Life skills : Overcoming worry and anxiety

Don’t waste your life in doubts and fears: spend yourself on the work before you, well assured that the right performance of this hour’s duties will be the best preparation for the hours or ages that follow it.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is not work that kills men, it is worry. Work is healthy; you can hardly put more on a man than he can bear. But worry is rust upon the blade. It is not movement that destroys the machinery, but friction.

— Henry Ward Beecher

Surely there is something in the unruffled calm of nature that overawes our little anxieties and doubts; the sight of the deep-blue sky and the clustering stars above seems to impart a quiet to the mind.

— Jonathan Edwards

Imagine every day to be the last of a life surrounded with hopes, cares, anger and fear. The hours that come unexpectedly will be much the more grateful.

— Horace

The mind that is anxious about future events is miserable.

— Seneca

Present fears are less than horrible imaginings.

— William Shakespeare

Let us be of good cheer, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those that never happen.

— James Russel Lowell

It is the trouble that never comes that causes the loss of sleep.

— Austin Bates