39 Living with Anxiety Quotes You’ll Love

Have you ever experienced the feeling of anxiety so intensely that you wonder if anyone else has ever felt that way? Living with anxiety quotes are a great way for those of us with anxiety to know that we are not alone in our struggle.

As a mental health therapist, and an anxious person, I love to find quotes about anxiety that I can connect with, that can motivate me, and that I can share to express my experiences. This post is ALL ABOUT living with anxiety quotes.

Relatable Living with Anxiety Quotes

1. “I’ve spent most of my life and most of my friendships holding my breath and hoping that when people get close enough, they won’t leave and fearing that it’s a matter of time before they figure me out and go.”
— Shauna Niequist

2. “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

3. “Our anxiety does not come from thinking about the future, but from wanting to control it.”
— Kahlil Gibran

4. “I lied and said I was busy. I was busy; but not in a way most people understand. I was busy taking deeper breaths. I was busy silencing irrational thoughts. I was busy calming a racing heart. I was busy telling myself I am okay. Sometimes, this is my busy -and I will not apologize for it.”
— Brittin Oakman

5. “But I can hardly sit still. I keep fidgeting, crossing one leg and then the other. I feel like I could throw off sparks or break a window–maybe rearrange all the furniture.”
— Raymond Carver

6. “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

7. “I do not sleep because I am not only afraid of the monsters at my door, but also of the monsters my own mind can conjure. The ones that live within.”
— Samantha Shannon

8. “Mom says where did anxiety come from? Anxiety is the cousin visiting from out of town, depression felt obliged to bring to the party. Mom, I am the party. Only, I am a party I don’t want to be at.”
–Sabrina Benaim

9. “I wake up scared and I’m scared all day. I’m scared of being scared. Scared of “losing it”. Scared of not being able to function. Scared of being hospitalized. Scared that I am not okay. Scared of what life is and if I am wasting mine. Scared that I have no home – that even the place I call home has no bottom to it and I will just keep falling under and under and under.”
— Melissa Broder

10. Creative people, as I see them, are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of insecurity, sensitivity, and defenselessness for the gift of the “divine madness,” to borrow the term used by the classical Greeks. They do not run away from non-being, but by encountering and wrestling with it, force it to produce being. They knock on silence for an answering music; they pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.”
— Rollo May

11. “By masking my mental illness, I get along with almost everyone. Although the odd duck, I honor society’s rules. No one else could imagine my mind’s interior.”
— Larry Godwin

12. “Temperamentally anxious people can have a hard time staying motivated, period, because their intense focus on their worries distracts them from their goals.”
— Winifred Gallagher

13. “What doesn’t kill you very often makes you weaker. What doesn’t kill you can leave you limping for the rest of your days. What doesn’t kill you can make you scared to leave your house, or even your bedroom, and have you trembling, or mumbling incoherently, or leaning with your head on a windowpane, wishing you could return to the time before the thing that didn’t kill you.”
— Matt Haig

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

Motivating Living with Anxiety Quotes

15. “To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose oneself…. And to venture in the highest is precisely to be conscious of oneself.”
— Søren Kierkegaard

16. “Don’t worry if people think you’re crazy. You are crazy. You have that kind of intoxicating insanity that lets other people dream outside of the lines and become who they’re destined to be.”
— Jennifer Elisabeth

17. “It’s OKAY to be scared. Being scared means you’re about to do something really, really brave.”
— Mandy Hale

18. “Fear and anxiety many times indicates that we are moving in a positive direction, out of the safe confines of our comfort zone, and in the direction of our true purpose.”
— Charles F. Glassman,

19. “They say, ‘Look before you leap.’ So look. But do not look for too long. Do not look into the void of uncertainty trying to predict each and every possible outcome, to evaluate every possible mistake, to prevent each possible failure. Look for the opportunity to leap, and leap faster than your fear can grab you. Leap before you talk yourself out of it, before you convince yourself to set up a temporary camp that turns into a permanent delay on your journey into your own heart.”
— Vironika Tugaleva

20. “He who is not every day conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.”
— Shannon L. Alder

21. “I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life and I’ve never let it keep me from a single thing that I wanted to do.:
— Georgia O’keefe

22. “The only reason I can’t jump in and engage life is that I’ve told myself I can’t. Yet I can’t help wondering would happen if I told myself I could?”
— Craig D. Lounsbrough

23. “Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.”
— Dale Carnegie

24. “The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”
— Nelson Mandela

25. “ “People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

26. “You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”
— Eleanor Roosevelt

Helpful Living with Anxiety Quotes

27. “When I feel threatened, vulnerable, or insecure, whether it from simply walking into a room of unknown people, meeting someone for the first time, an unexpected or expected confrontation, or doing something new, I affirm in my mind (over and over): There is no danger, there is no threat. From there, the discomfort lessens, and I become open for discovery and adventure.”
— Charles F. Glassman

28. “Our anxiety does not empty tomorrow of its sorrows, but only empties today of its strengths.”
— C.H. Spurgeon

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