Like many writers and students of discourse, I have stacks of notebooks. Notebooks ranging from class notes to free-form, to quotes I have gathered from books I read.

Here, I share with you some of the most intriguing quotes I found highlighted in my journals that summoned undertones of fear.

Quotes have the ability to make us feel something deep down inside. Whether it’s sheer terror, revulsion, or a sense of dread, some quotes have the power to chill us to the bone. Here are 15 of the most horrifying quotes of all time:

1. “The mind of the duly threatened man is like a paralyzed spider.” – Jean-Paul Sartre
2. “Can you feel the stench of death?” – Franz Kafka
3. “There is a special horror attached to the Third Reich because those were 20th century Europeans, Christians, and in many ways the smartest, most civilized people on Earth.” – Billy Wilder
4. “I have seen the future and it is murder.” – C.S. Lewis
5. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” – Edmund Burke
6. “In the depths of night, all cows are black.” – German Proverb
7. “What we do in life echoes in eternity.” – Maximus Decimus Meridius, Gladiator
8. “He who fights monsters should see to it that he himself does not become a monster.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
9. “The horror! The horror!” – Joseph Conrad
10. “The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.” – Oscar Wilde
11. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt
12. “The most merciful thing in the world… is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” – H.P. Lovecraft
13. “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” – Charles Baudelaire
14. “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.” – Vladimir Nabokov
15. “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” – H.P. Lovecraft

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