We all worry from time to time. Some worry more than others, but we all do it.
Almost invariably, the things we worry about never actually come to pass. Instead, we worry about threats that we’ve imagined and frightening fantasies that we’ve conjured up ourselves.
Worrying, regardless of whether the thing we worry about happens or not, is a pointless exerecise. It drains our energy, erodes our health, and restricts our ability to think of creative solutions to the problems that we really do encounter.
Here are some quotes about worrying from some of history’s great thinkers. The message I read in each of these is the same: “Please don’t make the mistake I’ve made so often - don’t waste your time worrying.”
“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened. “
- Mark Twain
“If I had my life to live over, I would perhaps have more actual troubles but I’d have fewer imaginary ones.”
- Don Herold
“Let us be of good cheer, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which will never happen.”
- James Russel Lowell
“Some of your hurts you have cured, And the sharpest you still have survived, But what torments of grief you endured From the evil which never arrived.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Some men storm imaginary Alps all their lives, and die in the foothills cursing difficulties which do not exist.”
- Edgar Watson Howe
“How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened.”
- Thomas Jefferson
“There are people who are always anticipating trouble, and in this way they manage to enjoy many sorrows that never really happen to them.”
- Josh Billings
“There are more things, Lucilius, that frighten us than injure us, and we suffer more in imagination than in reality.”
- Seneca
“My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.”
- Michel de Montaigne
“Real difficulties can be overcome, it is only the imaginary ones that are unconquerable. “
- Theodore N. Vail
“Do not anticipate trouble or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight. “
- Benjamin Franklin