act in the very way that increases the disaster.

I'm often prone to self-doubt about everything I do.

Fearing servility, people become servile.

The vertue of a coward is suspition.

Fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true.

They want me to give another concert but I have no desire to do so. You cannot imagine what a torture the three days before a public appearance are to me.

excessive fear and self-doubt that were the greatest detractors of personal genius.

I don't believe anyone ever suspects how completely unsure I am of my work and myself and what tortures of self-doubting the doubt of others has always given me.

You don't know what you're doing. You're just hoping that people won't make fun of you. I had no idea how it would turn out.

Insecurity refers to a profoud sense of self-doubt-a deep feeling of uncertainty about our basic worth and our place in the world. Insecurity is associated with chronic self-consciousness, along with a chronic lack of confidence in ourselves and anxiety about our relationships. The insecure man or woman lives in constant fear of rejection and a deep uncertainty about whether his or her own feelings and desires are legitimate.

One reason people never attempt new things is their fear of failure.

People are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles.

Do not call procrastination laziness. Call it fear.

How many people have never raised their hand before?

People procrastinate because they are afraid of the success that they know will result if they move ahead now.