Top 40 Anxiety Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Our anxiety does not come from thinking about the future, but from wanting to control it.”

— Khalil Gibran

Also featured in: Quotes About Thinking, Worry Quotes

2. “Its not stress that kills us, it is our reaction to it.”

— Hans Selye

Also featured in: Stress Quotes

3. “No amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that is going to happen.”

— Alan Watts

4. “The best use of imagination is creativity. The worst use of imagination is anxiety.”

— Deepak Chopra

5. “All your anxiety is because of your desire for harmony. Seek disharmony, then you will gain peace.”

— Rumi

Also featured in: Desire Quotes

6. “Do not let your difficulties fill you with anxiety, after all it is only in the darkest nights that stars shine more brightly.”

— Ali ibn Abi Talib

Also featured in: Quotes About Night

7. “God changes caterpillars into butterflies, sand into pearls and coal into diamonds using time and pressure. He’s working on you, too.”

— Rick Warren

8. “Risk, then, is not just part of life. It is life. The place between your comfort zone and your dream is where life takes place. It’s the high-anxiety zone, but it’s also where you discover who you are.”

— Nick Vujicic

Also featured in: Risk-Taking Quotes

9. “Anxiety is simply living out the future before it gets here.”

— Kevin DeYoung

10. “Anxiety, the illness of our time, comes primarily from our inability to dwell in the present moment.”

— Nhat Hanh

11. “Fear is inevitable, I have to accept that, but I cannot allow it to paralyze me.”

— Isabel Allende

12. “How do you know what is the right path to choose to get the result that you desire? The honest answer is this: You won’t. And accepting that greatly eases the anxiety of your life experience.”

— Jon Stewart

13. “We’re hallucinating. And that’s what this world is: a mass hallucination, where fear seems more real than love. Fear is an illusion. Our craziness, paranoia, anxiety and trauma are literally all imagined.”

— Marianne Williamson

Also featured in: Real Quotes

14. “Man is not worried by real problems so much as by his imagined anxieties about real problems.”

— Epictetus

Also featured in: Real Quotes, Stoic Philosophy Quotes

15. “When in haste, rest in the present. Take a deep breath and come back to here and now.”

— Dan Millman

16. “Real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.”

— Alan Watts

Also featured in: Real Quotes, Quotes About Laughter

17. “The more you pray, the less you’ll panic. The more you worship, the less you worry. You’ll feel more patient and less pressured.”

— Rick Warren

18. “You believe that you live in the world, where in fact the world lives within you.”

— Deepak Chopra

19. “Vision creates faith and faith creates willpower. With faith there is no anxiety and no doubt – just absolute confidence in yourself.”

— Arnold Schwarzenegger

20. “Work is an antidote for anxiety, an ointment for sorrow, and a doorway to possibility.”

— Dieter F. Uchtdorf

21. “Uncertainty causes more anxiety than perhaps any other single factor.”

— Liz Miller

22. “Growth can be painful, change can be painful but nothing is as painful as staying stuck somewhere you don’t belong Anxiety does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow it only empties today of it strengths.”

— Charles H. Spurgeon

Also featured in: Growth Quotes

23. “There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature.”

— Henry David Thoreau

24. “You sit here for days saying, this is a strange business. You’re the strange business. You have the energy of the sun in you, but you keep knotting it up at the base of your spine.”

— Rumi

25. “Our whole life is taken up with anxiety for personal security, with preparations for living, so that we really never live at all.”

— Leo Tolstoy

26. “Purity is when there is no anxiety, no worry, no thinking.”

— B.K.S. Iyengar

27. “When desire dies, fear is born.”

— Baltasar Gracián

28. “Nothing in the affairs of men is worthy of great anxiety.”

— Plato

Also featured in: Worry Quotes

29. “The future is usually imagined as either better or worse than the present. If the imagined future is better, it gives you hope or pleasurable anticipation. If it is worse, it creates anxiety. Both are illusory.”

— Eckhart Tolle

30. “If anyone is unhappy, remember that his unhappiness is his own fault. Nothing else is the cause of anxiety or loss of tranquility except our own opinion.”

— Epictetus

Also featured in: Stoic Philosophy Quotes

31. “The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle.”

— Christopher Hitchens

Also featured in: Struggle Quotes, Sleep Quotes

32. “Every day I pray. I yield myself to God and the tensions and anxieties go out of me and peace and power come in.”

— Dale Carnegie

33. “To grow old means to be rid of anxieties about the past.”

— Stefan Zweig

34. “We pay a price for everything we get or take in this world; and although ambitions are well worth having, they are not to be cheaply won, but exact their dues of work and self denial, anxiety and discouragement.”

— L.M. Montgomery

Also featured in: Ambition Quotes

35. “You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can make yourself do right in spite of your feelings.”

— Pearl S. Buck

Also featured in: Action Quotes, Peace Quotes, Quotes About Feelings

36. “Satan wants anxiety to hinder us from becoming effective servants of Christ.”

— Lysa TerKeurst

37. “Love is the ability and willingness to allow those that you care for to be what they choose for themselves without any insistence that they satisfy you.”

— Wayne W. Dyer

Also featured in: Self-Improvement Quotes

38. “I will be dead in a few months. But it hasn’t given me the slightest anxiety or worry. I always knew I was going to die.”

— B. F. Skinner

39. “Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.”

— T. S. Eliot

Also featured in: Creativity Quotes

40. “For me, its always a failure of the imagination. I have that anxiety that time is passing, that everything is ultimately fleeting and impermanent. I better take advantage of every single moment.”

— Jason Silva

Also featured in: Imagination Quotes

41. “If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present.”

— Lao Tzu

Also featured in: Motivational Quotes, Time Quotes, Mindfulness Quotes, Yoga Quotes

42. “The past has no power over the present moment.”

— Eckhart Tolle

Also featured in: Positive Quotes, Mindfulness Quotes, Stress Quotes