#anxiety

Beware lest in your anxiety to avoid war you obtain a master. ↗

— Demosthenes

#avoid #beware #lest #master #obtain

Because it is possible to create — creating one’s self, willing to be one’s self, as well as creating in all the innumerable daily activities (and these are two phases of the same process) — one has anxiety. One would have no anxiety if there were no possibility whatever. Now creating, actualizing one’s possibilities, always involves negative as well as positive aspects. It always involves destroying the status quo, destroying old patterns within oneself, progressively destroying what one has clung to from childhood on, and creating new and original forms and ways of living. If one does not do this, one is refusing to grow, refusing to avail himself of his possibilities; one is shirking his responsibility to himself. Hence refusal to actualize one’s possibilities brings guilt toward one’s self. But creating also means destroying the status quo of one’s environment, breaking the old forms; it means producing something new and original in human relations as well as in cultural forms (e.g., the creativity of the artist). Thus every experience of creativity has its potentiality of aggression or denial toward other persons in one’s environment or established patterns within one’s self. To put the matter figuratively, in every experience of creativity something in the past is killed that something new in the present may be born. Hence, for Kierkegaard, guilt feeling is always a concomitant of anxiety: both are aspects of experiencing and actualizing possibility. The more creative the person, he held, the more anxiety and guilt are potentially present. ↗

— Rollo May

#creativity #mindset #experience

I had turned my anxiety into my profession. ↗

— Francois Jacob

#had #i #into #profession #turned

My sense is that economic anxiety means electoral volatility. ↗

— Tim Kaine

#economic #electoral #means #sense #volatility

I have a lot of health anxiety. ↗

— Charlie Kaufman

#health #i #lot

Good humor is a tonic for mind and body. It is the best antidote for anxiety and depression. It is a business asset. It attracts and keeps friends. It lightens human burdens. It is the direct route to serenity and contentment. ↗

— Grenville Kleiser

#anxiety #asset #attracts #best #body

That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack. That concentrating on anything is very hard work. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#anxiety

Not being understood may be taken as a sign that there is much in one to understand. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#understanding #anxiety

The only way I can describe the extent of my anxiety is to say that I felt as if I were pregnant with a rock. ↗

— Katharine Graham

#simile #strikes #washington-post #anxiety

It felt like this was never going to end. The world wasn't going to stop crashing down until there was nothing left of me but dust. ↗

— Keary Taylor

#depression #mental #mental-disorder #mental-illness #anxiety