Courage Quotes
The quotes worth a second look here are the quiet ones. In Dryden’s Amphitryon (1690) a character says he is “whistling to keep myself from being afraid”, which is still a fair description of how most courage works. Samuel Johnson, according to Boswell (1791), said courage is so necessary to virtue that it is respected even when it goes along with vice. Nassim Taleb, in The Bed of Procrustes (2010), has it the other way round from the usual advice: mental clarity is the child of courage, not the reverse. The psychologist Rollo May is the most-quoted modern writer here.
Two of the page’s better-known quotes are flagged as misattributed: the Churchill line about the courage to continue, which has no traceable source (see Success), and a passage on the courage of our questions that is credited to Carl Sagan.
Most quoted on courage:
Oh courage...oh yes! If only one had that...Then life might be livable, in spite of everything.
Nothing is lost if one has the courage to proclaim that all is lost and we must begin anew.
Courage is not the absence of fear but the awareness that something else is more important.
The secret of happiness is freedom and the secret of freedom is courage.
The wages of courage is death, lad, but it’s the wages of everything else, too.
To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.
Every day begins with an act of courage and hope: getting out of bed.
Only evil grows of itself, while for goodness we want effort and courage.
Courage and the goodness of one’s cause, unfortunately, do not always go hand in hand.