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It is easy to be brave from a safe distance.
-Aesop
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"The French courage proceeds from vanity — the German from phlegm — the Turkish from fanaticism & opium — the Spanish from pride — the English from coolness — the Dutch from obstinacy — the Russian from insensibility — but the Italian from anger."
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron
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Courage is not the absence of fear but rather the judgment that something is more important than fear. The brave may not live forever but the cautious do not live at all.
-Meg Cabot, from the movie "The Princess Diaries" (2001)
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"Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle."
-G. K. Chesterton
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Lean into the sharp points and fully experience them. The essence of bravery is being without self-deception. Wisdom is inherent in (understanding) emotions.
-Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times (p. 75)
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Common experience shows how much rarer is moral courage than physical bravery. A thousand men will march to the mouth of the cannon where one man will dare espouse an unpopular cause.
-Clarence Darrow
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There must be a reason why people hesitate; uncertainty is one, no courage another.
-Ron de Jonge
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"Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace."
-Amelia Earhart
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One man with courage makes a majority.
-Andrew Jackson
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Go at it boldly, and you'll find unexpected forces closing round you and coming to your aid.
-Basil King, Conquest Of Fear (1921)
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When I was a small boy I often went to the woods to lie on the grass in the shade. Somehow I had come to believe the earth could give me wisdom, but it did not. Yet I learned a little about animals and learned it is not always brave to make a stand. It is often foolish. There is a time for courage and a time for flight.
-Louis L'Amour, Ride The Dark Trail, 1972
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"The fearless are merely fearless. People who act in spite of their fear are truly brave."
-James A. LaFond-Lewis, November 11, 1999
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I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the 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, To Kill a Mockingbird, 1960
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It takes courage to be the author of your life. When you are struggling through one of the difficult parts of turning your dreams into reality, you may wonder why you always get stuck with having to put up with so much fear and uncertainty. Why, you wonder, couldn't I feel more courageous, like those other people do? You don't feel courageous because courage is not an emotion. There is no such thing as feeling "courageous". It is an imaginary emotion. Courage consists of doing what you said you would do even when you don't want to. In the face of danger you have a choice to be the delegate of either your commitments or your feelings. It's as simple and as difficult as that.
-Nicholas Lore, The Pathfinder
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'I will have no man in my boat,' said Starbuck, 'who is not afraid of a whale.' By this, he seemed to mean not only that the most reliable and useful courage was that which arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril, but that an utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.
-Herman Melville, Moby Dick
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"Only a brave person is willing to honestly admit, and fearlessly to face, what a sincere and logical mind discovers."
-Rodan of Alexandria
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Nothing in life gives a man so much courage as the attainment or renewal of the conviction that other people regard him with favor; because it means that everyone joins to give him help and protection, which is an infinitely stronger bulwark against the ills of life than anything he can do himself.
-Arthur Schopenhauer, Position, IV
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"Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once."
-William Shakespeare, "Julius Caesar, Act II, Sc. 2, line 32."
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"Discretion is the better part of valour."
origin: Falstaff: 'The better part of valour is discretion; in the which better part I have saved my life.'
-William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part One
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"Courage is a perfect sensibility of the measure of danger, and a mental willingness to endure it."
-Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman
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I've been through it all, baby. I'm Mother Courage
-Elizabeth Taylor
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"He who does not have the courage to speak up for his rights cannot earn the respect of others."
-René G. Torres
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Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear--not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward, it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word. Consider the flea!--incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage. Whether you are asleep or awake he will attack you, caring nothing for the fact that in bulk and strength you are to him as are the massed armies of the earth to a sucking child; he lives both day and night and all days and nights in the very lap of peril and the immediate presence of death, and yet is no more afraid than is the man who walks the streets of a city that was threatened by an earthquake ten centuries before. When we speak of Clive, Nelson, and Putnam as men who "didn't know what fear was," we ought always to add the flea--and put him at the head of the procession.
-Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"
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Fortune favors the brave.
-Virgil, Aeneid
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Books about Bravery
