There’s two sorts of fear: one you embrace and one you should listen to and turn the other way

We find this line consistently and near-universally credited to Matthew McConaughey across quote collections, and its sentiment squarely matches his documented thinking on fear — in his celebrated 2015 University of Houston commencement address he argues that fear is "a good thing" and urges listeners not to deny their fears but to "declare them... give them the credit they deserve." What we could not do is trace this exact wording to any primary source: it is absent from his memoir Greenlights (2020) and poetry collection Poems & Prayers (2025), from the reprinted texts of his speeches, and there is no published collection of his letters to check. The verbatim phrasing surfaces only on quote-aggregator websites, which supply no original citation. We found no competing author and no earlier use, so the attribution to McConaughey is not in doubt — only the original source and occasion remain unconfirmed, which is why we mark it attributed rather than verified.