Quotations about fear from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, and Dan North

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a quotation attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, that:

 

“Fear always springs from ignorance.”

 

I ran across it in an article by Victor M. Parachin titled Taking the fear out of failure which appeared in the August 2000 issue of Toastmaster magazine. It came from an oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, August 31, 1837. The whole paragraph containing it says:

 

“In self-trust, all the virtues are comprehended. Free should the scholar be, — free and brave. Free even to the definition of freedom, ‘without any hindrance that does not arise out of his own constitution.’ Brave; for fear is a thing, which a scholar by his very function puts behind him. Fear always springs from ignorance. It is a shame to him if his tranquillity, amid dangerous times, arise from the presumption, that, like children and women, his is a protected class; or if he seek a temporary peace by the diversion of his thoughts from politics or vexed questions, hiding his head like an ostrich in the flowering bushes, peeping into microscopes, and turning rhymes, as a boy whistles to keep his courage up. So is the danger a danger still; so is the fear worse.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a similar quotation from Herman Melville that:

 

“Ignorance is the parent of fear.”

 

As you might suspect, it came from his 1851 novel, Moby Dick (in Chapter 3).

 

But both of these quotations only apply to our irrational fears, and there also are rational ones.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As shown above, there is a better quote from consultant Dan North regarding both types. He has discussed them in an article titled Better Best Practices that first appeared at InfoQ in March 2008. He explained:

 

“Now fear comes in two flavours, namely rational and irrational. Rational fear is healthy and useful. Lions are bad. Fire is hot. Trucks hurt. This is fear based on good information, either wired in via evolution or learned through cultural or individual development. Irrational fear is the source of prejudices, phobias and knee-jerk reactions. The earth is flat and you’ll die if you go over the edge. Hanging up dead rats by their tails wards off the plague. Putting coconut shells on your ears makes the freight aeroplane appear [cargo cult].

…. Rational fear is good: it stops us getting killed. We should embrace it and cherish it as a guardian of our well-being. Irrational fear is just a drag, but fortunately we have a strategy for dealing with it:

Because irrational fear comes from ignorance, we can learn our way out of it!”

The 1871 engraving of Emerson came from the Library of Congress, and an 1870 portrait of Melville came from Wikimedia Commons.