Quotations about Worrying

If I had my life to live over, I would perhaps have more actual troubles but I'd have fewer imaginary ones. ~Don Herold


Drag your thoughts away from your troubles... by the ears, by the heels, or any other way you can manage it. ~Mark Twain


Today is the tomorrow we worried about yesterday. ~Author Unknown


Let us be of good cheer, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which will never happen. ~James Russel Lowell


If things go wrong, don't go with them. ~Roger Babson


Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, it only saps today of its joy. ~Leo Buscaglia


Do not anticipate trouble or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight. ~Benjamin Franklin


If you can't sleep, then get up and do something instead of lying there worrying. It's the worry that gets you, not the lack of sleep. ~Dale Carnegie


I've developed a new philosophy... I only dread one day at a time. ~Charlie Brown (Charles Schulz)


Troubles are a lot like people - they grow bigger if you nurse them. ~Author Unknown


If you want to test your memory, try to recall what you were worrying about one year ago today. ~E. Joseph Cossman


Nerves and butterflies are fine - they're a physical sign that you're mentally ready and eager. You have to get the butterflies to fly in formation, that's the trick. ~Steve Bull


I keep the telephone of my mind open to peace, harmony, health, love and abundance. Then, whenever doubt, anxiety or fear try to call me, they keep getting a busy signal - and soon they'll forget my number. ~Edith Armstrong


Nerves provide me with energy. They work for me. It's when I don't have them, when I feel at ease, that I get worried. ~Mike Nichols


I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.... For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free. ~Wendell Berry, "The Peace of Wild Things"


People gather bundles of sticks to build bridges they never cross. ~Author Unknown


You can't wring your hands and roll up your sleeves at the same time. ~Pat Schroeder


The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one. ~Elbert Hubbard, The Note Book, 1927


Worrying is like a rocking chair, it gives you something to do, but it gets you nowhere. ~Glenn Turner


People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them. ~George Bernard Shaw, "Family Affection," Parents and Children, 1914


Panic is a sudden desertion of us, and a going over to the enemy of our imagination. ~Christian Nevell Bovee


Somehow our devils are never quite what we expect when we meet them face to face. ~Nelson DeMille


For peace of mind, resign as general manager of the universe. ~Author Unknown


We experience moments absolutely free from worry. These brief respites are called panic. ~Cullen Hightower


If you treat every situation as a life and death matter, you'll die a lot of times. ~Dean Smith


It only seems as if you are doing something when you're worrying. ~Lucy Maud Montgomery


A hundredload of worry will not pay an ounce of debt. ~George Herbert


As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey. ~Thomas A. Edison


Worry often gives a small thing a big shadow. ~Swedish Proverb


Never bear more than one kind of trouble at a time. Some people bear three - all they have had, all they have now, and all they expect to have. ~Edward Everett Hale


That the birds of worry and care fly over you head, this you cannot change, but that they build nests in your hair, this you can prevent. ~Chinese Proverb


We can easily manage if we will only take, each day, the burden appointed to it. But the load will be too heavy for us if we carry yesterday's burden over again today, and then add the burden of the morrow before we are required to bear it. ~John Newton


Worry ducks when purpose flies overhead. ~Terri Guillemets



It is the little bits of things that fret and worry us; we can dodge a elephant, but we can't dodge a fly. ~Josh Billings


Worry, doubt, fear and despair are the enemies which slowly bring us down to the ground and turn us to dust before we die. ~Attributed to Douglas MacArthur


You can never worry your way to enlightenment. ~Terri Guillemets


When you suffer an attack of nerves you're being attacked by the nervous system. What chance has a man got against a system? ~Russell Hoban


Any concern too small to be turned into a prayer is to small to be made into a burden. ~Corrie ten Boom, Clippings from My Notebook


I am reminded of the advice of my neighbor. "Never worry about your heart till it stops beating." ~E.B. White


There are two days in the week about which and upon which I never worry... Yesterday and Tomorrow. ~Robert Jones Burdette


A day of worry is more exhausting than a day of work. ~John Lubbock


As a rule, what is out of sight disturbs men's minds more seriously than what they see. ~Julius Caesar


If worrying were an Olympic sport, you'd get the gold for sure. ~Stephenie Geist


I refuse to be burdened by vague worries. If something wants to worry me, it will have to make itself clear. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Worry is rust upon the blade. ~Henry Ward Hughes


Heavy thoughts bring on physical maladies; when the soul is oppressed so is the body. ~Martin Luther


I have learned to live each day as it comes, and not to borrow trouble by dreading tomorrow. It is the dark menace of the future that makes cowards of us. ~Dorothy Day


Worry is a complete cycle of inefficient thought revolving about a pivot of fear. ~Author Unknown


Loneliness, insomnia, and change: the fear of these is even worse than the reality. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


It is not the cares of today, but the cares of tomorrow, that weigh a man down. ~George MacDonald


Oh the nerves, the nerves; the mysteries of this machine called man! Oh the little that unhinges it, poor creatures that we are! ~Charles Dickens


Some patients I see are actually draining into their bodies the diseased thoughts of their minds. ~Zacharty Bercovitz


Some of your hurts you have cured,
And the sharpest you still have survived,
But what torments of grief you endured
From the evil which never arrived.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson


I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened. ~Mark Twain


My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened. ~Michel de Montaigne


If you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you. ~Calvin Coolidge


When one has too great a dread of what is impending, one feels some relief when the trouble has come. ~Joseph Joubert


Some men storm imaginary Alps all their lives, and die in the foothills cursing difficulties which do not exist. ~Edgar Watson Howe


How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened. ~Thomas Jefferson


When I really worry about something, I don't just fool around. I even have to go to the bathroom when I worry about something. Only, I don't go. I'm too worried to go. I don't want to interrupt my worrying to go. ~J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye


Anxiety is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which all other thoughts are drained. ~Arthur Somers Roche


We have to fight them daily, like fleas, those many small worries about the morrow, for they sap our energies. ~Etty Hillesum


There are people who are always anticipating trouble, and in this way they manage to enjoy many sorrows that never really happen to them. ~Josh Billings


Only man clogs his happiness with care, destroying what is with thoughts of what may be. ~John Dryden


Love looks forward, hate looks back, anxiety has eyes all over its head. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


Worry is interest paid on trouble before it comes due. ~William Ralph Inge


There are more things, Lucilius, that frighten us than injure us, and we suffer more in imagination than in reality. ~Seneca


We are more disturbed by a calamity which threatens us than by one which has befallen us. ~John Lancaster Spalding


We are, perhaps, uniquely among the earth's creatures, the worrying animal. We worry away our lives. ~Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail, 1979


Grief has limits, whereas apprehension has none. For we grieve only for what we know has happened, but we fear all that possibly may happen. ~Pliny the Younger


Blessed is the person who is too busy to worry in the daytime and too sleepy to worry at night. ~Author Unknown


Do not be afraid of tomorrow; for God is already there. ~Author Unknown


Real difficulties can be overcome, it is only the imaginary ones that are unconquerable. ~Theodore N. Vail


No man ever sank under the burden of the day. It is when tomorrow's burden is added to the burden of today that the weight is more than a man can bear. ~George MacDonald


Rule number one is, don't sweat the small stuff. Rule number two is, it's all small stuff. ~Robert Eliot


They need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won't be at peace unless they can latch on to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, and all the time it all flies by them and they know it and that too worries them no end. ~Jack Kerouac


He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears. ~Montaigne, Essays, 1588


No human thing is of serious importance. ~Plato, The Republic


Fear can keep us up all night long, but faith makes one fine pillow. ~Philip Gulley


Don't fight with the pillow, but lay down your head
And kick every worriment out of the bed.
~Edmund Vance Cooke


Every evening I turn my worries over to God. He's going to be up all night anyway. ~Mary C. Crowley