One of the most famous Stoic quotes about fear was actually uttered by FDR, who channeled Stoicism when he said “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.” To the Stoics, the idea of fear is more fearful than the actual, knee-jerk reaction of fear that so many of us feel as an initial response.
This is important: Stoicism does NOT teach that we’re ever going to get rid of fear. As human beings, we’re always going to have instinctual reactions of fear to certain situations, and that will never go away. Stoics believe that it’s how you rationalize and handle that initial fear that matters.
These Stoic quotes on fear illustrate that very concept: that we will never fully rid ourselves of fear, but that we can control it and not let it have power over our lives. By seeing fear for what it really is, the Stoics lessen its negative affects and push past it to make opportunities out of challenges.
Stoic Quotes on Fear from Marcus Aurelius
“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.”
“Many of the anxieties that harass you are superfluous: being but creatures of your own fancy, you can rid yourself of them and expand into an ampler region, letting your thought sweep over the entire universe, contemplating the illimitable tracts of eternity, marking the swiftness of change in each created thing, and contrasting the brief span between birth and dissolution with the endless aeons that precede the one and the infinity that follows the other.”
“The first step: Don’t be anxious. Nature controls it all. And before long you’ll be no one, nowhere—like Hadrian, like Augustus. The second step: Concentrate on what you have to do. Fix your eyes on it. Remind yourself that your task is to be a good human being; remind yourself what nature demands of people. Then do it, without hesitation, and speak the truth as you see it. But with kindness. With humility. Without hypocrisy.'”
Stoic Quotes on Fear from Epictetus
“There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.”
“When I see an anxious person, I ask myself, what do they want? For if a person wasn’t wanting something outside of their own control, why would they be stricken by anxiety?”
“The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself with are externals, not under my control, and which have to do with the choice I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own.”
Stoic Quotes on Fear from Seneca
“You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire.”
“Remember, however, before all else, to strip things of all that disturbs and confuses, and to see what each is at bottom; you will then comprehend that they contain nothing fearful except the actual fear.”
“Everyone hurries his life on and suffers from a yearning for the future and a weariness of the present. But he who bestows all of his time on his own needs, who plans out every day as if it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the morrow.”
“True happiness is to enjoy the present without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied, for he that is wants nothing. The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach. A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not.”