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
No longer forward nor behind
I look in hope and fear;
But grateful take the good I find,
The best of now and here.
John G. Whittier
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
Be just, and fear not.
Let all the ends thou aim'st at be thy country's,
Thy God's and truth's.
William Shakespeare
Never let life's hardships disturb you ... no one can avoid problems, not even saints or sages.
Nichiren Daishonen
Ask yourself this question:
"Will this matter a year from now?"
Richard Carlson, writing in Don't Sweat the Small Stuff
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
Do not anticipate trouble, or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight.
Benjamin Franklin
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
How much pain have cost us the evils that have never happened.
Thomas Jefferson
It is the trouble that never comes that causes the loss of sleep.
Chas. Austin Bates
Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each.
Henry David Thoreau
We also deem those happy, who from the experience of life, have learned to bear its ills and without descanting on their weight.
Junvenal
Thus each person by his fears gives wings to rumor, and, without any real source of apprehension, men fear what they themselves have imagined.
Lucan
I never think of the future - it comes soon enough.
Albert Einstein
It is idle to dread what you cannot avoid.
Publius Syrus
He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
Who dares not put it to the touch
To gain or lose it all.
Marquis of Montrose
The rose is fairest when 't is budding new,
and hope is brightest when it dawns from fears.
Walter Scott
