Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Dogmatism of all kinds--scientific, economic, moral, as well as political--are threatened by the creative freedom of the artist. This is necessarily and inevitably so. We cannot escape our anxiety over the fact that the artists together with creative persons of all sorts, are the possible destroyer of our nicely ordered systems. (p. 76)
If I were asked about what to do about the level of insecurity and anxiety in contemporary Australian society, I wouldn't start with politics and I wouldn't say too much about terrorism. I'd suggest as a first step, that you invite the neighbours over for a drink this weekend. Today a drink, tomorrow a barbeque, pretty soon, a community.
The claim that myth is always a narrative spin-off of ritual; the claim that myth is the projection of human anxieties onto a cosmological scrim; the claim that myths are invented to give sanction to human predilections and institutions... These are ways of trivializing a mode of thought that has served humanity well for a very long time.
I do have comfort, because as an actor you don't want that anxiety of wondering if you're going to continue with a certain role or if you're going to be employed the next year. It's nice to be comfortable with that and then you can concern yourself with the stories and nothing else. There's no other agenda than putting out a good product.
Everybody's still miserable in the same way they've always been miserable, and more and more of my friends - especially my male friends - find themselves taking anti-anxiety, psychotropic drugs. It seems like everybody I know is wondering if they're really who they are, or once the prescription runs out, will they become someone different?
I've gotten to work with amazing people. I would say usually we get to a point before we get into the studio where there isn't that sense of anxiety or nervousness of who they are because I don't think it would be as productive in the studio if that was the case. But maybe meeting someone like Neil Young for the first time made me anxious.
What came out of that was an intense obsession with status anxiety. So much of these portraits are about fashioning oneself into the image of perfection that ruled the day in the 18th and 19th centuries. It's an antiquated language, but I think we've inherited that language and have forwarded it to its most useful points in the 21st century.
I would like to change everything, but obviously not everything. I've been incredibly fortunate. I guess everybody would do this, but I'd go back to my younger self and say, "Lighten up. Take it easy. Relax. Don't be so anxious about everything. Try to be in the day. Try to not have today stolen from you by anxiety about yesterday or tomorrow."
Yes, my dolls were the beginning. Obviously there was a convulsive flavor to them because they reflected my anxiety and unhappiness. To an extent they represented an attempt to reject the horrors of adult life as it was in favor of a return to the wonder of childhood, but the eroticism was all-important, they became an erotic liberation for me.
You have nothing to lose. All that you can lose is your tension and your worry, your little-mindedness, fear, and anxiety. And fear and anxiety, tension and worry in the small, little mind will keep the mind from being free, will keep the mind from experiencing its infinite potential, will keep the mind from becoming more powerful on this planet.
Reassurance can actually exacerbate anxiety: when you reassure your friend that the worst-case scenario he fears probably won't occur, you inadvertently reinforce his belief that it would be catastrophic if it did. You are tightening the coil of his anxiety, not loosening it. All to often, the Stoics point out, things will not turn out for the best.
Loss aversion is a really disproportionate anxiety about stuff that doesn't matter very much. So for instance, if you lose $5, you feel really bad about the $5 you've lost. You're cursing yourself. You're going through it again and again. If, on the other hand, you find $5, you go - hey, great, five bucks. And you've forgotten about it really quickly.
Right there is the usefulness of migraine, there in that imposed yoga, the concentration on the pain. For when the pain recedes, ten or twelve hours later, everything goes with it, all the hidden resentments, all the vain anxieties. The migraine has acted as a circuit breaker, and the fuses have emerged intact. There is a pleasant convalescent euphoria.
If we could make up our minds to spare our friends all details of ill health, of money losses, of domestic annoyances, of altercations, of committee work, of grievances, provocations, and anxieties, we should sin less against the world's good-humor. It may not be given us to add to the treasury of mirth; but there is considerable merit in not robbing it.
We are opinionated society. We're very happy to spout forth our own views; we're not good about listening. We have to listen to other's stories. Learn to listen to the stories of the terrorists just as we hope that they will listen to ours because very often these narratives express frustrations, fears, and anxieties that most societies can safely ignore.
Anxiety is so pervasive in my work, it's like it's not even a thing because it's always there. Like air. I have to work through a layer of anxiety to get to anything else. It's embarrassing to me when people point out to me all the anxiety I portray in my work. I don't ever want to write about anxiety again but it'd be like leaving a huge gap in the picture.
In all trouble you should seek God. You should not set Him over against your troubles, but within them. God can only relieve your troubles if you in your anxiety cling to Him. Trouble should not really be thought of as this thing or that in particular, for our whole life on earth involves trouble; and through the troubles of our earthly pilgrimage we find God.
Do you sometimes wish you could fast-forward a week? You know something bad's coming up, and you know you'll get through it, but the prospect just makes you feel sick. I worried for about thirty minutes, and though I knew there was no point in doing so, I could feel my anxiety twisting me up in a knot. 'Bullshit,' I told myself stoutly. 'This is utter bullshit.
The presence of anxiety is unavoidable, but the prison of anxiety is optional. Anxiety is not a sin; it's an emotion. So don't be anxious about feeling anxious. Anxiety can, however, lead to sinful behavior. When we numb our fears with six-packs or food binges, when we spew anger like Krakatau, when we peddle our fears to anyone who will buy them, we're sinning.
For the high achievers, studying gave them the pleasing, absorbing challenge of flow 40 percent of the hours they spent at it. But for low achievers, studying produced flow only 16 percent of the time; more often that not, it yielded anxiety, with the demands outreaching their abilities...The low achievers found pleasure and flow in socializing, not in studying.
Being scared is normal. My technique for erasing it is facing it. Be afraid and brave. Be nervous and courageous. The first few minutes of being scared is your test to see if you're really serious about reaching a goal. Push through anxiety and come out victorious. Fear is just a test. Honor the feeling. Know it's there. Know it's temporary. Face it to erase it.
In my work, hair denotes the flow of life prior to being freed from pain. I fill the hair with human struggles such as deep-rooted anxieties, stubborn attachment to life, obsessions, and restrictions. Appearing fluid like a live organism, the hair symbolizes longevity and patience, but when it appears coarse, the hair expresses an energetic life force and freedom.
Hopefully, there isn't any adjustment at all in terms of what I am doing and what I'm preparing. Obviously, there's going to be goose bumps. There's gonna be an adrenaline rush. I want that excitement. I want that anxiety. Because that lets you know that you're passionate about what you do and that this is important. I'd much rather be in that environment than not.
That [American exceptionalism] is a reaction to the inability of people to understand global complexity or important issues like American energy dependency. Therefore, they search for simplistic sources of comfort and clarity. And the people that they are now selecting to be, so to speak, the spokespersons of their anxieties are, in most cases, stunningly ignorant.
...You cannot live by sight and by faith, neither can you live by fear and by faith. It either has to be by faith or by fear, by faith or by sight. Which way are you living? Faith takes out the anxiety It takes out the fear. Faith leans heavy on the Lord. It knows that the Bible is so and can be trusted and that we can live by it and all of our needs will be supplied.
Contemporary culture in Pakistan, just like in America, is continuously hitting us with scary stuff. And so we are utterly anxious. I think that it's very important to resist that anxiety, to think of ways of resisting the constant inflow of negative feelings, not to become depoliticized as a result but to actually work actively to bring into being an optimistic future.
Meditation did not relieve me of my anxiety so much as flesh it out. It took my anxious response to the world, about which I felt a lot of confusion and shame, and let me understand it more completely. Perhaps the best way to phrase it is to say that meditation showed me that the other side of anxiety is desire. They exist in relationship to each other, not independently.
One of the most effective ways to overcome anxiety is to try to shift the focus of attention away from self and toward others. When we succeed in this, we find that the scale of our own problems diminishes. This is not to say we should ignore our own needs altogether, but rather that we should try to remember others' needs alongside our own, no matter how pressing ours may be
A woman who fears the Lord will not run away from God to satisfy her longings and relieve her anxieties. She will wait for the Lord. She will hope in God. She will stay close to the heart of God and trust in his promises. The prospect of departing into the way of sin will be too fearful to pursue; and the benefits of abiding in the shadow of the Almighty too glorious to forsake.
...sometimes we ask ourselves why happiness took so long to arrive, why it didn't come sooner, but appears suddenly, as now, when we've given up hope of it ever arriving, it's likely then that we won't know what to do, and rather than it being a question of choosing between laughter and tears, we will be filled by a secret anxiety to which we might not know how to respond at all.
Being a perfectionist, I didn't want to settle for just getting by, so I enrolled in a vocal training program. I then learned that songwriting and studying the voice actually pair with a lot of troubles that I had expressing myself, being vulnerable, trusting other people, trusting myself, calming anxiety. It became a life instructor of sorts and that is what kept me engaged with it.
Why are we so addicted to factual knowledge? Why are we so uncomfortable with the unknown? Is it something about the anxiety of our time? Because of course that wasn't always the way. Even now the whole idea of the rational individual has been subject to question and yet we still cling to this idea of factual, rational knowledge being more valuable than whatever its opposite might be.
The president Donald Trump took an important first step. Literally, we hadn't heard him speak in the way that he did, talking about that these threats are painful and that anti-Semitism is horrible. Of course we agree. But, as we have said for a long time, now we need the next step, which is a plan of action to calm these communities where anxiety has reached an incredibly high level.
That 'change makes us uncomfortable' is now one of the most widely promoted, widely accepted, and under-considered half-truths around. [I]t is not change by itself that makes us uncomfortable; it is not even change that involves taking on something very difficult. Rather, it is change that leaves us feeling defenseless before the dangers we 'know' to be present that causes us anxiety.
Tranquillizers do not change our environment, nor do they change our personalities. They merely reduce our responsiveness to stimuli. They dull the keen edge of the angers, fears, or anxiety with which we might otherwise react to the problems of living. Once the response has been dulled, the irritating surface noise of living muted or eliminated, the spark and brilliance are also gone.
Martin [Campbell] is very energetic and precise. He'll on the set like four hours early with a flashlight and I thought, well, I'll certainly try to be very neat about my script like Martin, which I wasn't, but I'm not going to do that bit with the 4AM and the flashlight. I'd love to be able to say I was nervous, but I wasn't. The only time I ever had anxiety it turned out to be asthma.
No grand inquisitor has in readiness such terrible tortures as has anxiety and no spy knows how to attack more artfully the man he suspects, choosing the instant when he is weakest; nor knows how to lay traps where he will be caught and ensnared as anxiety knows how, and no sharp-witted judge knows how to interrogate, to examine the accused, as anxiety does, which never lets him escape.
When I was young, my knowledge of the literary world was a distorted tabloid sketch of dazzling fame, suffering genius, and tragic glamour. It was all very naïve. Of course, the only part of the stereotype that has proven true is the suffering and the starving. Now, my fantasy of scribbling poems in a tower is gone, but an anxiety about reviews, book sales, and awards has taken its place.
The "family" has clearly emerged anew in the late 1970s as a central subject for discussion, debate, research and writing in bothscholarly and popular arenas. Anxiety over whether or not the family as a basic social institution is dying has diminished. In its stead has emerged a fairly broad consensus around the position that the family is "here to stay," but that it certainly is changing.
There is a tendency for humans to consciously see what they wish to see. They literally have difficulty seeing things with negative connotations while seeing with increasing ease items that are positive. For example, words that evoke anxiety, either because of an individuals personal history or because of experimental manipulation, require greater illumination before first being perceived.
In Utopia, where every man has a right to everything, they all know that if care is taken to keep the public stores full, no private man can want anything; for among them there is no unequal distribution, so that no man is poor, none in necessity; and though no man has anything, yet they are all rich; for what can make a man so rich as to lead a serene and cheerful life, free from anxieties.
Many Christians take their time and have leisure enough in their social life (no hurry here). They are leisurely, too, in their professionally activities, at table and recreation (no hurry here either). But isn't it strange how those same Christians find themselves in such a rush and want to hurry the priest, in their anxiety to shorten the time devoted to the most holy sacrifice of the altar?
To overcome the anxieties and depressions of contemporary life, individuals must become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to herself. She has to develop the ability to find enjoyment and purpose regardless of external circumstances.
Even if the wealth and power be well distributed throughout a community, its members will not be happy unless they are inwardly so, and obviously where the distribution is bad, where the few have a vast superfluity and the many are consumed by anxiety or want, or where a few controllers can exercise their will over the many, society has failed, even though its total wealth and power be increased.
The internet takes a lot of the anxiety of life away. It's a kind of deity. You're never lonely. You're always distracted. If you spend enough time on it, there's not really that nagging sensation of existential despair; it erases it very effectively. And it's monolithic. And thanks to it, we've got the ways to linger there after death - your blog exists afterwards, your e-mail exists afterwards.
Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another--which is not to say that we should never strive to overcome any of our anxieties or fulfil any of our desires, but rather to suggest that we should perhaps build into our strivings an awareness of the way our goals promise us a respite and a resolution that they cannot, by definition, deliver.
There is nothing more difficult to outgrow than anxieties that have become useful to us, whether as explanations for a life that never quite finds its true force or direction, or as fuel for ambition, or as a kind of reflexive secular religion that, paradoxically, unites us with others in a shared sense of complete isolation: you feel at home in the world only by never feeling at home in the world.
It is only when we want to take our lives out of the Father’s hands and have them under our own control that we find ourselves gripped with anxiety. The secret of freedom from anxiety is freedom from ourselves and abandonment of our own plans. But that spirit emerges in our lives only when our minds are filled with the knowledge that our Father can be trusted implicitly to supply everything we need.
Anxiety and desire are two, often conflicting, orientations to the unknown. Both are tilted toward the future. Desire implies a willingness, or a need, to engage this unknown, while anxiety suggests a fear of it. Desire takes one out of oneself, into the possibility or relationship, but it also takes one deeper into oneself. Anxiety turns one back on oneself, but only onto the self that is already known.
Even when change is elective, it will disorient you. You may go through anxiety. You will miss aspects of your former life. It doesn't matter. The trick is to know in advance of making any big change that you're going to be thrown off your feet by it. So you prepare for this inevitable disorientation and steady yourself to get through it. Then you take the challenge, make the change, and achieve your dream.