Where No Fear Was: A Book About Fear

I. THE SHADOW II. SHAPES OF FEAR III. THE DARKEST DOUBT IV. VULNERABILITY V. THE USE OF FEAR VI. FEARS OF CHILDHOOD VII. FEARS OF BOYHOOD VIII. FEARS OF YOUTH IX. FEARS OF MIDDL...

The theory of life as taught and enforced, for instance, in such a work as Dante's great poem is based upon this crudity of thought. Dante, by his Hell and his Purgatory, expres...

As a child the one thing I was afraid of was the possibility of my father's displeasure. We did not see a great deal of him, because he was a much occupied headmaster; and he wa...

The fears of youth are as a rule just the terrors of self-consciousness and shyness. They are a very irrational thing, something purely instinctive and of old inheritance. How i...

With such fears as these may be classed all the unreal but none the less distressing fears about health which beset people all their lives, in some cases; it is extremely annoyi...

Boswell did not shrink from admitting the reader to a sight of Johnson's hypochondria, his melancholy fears, his dreary miseries, his dread of illness, his terror of death. John...

And then we come to Carlyle, and here we are on somewhat different ground. Carlyle had a colossal quarrel with the age, but he thought very little of the message of beauty and p...

The younger Sterling, Carlyle's friend, was at Cambridge for a time, but never took his degree; he became a journalist, wrote a novel, tales, plays, endless poems--all of thin a...

"Mother. Perhaps you see sights and visions; I knew a lady once who was continually thinking that she saw an armed man threaten her, but it was only an imagination, a phantom of...

But if one is not capable of going to such lengths, if indeed one has nothing that one can resign, how is it possible to practise simplicity of life? It can be done by limiting...

Fear should then rather show us that we are being confronted with experience; and that our duty is to disregard it, to march forward through it, to come out on the other side of...