80 uplifting quotes when anxiety is getting the best of you

When it feels like your anxiety is getting the best of you — whether because your kids are having trouble at school or you have a major work project looming or your parents’ health is suffering (it’s always something, isn’t it?!) — sometimes it’s helpful to reach for a few calming words. It’s a way to shift your mind away from whatever is going on at the moment, and instead on a helpful reminder, like Robert Tew’s comforting quote: “Trust yourself. You’ve survived a lot, and you’ll survive whatever is coming.” Or when Oprah Winfrey said, “Doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment.”

Ahead, this collection of succinct and powerful quotes can be a lifeline for when you are navigating the storms of anxiety. Among these 80 quotes, you’ll find nuggets of wisdom from legendary figures like Maya Angelou and Mark Twain, as well as adages from contemporary voices like Eckhart Tolle and Judy Blume.

As Albert Einstein once said, “Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.” And move, you will. As you go through these inspirational quotes, let them remind you that even in the throes of anxiety, brighter days are ahead. To get in a better frame of mind, read them all, or simply jump ahead to the category of quotes that’s most relevant to you.

Best overall anxiety quotes

• “As long as you are breathing, there is more right with you than wrong with you, no matter what is wrong.” ― Jon Kabat-Zinn

• “Your calm mind is the ultimate weapon against your challenges. So relax.” ― Bryant McGill

• “Trust yourself. You’ve survived a lot, and you’ll survive whatever is coming.” ― Robert Tew

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

• “Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.” — Albert Einstein

• “I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.”― Mark Twain

• “Do not anticipate trouble or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight.” ― Benjamin Franklin

• “For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.” ― T.S. Eliot

• “There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.” ― Sylvia Plath

• “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” ― Franklin Delano Roosevelt

• “The world only exists in your eyes. You can make it as big or as small as you want.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald

• “If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.” ― Martin Luther King Jr.

• “The best use of creativity is imagination. The worst use of creativity is anxiety.”  ― Deepak Chopra

• “Doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment.” — Oprah Winfrey

• “You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.” — Maya Angelou

Quotes about overcoming anxiety

• “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

• “Every tomorrow has two handles. We can take hold of it with the handle of anxiety or the handle of faith.” ― Henry Ward Beecher

• “Let fear be a counselor and not a jailer.” ― Tony Robbins

• “I promise you nothing is as chaotic as it seems. Nothing is worth diminishing your health. Nothing is worth poisoning yourself into stress, anxiety, and fear.” ― Steve Maraboli

• “Present fears are less than horrible imaginings.” ― William Shakespeare

• “You don’t have to control your thoughts. You just have to stop letting them control you.” ― Dan Millman

• “Nothing is permanent in this wicked world — not even our troubles.” — Charlie Chaplin

• “Actually spending ten minutes clearing off one shelf is better than fantasizing about spending a weekend cleaning out the basement.” — Gretchen Rubin

• “Do not fight your negative emotions. Observe and befriend them.” — Haemin Sunim

• “We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” — Joseph Campbell

• “Talk to yourself like you would to someone you love.” — Brené Brown

• “Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.” ― Mother Teresa

• “You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.” Jon Kabat-Zinn

• “Life is ten percent what you experience and ninety percent how you respond to it.” ― Dorothy M. Neddermeyer

• “Sometimes the most important thing in a whole day is the rest taken between two deep breaths.” ― Etty Hillesum

• “If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be.” ― Yogi Berra

• “Understanding the difference between healthy striving and perfectionism is critical to laying down the shield and picking up your life. Research shows that perfectionism hampers success. In fact, it’s often the path to depression, anxiety, addiction and life paralysis.” ― Brené Brown

• “I tend to get pretty depressed and I have some issues with anxiety and things like that...For me, it’s more psychological. Exercise is a means of expelling those demons.” — Ryan Reynolds

• “Rule No. 1 is, don’t sweat the small stuff. Rule No. 2 is, it’s all small stuff.” ― Robert Eliot

• “Instead of worrying about what you cannot control, shift your energy to what you can create.” ― Roy T. Bennett

• “Do not judge me by my success, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.” ― Nelson Mandela

• “No matter how much falls on us, we keep plowing ahead. That’s the only way to keep the roads clear.” ― Greg Kincaid

• “Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.” ― Ernest Hemingway

• “Everything you want is on the other side of fear.” ― Jack Canfield

• “Breathe, darling. This is just a chapter. It’s not your whole story.” ― S.C. Lourie

• “A problem is a chance for you to do your best.” ― Duke Ellington

• “Peace is the result of retraining your mind to process life as it is, rather than as you think it should be.” ― Wayne W. Dyer

• “Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.” — Anne Lamott

• “Every time you are tempted to react in the same old way, ask if you want to be a prisoner of the past or a pioneer of the future.” ― Deepak Chopra

• “This life is mine alone. So I have stopped asking people for directions to places they’ve never been.” ― Glennon Doyle

Quotes about living with anxiety

• “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

• “Worrying is like paying a debt you don’t owe.” ― Mark Twain

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

• “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

• “We tend to think that the future happens later, but we’re creating it in our minds every day.” ― Lori Gottlieb

• “Feelings don’t try to kill you, even the painful ones. Anxiety is a feeling grown too large. A feeling grown aggressive and dangerous. You’re responsible for its consequences, you’re responsible for treating it. But...you’re not responsible for causing it. You’re not morally at fault for it. No more than you would be for a tumor.” ― Patrick Ness

• “Mattie sat at the table, obsessing, orbiting around herself. She was sick of her worried, hostile mind. It would have killed her long before, she felt, if it hadn’t needed the transportation.” — Anne Lamott

• “You can’t just take Tylenol to deal with anxiety. Being able to be level with people, being honest about your problem — that is a huge help.” —  Royce White

• “Anxiety was born in the very same moment as mankind. And since we will never be able to master it, we will have to learn to live with it—just as we have learned to live with storms.” ― Paulo Coelho

• “You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.” ― William Faulkner

Deep anxiety quotes

• “Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry — all forms of fear — are caused by too much future, and not enough presence. ― Eckhart Tolle

• “The largest part of what we call ‘personality’ is determined by how we’ve opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness.” ― Alain de Botton

• “In the end, just three things matter: How well we have lived. How well we have loved. How well we have learned to let go.” — Jack Kornfield

• “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” ― Søren Kierkegaard

• “Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.” ― William S. Burroughs

• “I am waiting for my case to come up / and I am waiting / for a rebirth of wonder.”  ― Lawrence Ferlinghetti

• “He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.” ― Michel de Montaigne

• People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.”― Thich Nhat Hanh

• “If you want to conquer the anxiety of life, live in the moment, live in the breath.” ― Amit Ray

• “Anxiety is a living body / Poised beside us like a shadow. / It is the last creature standing, / The only beast who loves us / Enough to stay.” ― Amanda Gorman

• “There’s a sunrise and a sunset every single day, and they’re absolutely free. Don’t miss so many of them.” ― Jo Walton

• “I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” ―  Frank Herbert

• “It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.” ― Chuck Palahniuk

• “The only reality is ‘anxiety’ in the whole chain of beings. To the man lost in the world and its diversions this anxiety is a brief, fleeting fear. But if that fear becomes conscious of itself, it becomes anguish, the perpetual climate of the lucid man “in whom existence is concentrated.” ― Albert Camus

• “Each of us must confront our own fears, must come face to face with them. How we handle our fears will determine where we go with the rest of our lives. To experience adventure or to be limited by the fear of it.” ― Judy Blume

Funny anxiety quotes

• “There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.” ― Henry Kissinger

• “Remember, today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.” ― Dale Carnegie

• “For fast-acting relief, try slowing down.” ― Lily Tomlin

• “The time to relax is when you don’t have time for it.” ― Sydney J. Harris

• “We must have a pie. Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie.” ― David Mamet

• “Smile, it’s free therapy.” — Douglas Horton

• “To succeed in life, you need three things: a wishbone, a backbone, and a funny bone.” — Reba McEntire

• “Thankfully, perseverance is a great substitute for talent.” — Steve Martin

• “My ability to turn good news into anxiety is rivaled only by my ability to turn anxiety into chin acne.” ― Tina Fey

• “When I hear somebody sigh, ‘Life is hard,’ I am always tempted to ask, ‘Compared to what?’” ― Sydney J. Harris

This article was originally published on TODAY.com