No passion so effectively robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.” —Edmund Burke, 1756.

Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.” —Sydney Harris

…if thou shalt be afraid not because thou must some time cease to live, but if thou shalt fear never to have begun to live according to nature- then thou wilt be a man worthy of the universe which has produced thee.” - Marcus Aurelius.

People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy, but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.

We are not ourselves when nature, being oppressed, commands the mind to suffer with the body - King Lear.