fear-of-death

Fears hide within fears....

I haven__ been out driving at this time of night in many years, much less in an unfamiliar area. These are the things that scare you as you get older. You understand night all too well, all its attendant meanings. You try to avoid it, work around it, keep it from entering your house. Your weary, ornery body tells you to stay up late, sleep less, keep the lights on, don__ go into the bedroom__f you have to sleep, sleep in your chair, at the table. Everything is about avoiding the night. Because of that, I suppose that I should be scared out here in the dark, but I am finally past that, I think.(p.204)

Failure is like flu. It can happen to anyone. Just as it is difficult to find a person who hasn__ had the flu, it is difficult to find someone who has not been stuck by failure at some time.

The fear of failure kills creativity and intelligence. The only thing it produces is conformity.

The Fear of failure is the greatest fear of man. Even the fear of death is fear of failing to continue life,

Can we quantify failure in degrees and say, __n a 10 point scale this failure causes this much pain?_ Extremely difficult.

Death undoes us less, sometimes, than the hope that it will never come.

The white-hot singularity at the core of the Machine is _ ultimately - a fear of death. It's the inevitability of a journey's end and the threat of a question nobody can honestly answer: what does it mean to make the most of a life? How can you tell that you've spent your time well? There is no metric, no answer key at the back of the book. It's a question that I think everyone had to answer for themselves, and hold tight onto that answer with both hands.

Although it's great to appear to a feast, home is always sweet, though it may be lonely and cold like death

Jesus was stoned, but no rock hit him. He slipped into the crowd and was found later teaching on a hill somewhere. History tells us that he did nothing wrong, and we sacrificed him anyway. The day my father died, I assured him he was headed for heaven, though I had a hard time believing in something that floated so aimlessly through the minds of children. The concept seemed fair and unfair in such equal amounts that it appeared to cancel itself out. I__ never met someone so deserving of eternal bliss, yet from the time I was a child I was taught we all deserve hell. I wondered if heaven existed at all. But I wanted everlasting life to be real for the man who let me lie on his chest on a hammock in the backyard and taught me not to fear thunder. One of the many things my father taught me not to fear. His breaths were labored and aided by machines. He wore a white hospital gown. I remember thinking, __ can__ believe my father__ going to die in a gown._ __re you afraid?_ I asked.__ot at all,_ he strained. ____ going to be with the Lord.__ wished I shared his confidence. For him, it was a priceless thing no one could take. I wished the fear of death was like the fear of a passing storm cloud__omething we outgrow with understanding. For men like my dad, I guess it was.

I would prefer to believe that things possess the power of recall, of recollection. That things are memoirs of the existences that once were theirs, if only we knew how to read them.

Fear is an aid to the warrior. It is a small fire burning. It heats the muscles, making us stronger. Panic comes when the fire is out of control, consuming all courage and pride.

The universe is eternal; every person appears in the stream of time, and then disappears. The ego does not survive. Life is significant despite that it ends. The products of human life that we cherish _ love, happiness, beauty, art, kindness, _ have value without being everlasting. We must conquer human fearfulness in order to live a dignified life.

If you still have fear, you love life

The fear of death never left me; I couldn't get used to the thought; I would still sometimes shake and weep with terror. By contrast, the fact of existence here and now sometimes took on a glorious splendour.

When we face our fear of death and slow down our busy lives, we come to realize our relationships are precious, a part of life__ foundation. Knowing this fact helps us to understand that death__ true purpose is to teach us how to live.

For years, I worked seven-day weeks, through birthdays and most public holidays, Christmases and New Year__ Eves included. I worked mornings and afternoons, resuming work after dinner. I remember feeling as if life were a protracted exercise in pulling myself out of a well by a rope, and that rope was work.

There are many shades in the danger of adventures and gales, and it is only now and then that there appears on the face of facts a sinister violence of intention- that indefinable something which forces it upon the mind and the heart of a man, that this complication of accidents or these elemental furies are coming at him with a purpose of malice, with a strength beyond control, with an unbridled cruelty that means to tear out of him his hope and his fear, the pain of his fatigue and his longing for rest: which means to smash, to destroy, to annihilate all he has seen, known, loved, enjoyed, or hated; all that is priceless and necessary- the sunshine, the memories, the future,- which means to sweep the whole precious world utterly away from his sight by the simple and appalling act of taking his life.