Michel de Montaigne on fear

He who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live.

Few men have been admired by their own domestics.

Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens.

Fear is your best friend or your worst enemy. It’s like fire. If you can control it, it can cook for you; it can heat your house. If you can’t control it, it will burn everything around you and destroy you. If you can control your fear, it makes you more alert, like a deer coming across the lawn.

Mike Tysonborn 1966

As a rule, men worry more about what they can’t see than about what they can.

Julius Caesar100–44 BC

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself⁠—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

Franklin D. Roosevelt1882–1945Franklin D. Roosevelt’s First Inaugural Address (1933)