quotes and quotations on courage

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

Arthur Koestler

I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting an idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. Harper Lee

When you get in a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems you could not hold on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn. Harriet Beecher Stowe Courage is a special kind of knowledge: the knowledge of how to fear what ought to be feared and how not to fear what ought not to be feared. David Ben-Gurion

Last, but by no means least, courage--moral courage, the courage of one's convictions, the courage to see things through. The world is in a constant conspiracy against the brave. It's the age-old struggle--the roar of the crowd on one side and the voice of your conscience on the other. Douglas MacArthur

We must have courage to bet on our ideas, to take the calculated risk, and to act. Everyday living requires courage if life is to be effective and bring happiness. Maxwell Maltz

The hallmark of courage in our age of conformity is the capacity to stand
on one's own convictions--not obstinately or defiantly (these are gestures
of defensiveness, not courage) nor as a gesture of retaliation,
but simply because these are what one believes.

Rollo May

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The world has no room for cowards. We must all be
ready somehow to toil, to suffer, to die. And yours is
not the less noble because no drum beats before you
when you go out to your daily battlefields, and no
crowds shout your coming when you return from
your daily victory and defeat.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide
upon, there is always someone to tell you, you are wrong. There
are always difficulties arising which tempt you to believe that your
critics are right. To map out a course of action, and follow it to an
end, requires some of the same courage which a soldier needs.
Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women
to win them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The courage of life is often a less dramatic spectacle than the courage
of a final moment; but it is no less than a magnificent mixture of triumph
and tragedy. A person does what he or she must--in spite of personal consequences,
in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures--and that is the basis of all human morality.

John F. Kennedy

Courage is resistance to fear, not absence of it.

Mark Twain

Perfect courage is to do unwitnessed what
we should be capable of doing before all the world.

La Rochefoucauld

Courage is energized by challenges; it is inspired by difficult tasks and
even seeks them out. When courage is present, we rise to meet different
challenges for the sake of what we want to accomplish, and we’re not
discouraged by thought of hardship or by the length of the undertaking.

Joseph Goldstein
7 Treasures of Awakening

The hero is no braver than an ordinary person,
but he or she is brave five minutes longer.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

One has to abandon altogether the search for security, and reach
out to the risk of living with both arms. One has to embrace the
world like a lover. One has to accept pain as a condition of existence.
One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing. One
needs a will stubborn in conflict, but apt always to total acceptance
of every consequence of living and dying.

Morris L. West

Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak;
courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.

unattributed

courage 2

Courage and cowardice are antithetical.
Courage is an inner resolution to go forward in spite of obstacles and frightening situations;
    cowardice is a submissive surrender to circumstance.
Courage breeds creative self-affirmation;
    cowardice produces destructive self-abnegation.
Courage faces fear and thereby masters it;
    cowardice represses fear and is thereby mastered by it.
Courageous people never lose the zest for living even though their life situation is zestless;
    cowardly people, overwhelmed by the uncertainties of life, lose the will to live.
We must constantly build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

I looked more widely around me, I studied the lives of the masses of humanity,
and I saw that, not two or three, or ten, but hundreds, thousands, millions,
had so understood the meaning of life that they were able both to live and to
die. All these people were well acquainted with the meaning of life and death,
quietly labored, endured privation and suffering, lived and died, and saw
in all this, not a vain, but a good thing.

Leo Tolstoy

I do not ask to walk smooth paths
Nor bear an easy load.
I pray for strength and fortitude
To climb the rock-strewn road.

Give me such courage I can scale
The hardest peaks alone,
And transform every stumbling block
Into a steppingstone.

Gail Brook Burket

Articles and book excerpts on courage:

Be Willing to Be a Little Outrageous to Get What You Want Lisa Jimenez
Thoughts on the Serenity Prayer Ray Whiting

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This is the art of courage: to see things as they are and still
believe that the victory lies not with those who avoid the bad,
but those who taste, in living awareness, every drop of the good.

Victoria Lincoln

It takes more courage to reveal insecurities than to hide them,
more strength to relate to people than to dominate them,
more "manhood" to abide by thought-out principles rather
than blind reflex. Toughness is in the soul and spirit,
not in muscles and an immature mind.

Alex Karras

Courage is more than standing for a firm conviction.
It includes the risk of questioning that conviction.

Julian Weber Gordon

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience
in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say
to yourself, "I lived through this horror. I can take the next
thing that comes along."

Eleanor Roosevelt

courage 2

It is courage, courage, courage, that raises the blood of life to
crimson splendor. Live bravely and present a brave front to adversity!

Horace

Knowledge without courage is sterile.

Baltasar Gracian

Courage without conscience is a wild beast.

Robert Ingersoll

Courage is the first of human qualities because
it is the quality which guarantees all the others.

Winston Churchill

Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace.
The soul that knows it not, knows no release from the little things.

Amelia Earhart

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment
that something else is more important than fear.

Ambrose Redmoon

Fearlessness may be a gift, but perhaps more precious is the
courage acquired through endeavor, courage that comes from
cultivating the habit of refusing to let fear dictate one's actions,
courage that could be described as "grace under pressure"--
grace which is renewed repeatedly in the face
of harsh, unremitting pressure.

Aung San Suu Kyi

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

Nelson Mandela

If you summon your courage to challenge something, you'll never
regret it. How sad it would be to spend your life wishing, "If only
I had a little more courage." Whatever the outcome, the important
thing is to take a step forward on the path that you believe is right.
There's no need to worry about what others may think.
It's your life, after all. Be true to yourself.

Daisaku Ikeda
Buddhism Day by Day

Courage is the most important of all virtues, because without courage,
you cannot practice any of the other virtues consistently.

Maya Angelou

The true meaning of courage is to be afraid, and then, with your knees
knocking and your heart racing, to step out anyway--even when that
step makes sense to nobody but you. I know that's not easy. But making
a bold move is the only way to truly advance toward the
grandest vision the universe has for you.

Oprah Winfrey