#anxiety

Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#anxiety #contemporary

I see at intervals the glance of a curious sort of bird through the close set bars of a cage: a vivid, restless, resolute captive is there; were it but free, it would soar cloud-high. ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#confidence #self-esteem #social-anxiety #anxiety

It is the most ambitious and driven among us who are the most sorely in need of having our reckless hopes dampened through immersive dousings in the darkness which religions have explored. This is a particular priority for secular Americans, perhaps the most anxious and disappointed people on earth, for their nation infuses them with the most extreme hopes about what they may be able to achieve in their working lives and relationships. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#americans #anxiety #atheism #disappointment #drive

Keep making noise, I prayed, laughing. Bang drums. Clamor and ring bells for I cannot stand to hear the tired beating of this almost heart. ↗

— Meg Howrey

#heartache #heartache

I have always felt that fear possesses such great power, enough to paralyze and quake an individual. Pondering this, I realized that the source of fear's power comes from within me. So, I ask myself, does that not make me the powerful one? ↗

— Richelle E. Goodrich

#anxiety #dread #fear #obstacles #power

Almost all the ideas we have about being a man or being a woman are so burdened with pain, anxiety, fear and self-doubt. For many of us, the confusion around this question is excruciating. ↗

— Andrew Cohen

#almost #anxiety #around #being #being a man

The ancient Greek oral poets all had this anxiety about the deficiencies of their memories and always began poems by praying to the Muse to help them remember. ↗

— David Antin

#always #ancient #anxiety #began #deficiencies

A crust eaten in peace is better than a banquet partaken in anxiety. ↗

— Aesop

#anxiety #banquet #better #crust #eaten

I always felt that I had anxiety of survival in terms of livelihood even when I was making plenty of money. ↗

— Leonard Baskin

#anxiety #even #felt #had #i

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