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:
Patience is not very different from courage. It just takes longer.
He allowed himself to feel that his stubbornness was courage. Maybe it was.
She had the best kind of courage, or maybe the worst kind, the kind that gets you into trouble.
The strangest of our powers
Is the courage to live
Knowing that we will die,
Knowing nothing more true.
All too often men with physical courage are disappointing in their moral imagination.
Lord, give me the heart of a child, and the awesome courage to live it out as an adult.
People are made of flesh and blood and a miracle fiber called courage.
Why is it that so many men of small stature have more courage than men of size?
A man is not independent unless he has the courage to stand alone.
I sit beside my lonely fire
And pray for wisdom yet:
For calmness to remember
Or courage to forget.