Fear of Self Quotes

There are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.

People are afraid of their own lives. Shouldn't your goal be to have a meaningful life? Unknown, mysterious, thrilling?

Perhaps down in his heart Okonkwo was not a cruel man. But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness. It was deeper and more intimate that the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest, and of the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw. Okonkwo’s fear was greater than these. It was not external but lay deep within himself.

We fear violence less than our own feelings. Personal, private, solitary pain is more terrifying than what anyone else can inflict.

I didn't tell him that what I was most scared of, most haunted by, was something I didn't understand and could never run away from. It was myself.

Even snakes are afraid of snakes.

Fear of self is the greatest of all terrors, the deepest of all dread, the commonest of all mistakes. From it grows failure. Because of it, life is a mockery. Out of it comes despair.

Then they grow away from the earth then they grow away from the sun then they grow away from the plants and the animals. They see no life. When they look they see only objects. The world is a dead thing for them the trees and the rivers are not alive. the mountains and stones are not alive. The deer and bear are objects. They see no life. They fear. They fear the world. They destroy what they fear. They fear themselves.

What I saw wasn't a ghost. It was simply--myself. I can never forget how terrified I was that night, and whenever I remember it, this thought always springs to mind: that the most frightening thing in the world is our own self. What do you think?

Fear is the fear of one's self.

I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.

Evil is not a thing. It cannot take possession of you. It's the opposite; it's a void, an absence of goodness. The only thing you can be frightened of here is yourself.

Among precautions against ambition, it may not be amiss to take precautions against our own. I must fairly say, I dread our own power and our own ambition: I dread our being too much dreaded.

Human beings are the only animals of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid.

What strange beings we are! That sitting in hell at the bottom of the dark, we're afraid of our own immortality.

What makes Hulk afraid? It's himself. It's a version of himself that's weak. It's a version of himself that's vulnerable. It's a child inside of him.

...the most serious thing, and the strangest, is that we are afraid to the point of panic, not so much of seeing ourselves as of being seen by ourselves. This is our root absurdity. What is behind this great fear?

I was right not to be afraid of any thief but myself, who will end by leaving me nothing.

The face of the enemy frightens me only when I see how much it resembles mine.

Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty.

I am not a romantic leading man anymore so I don't need to nurture that public image anymore. I can talk about it now because I'm not afraid anymore . . . When I grew up, being gay, being sissy or anything like that, was verboten. I disliked myself intensely and feared this part of myself intensely, and had to hide it and became 'Perfect Richard, All-American Boy' as a place to hide.

The reason why I do not know anything about myself, the reason why Siddhartha has remained alien and unknown to myself is due to one thing, to one single thing--I was afraid of myself, I was fleeing from myself. I was seeking Atman, I was seeking Brahman, I was determined to dismember myself and tear away its layers of husk in order to find in its unknown innermost recess the kernel at the heart of those layers, the Atman, life, the divine principle, the ultimate. But in so doing, I was losing myself.

The women I have loved I have desired for themselves, but also because I feared myself.

One thing I learned about that I always knew about myself - that I always been afraid of myself.