Courage Quotations

Living at risk is jumping off the cliff and building your wings on the way down.

Courage is the capacity to confront what can be imagined.

Accept the challenges so that you can feel the exhilaration of victory.

Courage is never to let your actions be influenced by your fears.

Courage is being scared to death... and saddling up anyway.

An essential aspect of creativity is not being afraid to fail.

A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.

Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.

Let us go forth with fear and courage and rage to save the world.

It's the little details that are vital. Little things make big things happen.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.

What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?

Bravery is the capacity to perform properly even when scared half to death.

Boldness is a mask for fear, however great.

Success is never final, failure is never fatal. It's courage that counts.

Every human being on this earth is born with a tragedy, and it isn't original sin. He's born with the tragedy that he has to grow up... a lot of people don't have the courage to do it.

We've begun to raise daughters more like sons... but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.

Courage - a perfect sensibility of the measure of danger, and a mental willingness to endure it.

Some people think luxury is the opposite of poverty. It is not. It is the opposite of vulgarity.

Fear doesn't exist anywhere except in the mind.

Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.

In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.

I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.

Live as brave men; and if fortune is adverse, front its blows with brave hearts.

Do not fear mistakes. You will know failure. Continue to reach out.

Where a man's strength and courage is tested most is in the way that he treats women - the way that he loves.

Even in the hardest circumstances, dreams can give you the courage to live, and I hope I can share that message with children in need.

There can be a fundamental gulf of gracelessness in a human heart which neither our love nor our courage can bridge.

I don't believe in any Greatest Generation. I believe in great events. They sweep ordinary people up, expose them to extremes of human behavior and unimaginable tests of integrity and courage, and then deposit them back on the home front.

Courage, sacrifice, determination, commitment, toughness, heart, talent, guts. That's what little girls are made of; the heck with sugar and spice.

To bathe a cat takes brute force, perseverance, courage of conviction - and a cat. The last ingredient is usually hardest to come by.

Have the courage to face a difficulty lest it kick you harder than you bargain for.

You take a number of small steps which you believe are right, thinking maybe tomorrow somebody will treat this as a dangerous provocation. And then you wait. If there is no reaction, you take another step: courage is only an accumulation of small steps.

If we are to survive, we must have ideas, vision, and courage. These things are rarely produced by committees. Everything that matters in our intellectual and moral life begins with an individual confronting his own mind and conscience in a room by himself.

Optimism is essential to achievement and it is also the foundation of courage and true progress.

Earth teach me to forget myself as melted snow forgets its life. Earth teach me resignation as the leaves which die in the fall. Earth teach me courage as the tree which stands all alone. Earth teach me regeneration as the seed which rises in the spring.

Often the difference between a successful man and a failure is not one's better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on his ideas, to take a calculated risk, and to act.

It often takes more courage to change one's opinion than to keep it.

There's no mystique to acting. It's only common sense - and a bit of courage.

A mode of conduct, a standard of courage, discipline, fortitude and integrity can do a great deal to make a woman beautiful.

Courage is being afraid but going on anyhow.

Success is that old ABC: ability, breaks and courage.

Every great work, every big accomplishment, has been brought into manifestation through holding to the vision, and often just before the big achievement, comes apparent failure and discouragement.

There can be no failure to a man who has not lost his courage, his character, his self respect, or his self-confidence. He is still a King.

Each of us has an inner dream that we can unfold if we will just have the courage to admit what it is, and the faith to trust our own admission. The admitting is often very difficult.

The difference between a hero and a coward is one step sideways.

Discouragement is not the absence of adequacy but the absence of courage.

If we bring not the good courage of minds covetous of truth, and truth only, prepared to hear all things, and decide upon all things, according to evidence, we should do more wisely to sit down contented in ignorance, than to bestir ourselves only to reap disappointment.

It takes a certain courage and a certain greatness to be truly base.

Take chances, make mistakes. That's how you grow. Pain nourishes your courage. You have to fail in order to practice being brave.

You want to shut up every Negro who has the courage to stand up and fight for the rights of his people, for the rights of workers, and I have been on many a picket line for the steelworkers too.

These rules may seem simple enough, but it will require great morale and physical courage to adhere to them. But if carried out in the strict sense of the word it will surely lead to a greater success than could otherwise be attained.

One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying.

This nation will remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave.

My talent is such that no undertaking, however vast in size... has ever surpassed my courage.

You must accept that you might fail; then, if you do your best and still don't win, at least you can be satisfied that you've tried. If you don't accept failure as a possibility, you don't set high goals, you don't branch out, you don't try - you don't take the risk.

Fear cannot be banished, but it can be calm and without panic; it can be mitigated by reason and evaluation.

We had no more courage than Harriet Tubman or Marcus Garvey had in their times. We just had a more vulnerable enemy.

Develop an attitude of gratitude, and give thanks for everything that happens to you, knowing that every step forward is a step toward achieving something bigger and better than your current situation.

We don't develop courage by being happy every day. We develop it by surviving difficult times and challenging adversity.

Had we lived I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale.

Courage, above all things, is the first quality of a warrior.

You'll notice that my books offer great variety. Some are for adults, some for children and some for teens. There are mysteries, historical novels, picture books, love stories and stories of crisis and courage.

Infinite growth of material consumption in a finite world is an impossibility.

I became frustrated early on as a playwright by a kind of smug smallness in modern drama. There was a lack of what I now understand as courage in the work of others as well as in my own work, and I found I was mildly amused or interested by such plays but not deeply engaged or enlightened.

It's better to be a lion for a day than a sheep all your life.

At the bottom of not a little of the bravery that appears in the world, there lurks a miserable cowardice. Men will face powder and steel because they have not the courage to face public opinion.

Individual courage is the only interesting thing in life.

The values transmitted through oral history are many - courage, selflessness, the ability to endure, and to do so with humor and grace. I got those values listening to my dad's stories about the Depression and how their family survived. It gave me courage that I, too, could survive hard times.

I cannot think of a greater symbol of human resistance and courage than our Nobel laureate colleague Andrei Sakharov.

Well, I think that - I think leadership's always been about two main things: imagination and courage.

We all know the dangers of sequels. Lightning doesn't strike twice in the same place too often, and I think you've got to move beyond it, go the extra mile and have the courage not to just repeat the first one.

So many times I wanted to go to Auschwitz, but I couldn't take up the courage to go there.

You only have power over people so long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power - he's free again.

Collaboration is just, really, a group of people getting in a room with their eye on a very similar prize and wanting to come out with the same show. The director, ultimately, is the guy in front of whom the buck stops. So, he has to have the courage to prevail. But, he has got to have a huge amount of respect for his collaborators.

If men knew all that women think, they would be twenty times more audacious.

Love is the most difficult and dangerous form of courage. Courage is the most desperate, admirable and noble kind of love.

It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.

Therefore, don't let sinners take courage to think they will be favoured like the thief on the cross; for we see on the other side, they may be like the hardened one, and reproach death itself.

It takes vision and courage to create - it takes faith and courage to prove.

Because we men have been physically stronger and more arrogant, we've influenced much of the cool stuff of the world, like basing the definition of courage on what we do on battlefields rather than on the patience or endurance or tolerance necessary for a sometimes painful daily grind that includes small children.

Freedom. And Justice. If you have those two, it covers everything. You must stick to those principles and have the courage of your convictions.

You have to have the courage to face the unexpected. This is the difference between people who do things and people who don't dare, who don't dare to live.

I remember being a teenager and seeing Seymour Cassel across a crowded room and being incredibly star struck, and not having the courage to say, 'Hello.'

Gird your hearts with silent fortitude, Suffering, yet hoping all things.

It is well to think well; it is divine to act well.

The opposite for courage is not cowardice, it is conformity. Even a dead fish can go with the flow.

We must become bigger than we have been: more courageous, greater in spirit, larger in outlook. We must become members of a new race, overcoming petty prejudice, owing our ultimate allegiance not to nations but to our fellow men within the human community.

If you suppress grief too much, it can well redouble.

Do not wait; the time will never be 'just right.' Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along.

It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.

Woman must not accept; she must challenge. She must not be awed by that which has been built up around her; she must reverence that woman in her which struggles for expression.

Who bravely dares must sometimes risk a fall.

A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with, the wind.

When you've got something to prove, there's nothing greater than a challenge.

There's only one thing worse than a man who doesn't have strong likes and dislikes, and that's a man who has strong likes and dislikes without the courage to voice them.

Someone once told me the one thread that runs through them all is a premium on personal courage - not intellectual courage, but just plain physical courage.

We cannot be sure of having something to live for unless we are willing to die for it.

To create one's world in any of the arts takes courage.