Cowards may fear to die; but courage stout,
Rather than live in snuff, will be put out.
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:
Be steadfast as a tower that doth not bend its stately summit to the tempest's shock.
Courage conquers all things: it even gives strength to the body.
O, the blood more stirs
To rouse a lion than to start a hare!
We are not downhearted, but we cannot understand what is happening to our neighbours.