What the statesman is most anxious to produce is a certain moral character in his fellow citizens, namely a disposition to virtue and the performance of virtuous actions.
I've learned one important lesson in my life, and I'm going to share it with you. Don't worry about bad things that haven't happened yet. It will save you a lot of anxiety.
The animal lacks both anxiety and hope because its consciousness is restricted to what is clearly evident and thus to the present moment: the animal is the present incarnate.
There are legitimate concerns and anxieties that the forces of globalisation are leaving too many people behind - and we have to take those concerns seriously and address them. But the answer isn't to turn inward and embrace protectionism. We can't just walk away from trade.
Conscious attention is a designed function of the brain
which scans the environment for any trouble making changes.
If you identify yourself with your trouble shooter, then naturally you define yourself as being in a perpetual state of anxiety.
Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.
Certain temperaments respond to anxiety by pulling inward. Their instincts tell them ' Don't go out to meet the world - you'll have a panic attack. Inside is where safety is.
Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another--which is not to say that we should never strive to overcome any of our anxieties or fulfil any of our desires, but rather to suggest that we should perhaps build into our strivings an awareness of the way our goals promise us a respite and a resolution that they cannot, by definition, deliver.
We need tremendous energy to bring about a psychological change in ourselves as human beings, because we have lived far too long in a world of make-belief, in a world of brutality,
violence, despair, anxiety. To live humanly, sanely, one has to change.