14 Quotes that Will Feed You Courage

Fear triggers our survival response, fight or flight. That makes it one powerful emotion. So powerful it can overwhelm—it can freeze us. Fight, flight, or freeze. But sometimes fear isn’t real. Today, we don’t have a saber tooth tiger on on tail but fear still dogs us. Are you Frozen with Fear? Here are 14 quotes that will feed you courage.

One of 14 Quotes to feed you courage over the image of a footbridge fading into the fog.

Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fear Is a Liar

Fear can be essential to our survival but fear is a sneaky devil. It can pick on something small, inconsequential. But it builds slowly. It raises our pulse, makes our palms clammy, our breathing ragged, our bowels feel loose, we CAN. NOT. MOVE. At least that’s what fear tells us. 

Fear: False Evidence Appearing Real.

~Unknown

Of all the liars in the world, sometimes the worst are our own fears.

~Rudyard Kipling

Shame is the most powerful, master emotion. It’s the fear that we’re not good enough.

~Brene Brown

Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.

~Helen Keller

Fear is 100% dependent on you for its survival.

~Steve Maraboli

Discover Your Courage

Fears are educated into us, and can, if we wish, be educated out.

~Karl Augustus Menninger

Fear is only as deep as the mind allows.

~ Japanese Proverb

Feed your faith and your fears will starve to death.

~ Unknown

You can conquer almost any fear if you will only make up your mind to do so. For remember, fear doesn’t exist anywhere except in the mind.

~Dale Carnegie
One of 14 Quotations that will feed you courage over a pink and lavender sky with wispy clouds.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear.

~Mark Twain

One of the greatest discoveries a man makes, one of his great surprises, is to find he can do what he was afraid he couldn’t do.

~Henry Ford

The key to growth is acknowledging your fear of the unknown and jumping in anyway.

~Jen Sincero

I believe that every single event in life happens in an opportunity to choose love over fear.

~Oprah Winfrey

Everything you want is on the other side of fear.

~Jack Canfield

Take Action

Do the thing you fear to do and keep on doing it… that is the quickest and surest way ever yet discovered to conquer fear.

~Dale Carnegie

Laughter is poison to fear.

~ George R.R. Martin

Action is a great restorer and builder of confidence. Inaction is not only the result, but the cause, of fear. Perhaps the action you take will be successful; perhaps different action or adjustments will have to follow.

But any action is better than no action at all.

~Norman Vincent Peale

“Try a thing you haven’t done three times. Once, to get over the fear of doing it. Twice, to learn how to do it. And a third time to figure out whether you like it or not.”

 ~Virgil Thomson

Sometimes, even though you know it’s unfounded, the fear gets too big to handle alone.

Be Free

One of 14 quotes that will feed you courage over an image of the silhouette of a Greek olympian holding a wreath up in the air against gray clouds with sunlight bursting through.

He who has overcome his fears will truly be free.

~Aristotle

If you need more information about fear, read Psychology Today’s article, Fear. Those of you in the UK may want to read Mental Health’s article, How to Overcome Fear and Anxiety. Or you can read some of my posts:

Are you Frozen with Fear? The 14 Quotes that will feed you courage above may not be all you need to overcome your fears. But it’s a start. Recognize your fears. You are courageous. Get help if you need it. Face your fears and they’ll start to shrink. 

Quotes on Technology and Science Fiction

Is science fiction predictive? Does it lead to advances in technology? Read these quotes on technology and science fiction and see what you think.

Public domain image of earth from the International Space Station. Did science fiction predict our going to space? Read these quotes on technology and science fiction and see what you think.

Progress

“Progress isn’t made by early risers. It’s made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.” ~Robert A. Heinlein

Time travel used to be thought of as just science fiction, but Einstein’s general theory of relativity allows for the possibility that we could warp space-time so much that you could go off in a rocket and return before you set out.

~Stephen Hawking

New Technologies

“Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.” J. G. Ballard, “Fictions of Every Kind”

In science fiction, we dream. In order to colonize in space, to rebuild our cities, which are so far out of whack, to tackle any number of problems, we must imagine the future, including the new technologies that are required.

~Ray Bradbury, Playboy, 1996

“There’s more to research than just looking up facts. Eventually, you have to make subjective calls. If you’re writing a science fiction novel, there’s probably some speculative technology in it. You’ll have to decide how to project existing technology forward in a plausible way.” ~Andy Weir

New technologies are rapidly giving rise to unprecedented methods of warfare. Innovations that yesterday were science fiction could cause catastrophe tomorrow, including nanotechnologies, combat robots, and laser weapons.

~Peter Maurer

“The Jetsons had them in the 1960s. They were the defining element of ‘Knight Rider’ in the 1980s: cars that drive themselves. Self-driving cars appear in countless science fiction movies. By Hollywood standards, they are so normal we don’t even notice them. But in real life, they still don’t exist. What if you could buy one today?” Sebastian Thrun

Science Fiction vs Fact

Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

~Ray Bradbury, The Paris Review, spring 2010

There’s two tiers of science fiction: the McDonalds sci-fi like Star Trek, where they have an adventure and solve it before the last commercial, and there are books that once you’ve read, you never look at the world the same way again. ~David Gerrold

Everything’s science fiction until someone makes it science fact.

~Marie Lu, Warcross

These quotes on technology and science fiction are shared to give a little inspiration and a little hope. Somewhere, someone is writing (or has written) a story that suggests a possibility that isn’t real—yet. Someone, somewhere, has read a story and is working on the next piece of technology that will change our world for the better. 

Science Fiction Authors About Science

Science fiction intimidates some. Perhaps, these quotes by science fiction authors about science might help dispel some of that. 

Magic or Science?

Science Fiction Authors About Science

“Science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle.”

Ray Bradbury-The Martian Chronicles

 Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.”

Jules Vern-A Journey to the Center of the Earth

“If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic.”

Ursula K. Le Guin

Science is magic that works.”

Kurt Vonnegut-Cat’s Cradle

Why Science

“Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.”

Frank Herbert-Dune

I think science fiction helps us think about possibilities, to speculate – it helps us look at our society from a different perspective. It lets us look at our mores, using science as the backdrop, as the game changer.

Mae Jemison

I, for one, bet on science as helping us. I have yet to see how it fundamentally endangers us, even with the H-bomb lurking about. Science has given us more lives than it has taken; we must remember that.

Phillip K. Dick, The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings

Science and Science Fiction

The ‘science’ in ‘science fiction’ isn’t just physics and engineering. It can also be linguistics, anthropology, and psychology.

Ann Leckie

These final two quotes are the best ones,  though Michio Kaku is not a science fiction author 

Physics is often stranger than science fiction, and I think science fiction takes its cues from physics: higher dimensions, wormholes, the warping of space and time, stuff like that.

Michio Kaku

You cannot create new science unless you realize where the old science leaves off and new science begins, and science fiction forces us to confront this.

Michio Kaku

This post began as a quest for quotes from science fiction authors about science. Yet, the scientist gave the best answer. New science begins because science fiction forces us to confront this. Do you think this is true? What evidence (science) supports that?