Vittorio Alfieri Quotes

If I'd had any way of knowing that things were- as Lily Tomlin once said- going to get a whole lot worse before they got worse, I'm not sure how I would have slept that night.

Uncertainty! fell demon of our fears! The human soul that can support despair, supports not thee.

I was imbued from a very early age with a sense of doom.

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. [Omnes relinquite spes, o vos intrantes]

When you are desperate, it's usually because of fear.

Nobody gets excited about the future at all, ever. The future is something we find depressing and worrisome.

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

Oh my God. My God. It’s all over.

You woke in the morning with the weight of doom on your head. You lay with eyes shut wondering why you dreaded the day; was it a debt, was it a lost love? -and then you remembered the nightmare....This was no time for beauty, for love, or private future....There was no future; everyone waited, marked time, waited. For what?

All was black, gloomy and awful. There was no light at the end of the tunnel - or if there was, it was an oncoming train.

Fear of the unknown is a terrible fear.

Fear is the dark room where the Devil develops his negatives.

Fear is the lengthened shadow of ignorance.

Fear comes not from God but from the evil one.

What else does anxiety about the future bring you but sorrow upon sorrow?

All hope abandon, ye who enter here!

Dread, which is closely related to fear, steals the ability to enjoy ordinary life and makes people anxious about the future. It keeps them from looking forward to the next day, the next month, or the next decade.

Grief has limits, whereas apprehension has none. For we grieve only for what we know has happened, but we fear all that possibly may happen.

I fear the future.

To doubt is worse than to have lost; and to despair is but to antedate those miseries that must fall on us.

Horror can be contained within a book, given form and meaning. But in life, horror has no more form than it does meaning. Horror just is.

Americans are nervous; Americans are restless; and what troubles me the most is that Americans are uncharacteristically pessimistic.

I've always had this in a kind of worst-case dark imagination. I want to know what the dark form in the window is. I want to know what the noise under the staircase is.