78 Inspiring Anxiety Relief Quotes

In today's fast-paced world, anxiety has become a common companion for many of us. Whether it's work-related stress, personal challenges, or just the overwhelming nature of modern life, finding moments of peace can feel elusive. That's where the power of words can make a difference. This collection of 78 inspiring anxiety relief quotes is designed to provide comfort, encouragement, and perspective. Each quote serves as a reminder that while anxiety may be a part of our journey, it doesn't have to define it. Let these words be a source of strength and a gentle reminder to breathe, relax, and find your calm amidst the chaos.

1. “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” - Søren Kierkegaard

2. “The pleasure of living and the pleasure of the orgasm are identical. Extreme orgasm anxiety forms the basis of the general fear of life.” - Wilhelm Reich

3. “…there is also an underlying, less specific fear - what some might call an ontological or existential anxiety - that shrouds our days and seeps into our dreams. We feel empty and seek meaning. We feel empty and seek meaning. We yearn and know not what we yearn for. There is a black hole at the center of our understanding that engulfs and crushes our every attempt to explore it. Something is missing. ” - Jesse Browner

4. “Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.” - Anais Nin

5. “Worrying is carrying tomorrow's load with today's strength- carrying two days at once. It is moving into tomorrow ahead of time. Worrying doesn't empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength.” - Corrie Ten Boom

6. “Some part of me can't wait to see what life's going to come up with next! Anticipation without the usual anxiety. And underneath it all is the feeling that we both belong here, just as we are, right now.” - Alexander Shulgin

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

8. “I wondered what you'd have on the side with a plate of Deep Fried Anxiety. Pickles? Coleslaw? Potato-strychnine mash?” - Robin McKinley

9. “After all, what is happiness? Love, they tell me. But love doesn't bring and never has brought happiness. On the contrary, it's a constant state of anxiety, a battlefield; it's sleepless nights, asking ourselves all the time if we're doing the right thing. Real love is composed of ecstasy and agony.” - Paulo Coelho

10. “We live in the hope that life will be different. Just a little more substance perhaps in the intrinsic frailty of the days. Such resignation frightens me. Between gunshots I get drunk. In secret, all knowledge becomes anxiety.” - Floriano Martins

11. “To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose one's self.... And to venture in the highest is precisely to be conscious of one's self.” - Søren Kierkegaard

12. “Usually she ordered a cup of coffee and a cup of tea, as well as a brownie, propping up her sadness with chocolate and caffeine so that it became an anxiety.” - Lorrie Moore

13. “We live only a few conscious decades, and we fret ourselves enough for several lifetimes.” - Christopher Hitchens

14. “Mattie sat at the table, obsessing, orbiting around herself. She was sick of her worried, hostile mind. It would have killed her long before, she felt, if it hadn't needed the transportation.” - Anne Lamott

15. “People who are diagnosed as having "generalized anxiety disorder" are afflicted by three major problems that many of us experience to a lesser extent from time to time. First and foremost, says Rapgay, the natural human inclination to focus on threats and bad news is strongly amplified in them, so that even significant positive events get suppressed. An inflexible mentality and tendency toward excessive verbalizing make therapeutic intervention a further challenge.” - Winifred Gallagher

16. “But the great artists like Michelangelo and Blake and Tolstoi--like Christ whom Blake called an artist because he had one of the most creative imaginations that ever was on earth--do not want security, egoistic or materialistic. Why, it never occurs to them. "Be not anxious for the morrow," and "which of you being anxious can add one cubit to his stature?"So they dare to be idle, i.e. not to be pressed and duty-driven all the time. They dare to love people even when they are very bad, and they dare not to try and dominate others to show them what they must do for their own good. ” - Brenda Ueland

17. “If you want to conquer the anxiety of life, live in the moment, live in the breath.” - Amit Ray

18. “I sat down and tried to rest. I could not; though I had been on foot all day, I could not now repose an instant; I was too much excited. A phase of my life was closing tonight, a new one opening tomorrow: impossible to slumber in the interval; I must watch feverishly while the change was being accomplished.” - Charlotte Brontë

19. “Chronic anxiety is a state more undesirable than any other, and we will try almost any maneuver to eliminate it. Modern man is living in anxious anticipation of destruction. Such anxiety can be easily eliminated by self-destruction. As a German saying puts it: 'Better an end with terror than a terror without end.” - Robert E. Neale

20. “In an era of stress and anxiety, when the present seems unstable and the future unlikely, the natural response is to retreat and withdraw from reality, taking recourse either in fantasies of the future or in modified visions of a half-imagined past.” - Alan Moore

21. “Anxiety's like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn't get you very far.” - Jodi Picoult

22. “I promise you nothing is as chaotic as it seems. Nothing is worth diminishing your health. Nothing is worth poisoning yourself into stress, anxiety, and fear.” - Steve Maraboli

23. “Se tudo o resto não me basta por que hei-de impedir o efeito paliativo das benzodiazepinas e a volúpia desta evocação alucinatória?If everything else is not enough for me why should I stop the palliative effect of benzodiazepines and the lust of this hallucinatory evocation?” - Victor Eustáquio

24. “A lady should never feel anxious about her behavior. The status is bred in the bone. To show anxiety is to lower oneself. Anxiety is vulgar.” - Eloisa James

25. “Meditation did not relieve me of my anxiety so much as flesh it out. It took my anxious response to the world, about which I felt a lot of confusion and shame, and let me understand it more completely. Perhaps the best way to phrase it is to say that meditation showed me that the other side of anxiety is desire. They exist in relationship to each other, not independently.” - Mark Epstein

26. “What does your anxiety do? It does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow, but it empties today of its strength. It does not make you escape the evil; it makes you unfit to cope with it if it comes.” - Raymond L. Cramer

27. “While writing is like a joyful release, editing is a prison where the bars are my former intentions and the abusive warden my own neuroticism.” - Tiffany Madison

28. “Each moment of worry, anxiety or stress represents lack of faith in miracles, for they never cease.” - T.F. Hodge

29. “Even if she be not harmed, her heart may fail her in so much and so many horrors; and hereafter she may suffer--both in waking, from her nerves, and in sleep, from her dreams.” - Bram Stoker

30. “I was in misery, and misery is the state of every soul overcome by friendship with mortal things and lacerated when they are lost. Then the soul becomes aware of the misery which is its actual condition even before it loses them.” - St. Augustine of Hippo

31. “Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.” - Alain De Botton

32. “He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.” - Shannon L. Alder

33. “It was one of those days when I was thinking too much, too fast. Only it was more like the thoughts had a mind of their own and going all by themselves at a hundred miles a second, and I was just sitting back, feeling the growing paranoia inside of me.” - Sasha Mizaree

34. “Good God, but life could be less than easy, not that he was unaware that it could certainly be a lot worse, but to go about in such a state, pulse high, face red, worried sick that someone would notice how nervous one was, was certainly less than ideal, and he felt sure that his body was secreting all kinds of harmful chemicals and that the more he worried about the harmful chemicals the faster they were pouring out of wherever it was they came from.” - George Saunders

35. “his face, though lined, bore few traces of anxiety. But, perhaps the confidential bachelor clerks in Tellson's Bank were principally occupied with the cares of other people; and perhaps second-hand cares, like second-hand clothes, come easily off and on.” - Charles Dickens

36. “It was that sort of sleep in which you wake every hour and think to yourself that you have not been sleeping at all; you can remember dreams that are like reflections, daytime thinking slightly warped.” - Kim Stanley Robinson

37. “I had the chance to make every possible mistake and figure out a way to recover from it. Once you realize there is life after mistakes, you gain a self-confidence that never goes away.” - Bob Schieffer

38. “It is a promise which eminently deserves our observation that all who are united to Christ and acknowledge Him to be Christ and Mediator will remain to the end safe from all danger, for what is said of the body of the Church belongs to each of its members since they are one in Christ.” - John Calvin

39. “There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human's mind against the Enemy. He wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.” - C.S. Lewis

40. “Knowing about God is crucially important for the living of our lives. As it would be cruel to an Amazonian tribesmen to fly him to London, put him down without explanation in Trafalgar Square and leave him, as one who knew nothing of English or England, to fend for himself, so we are cruel to ourselves if we try to live in this world without knowing about the God whose world it is and who runs it .The world becomes a strange, mad, painful place, and life in it a disappointing and unpleasant business, for those who do not know about God. Disregard the study of God, and you sentence yourself to stumble and blunder through life blindfold, as it were , with no sense of direction, and no understanding of what surrounds you. This way you can waste your life and lose your soul.” - J.I. Packer

41. “Human beings, like plans, prove fallible in the presence of those ingredients that are missing in maneuvers - danger, death, and live ammunition.” - Barbara W. Tuchman

42. “It ain't no use putting up your umbrella till it rains!” - Alice Caldwell Rice

43. “The largest part of what we call 'personality' is determined by how we've opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness".” - Alain De Botton

44. “When I don't have something to worry about, I worry. Nothing comes so naturally to a human being as anxiety and worry.” - Brian Richardson

45. “I watch worry and anxiety being pandered to through technology which is neutral.” - Brian Richardson

46. “It's like I have a sensor in my head, but she works on a seven-second delay... well-meaning, but perpetually about seven seconds too late to actually do anything to stop the horrific avalanche of shit-you-shouldn't- say-out-loud-but-I-just-did.” - Jenny Lawson

47. “In bed our yesterdays are too oppressive: if a man can only get up, though it be but to whistle or to smoke, he has a present which offers some resistance to the past—sensations which assert themselves against tyrannous memories.” - George Eliot

48. “He meant everything he said, when he said it. But this is his default. And it won out. Right now you're depressed about one thing. Before you were depressed about everything. These are good times for you.""I'm afraid of loving again. I'm afraid I've lost my faith.""You haven't.""The trapdoor I have in my mind? That can go to those bad places? It's almost gave way again.""You know the ways to keep it nailed shut.” - Emma Forrest

49. “But the Christian also knows that he not only cannot and dare not be anxious, but that there is no need for him to be so. Neither anxiety now work can secure his daily bread, for bread is the gift of the Father.” - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

50. “Arrogance is someone claiming to have come to Christ, but they won't spend more than five minutes listening to your journey because they are more concerned about their own well being, rather than being a true disciple of Christ. Blessed is the person that takes the time to heal and hear another person so they can move on.” - Shannon L. Alder

51. “When someone is stalking you because they think you are stalking them, it makes you wonder who really is the true stalker?” - Shannon L. Alder

52. “Perfect prayer does not consist in many words, silent remembering and pure intention raises the heart to that supreme Power.” - Amit Ray

53. “If you are resolute to go, I will not stop you. But I hope I’m making the right decision.” - Mario Stinger

54. “Life is like a game of chess.To win you have to make a move.Knowing which move to make comes with IN-SIGHTand knowledge, and by learning the lessons that areacculated along the way.We become each and every piece within the game called life!” - Allan Rufus

55. “Do you remember what I forgot?” - Erica Goros

56. “The way to misuse our possessions is to use them as an insurance against the morrow. Anxiety is always directed to the morrow, whereas goods are in the strictest sense meant to be used only for to-day.” - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

57. “It is the most ambitious and driven among us who are the most sorely in need of having our reckless hopes dampened through immersive dousings in the darkness which religions have explored. This is a particular priority for secular Americans, perhaps the most anxious and disappointed people on earth, for their nation infuses them with the most extreme hopes about what they may be able to achieve in their working lives and relationships.” - Alain De Botton

58. “Carry the confidence.” - Diane Chamberlain

59. “The apprehension of this blessed truth (God's faithfulness) will check our murmurings. The Lord knows what is best for each of us, and one effect or resting on this truth will be the silencing of our petulant complainings. God is greatly honored when, under trial and chastening, we have good thoughts of Him, vindicate His wisdom and justice, and recognize His love in His very rebukes.” - A. W. Pink

60. “My anxiety house a house and a fence and a deer in the yard. A zip code. A plague of starlings.” - Kristy Bowen

61. “Almost everything that I've ever worried about has never happened ..” - Ian Tucker

62. “[L]ife is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods, of failing to understand ourselves and misinterpreting the behaviour of others, of growing unproductively anxious or desirous, and of losing ourselves to vanity and error. Surreptitiously and beguilingly, then, with humour or gravity, works of art--novels, poems, plays, paintings or films--can function as vehicles to explain our condition to us. They may act as guides to a truer, more judicious, more intelligent understanding of the world.” - Alain De Botton

63. “She felt happy these days, yet there was always an undercurrent of sadness just below the surface” - Diane Chamberlain

64. “Panic---a deep abiding, free-floating anxiety, often without any reason or logical basis.” - Nelson DeMille

65. “Sabbath, in the first instance, is not about worship. It is about work stoppage. It is about withdrawal from the anxiety system of Pharaoh, the refusal to let one’s life be defined by production and consumption and the endless pursuit of private well-being.” - Walter Brueggemann

66. “Bodily haste and exertion usually leave our thoughts very much at the mercy of our feelings and imagination.” - George Eliot

67. “Memory is a barricade against forgetting; light is a bulwark against darkness; life is a flex against the stillness of the grave. Maybe that's what I'm trying to do here, clear a space in all the debris, through all the anxieties and worries, where I can just exist, easily and simply, entire, for as long as I have left.” - Helen Humphreys

68. “Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.” - George Eliot

69. “Let your cares drive you to God. I shall not mind if you have many of them if each one leads you to prayer. If every fret makes you lean more on the Beloved, it will be a benefit.” - Charles H. Spurgeon

70. “Has someone or something pushed your anxiety button? Answer it with prayer!” - Evinda Lepins

71. “Anxiety was born in the very same moment as mankind. And since we will never be able to master it, we will have to learn to live with it—just as we have learned to live with storms.” - Paulo Coelho

72. “We imagine that a little anxiety and worry is an indication of how wise we really are; it may be an indication of how wicked we really are.” - Oswald Chambers

73. “When Dad was in the middle of a description of the hotel’s laundry facility, I interrupted. “Why haven’t you told me today, like you do every day, that Mom’s going to be better soon?”He looked up then. His gaze locked with mine and held a promise that no matter what he said or didn’t say, he and I would ride this out together. “I haven’t told you that today, Meg, because I don’t know.” - Laura Anderson Kurk

74. “Sometimes, in the stillness of my room, my mom’s voice came to me, repeating things she’d said for months. Like, “My skin is melting off my face, isn’t it?” And, “My whole body feels dead from the crap they’re pouring into me. Do I look green to you?” And, “When I’m naked, I can see my heart beating.” - Laura Anderson Kurk

75. “the demons that make a person afraid are the hardest to cast out.” - Elizabeth George Speare

76. “God does not regret saving you. There is no sin which you commit which is beyond the cross of Christ.” - Matt Chandler

77. “Greater is Your care for me than all the care I am able to take from myself.” - Thomas A. Kempis

78. “You're surrounded by people and voices and noises, but there you are, alone and trembling inside. And you want to be invisible. (thinking) Please, don't notice me.” - Kellie Elmore