Quotations for OCD

Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Refuse to act on an obsession, and it will die of inaction.
- Recovery Inc.

If you want to think about it less, think about it more.
- Fred Penzel

Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.
- Michel de Montaigne

Getting well is 50 percent of the job, staying well is the other 50 percent.
- Fred Penzel

It is bad luck to be superstitious.
- Andrew W. Mathis

“More important than the quest for certainty is the quest for clarity.”

-Francois Gautier

When you attempt to eliminate risk from your life, you eliminate along with it, your ability to function.
- Fred Penzel

I'm a person who also happens to have OCD.
- Patricia Perkins-Doyle

When the disease is known it is half cured.
- Erasmus Colloquies

It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.
- Leonardo da Vinci

Suffering begins to dissolve when we can question the belief or hope that there's anywhere to hide.
- Pema Chodron

Worrying about dying will hardly help you live.
- Albert Ellis

Great deeds are usually wrought at great risks.
- Herodotus

Pain of mind is worse than pain of body.
- Publius Syrus

The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.

- Samuel Johnson

The only courage that matters is the kind that gets you from one moment to the next.
- Mignon McLaughlin

What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step.
- Antoine De Saint-Exupery

Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.
- Mark Twain

Habit is overcome by habit.

- Thomas à Kempis, c. 1420

Habit and routine have an unbelievable power to destroy.
- Henri de Lubac

You really never lose until you stop trying.
- Mike Ditka

We first make our habits, then our habits make us.

- John Dryden

If you wait for the perfect moment when all is safe and assured, it may never arrive. Mountains will not be climbed, races won, or lasting happiness achieved.
- Maurice Chevalier

Depend on the rabbit's foot if you will, but remember, it didn't work for the rabbit.
- R. E. Shay

Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.
- Vincent van Gogh

Fear is a feeling that is stronger than love.
- Pliny the Younger

The issue is not that you get symptoms it's what you do with the symptoms that you get.
- Fred Penzel

Life does not have to be perfect to be wonderful.
- Annette Funicello

The policy of being too cautious is the greatest risk of all.
- Jawaharlal Nehru

The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer because smaller things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of suffering.
- Thomas Merton

The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions.
- Alfred Adler

There are some things one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction.
- Franz Kafka

My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.

- Michel de Montaigne

He that doubteth is damned.
- Romans XIV, 23, c.55

Doubts are more cruel than the worst of truths.
- Molière

Where there is no imagination, there is no horror.
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?
- Vincent van Gogh

Man is a creature who can get used to anything, and I believe that is the very best way of defining him.

- Fyodor Dostoevsky

Nothing is more powerful than habit.|
- Ovid

The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it.
- H. Norman Schwartzkopf

Progress always involves risk; you can't steal second base and keep your foot on first base.
- Frederick Wilcox

Compulsions are a lousy solution to the problem of having obsessions.
- Fred Penzel

Habits are at first cobwebs, then cables.
- Spanish Proverb

The longer we dwell on our misfortunes, the greater is their power to harm us.
- Voltaire

We fear things in proportion to our ignorance of them.
- Titus Livius

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature... Avoiding danger in the long run is no safer than outright exposure. Life is either daring adventure or nothing.
- Helen Keller

It is impossible to get out of a problem by using the same kind of thinking that it took to get into it.|
- Albert Einstein.

Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.
- Shakespeare, from Measure for Measure

Everything is dangerous to him that is afraid of it.
- Benjamin Whichcote

A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere.
- Groucho Marx

To be alive at all involves some risk.
- Harold MacMillan

You should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.
- Quentin Crisp

Don't be afraid your life will end; be afraid that it will never begin.
- Grace Hansen

Remorse for what is done is useless.
- Philo

Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.
- Gertrude Stein

We must travel in the direction of our fear.
- John Bunyan

Present fears are less than horrible imaginings.
- Shakespeare, from Macbeth

The basic principle behind behavioral therapy for OCD is that you cannot be bored and scared at the same time.
- Fred Penzel

No passion so effectively robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.
- Edmund Burke

The best way out is always through.
- Robert Frost

Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.
- Henry David Thoreau

Any truth is better than indefinite doubt.
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, from The Yellow Face

Courage is the complement of fear. A man who is fearless cannot be courageous. (He is also a fool).
- Lazarus Long

Fear always springs from ignorance.
- R. W. Emerson

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not.
- Walter Bagheot

Rule your mind or it will rule you.
- Horace

The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss, and commit to memory the one, and pass over the other.
- Sir Francis Bacon

An unfortunate thing about this world is that good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones.
- W. Somerset Maugham

I have not ceased being fearful, but I have ceased to let fear control me. I have accepted fear as part of life, specifically fear of change and fear of the unknown; and I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says, turn back, turn back, you'll die if you venture too far.
- Erica Jong

Habit if not resisted, soon becomes necessity.
- St. Augustine

The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.
- Samuel Johnson

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear not absence of fear.
- Mark Twain

Sometimes it is more important to discover what one cannot do, than what one can do.
- Lin Yutang

The great thing about absurd logic is that it fits any situation.
- Scott Adams

I have learned to live each day as it comes, and not to borrow trouble by dreading tomorrow. It is the dark menace of the future that makes cowards of us.
- Dorothy Dix

I can feel guilty about the past, apprehensive about the future, but only in the present can I act. The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.
- Abraham Maslow

Be patient toward all this is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not seek the answers that cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them, and the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.}
- Reiner Maria Rilke

You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself.
- Galileo Galilei

This only is certain, that there is nothing certain.
- Pliny the Elder

None of us knows anything, not even whether we know or do not know, nor do we know whether not knowing and knowing exist, nor in general whether there is anything or not.
- Metrodorus of Chios (4th Century B.C. Greek philosopher)

Habit and routine have an unbelievable power to destroy.

- Henri de Lubac

This is a mad disease, surely I don't think the wildest psychiatric phantasy could have invented anything like it, and if we did not see it every day with our own eyes we could hardly bring ourselves to believe in it.

- Sigmund Freud (discussing OCD)

The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision.

- Maimonides

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

- Virginia Woolf