Courage Quotes

Courage is reckoned the greatest of all virtues; because, unless a man has that virtue, he has no security for preserving any other.  ~Samuel Johnson  (Thanks, Frank Lynch)


Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear.  ~Ambrose Redmoon


Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson





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


Courage doesn't always roar.  Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says I'll try again tomorrow.  ~Mary Anne Radmacher


It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.  ~Mark Twain


People are made of flesh and blood and a miracle fibre called courage.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.  ~Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters to Lucilius


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.  ~Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar, 1894


It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived.  ~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird


Courage is being afraid but going on anyhow.  ~Dan Rather


Courage is doing what you're afraid to do.  There can be no courage unless you're scared.  ~Edward Vernon Rickenbacker


A coward is a hero with a wife, kids, and a mortgage.  ~Marvin Kitman


Coward:  A man in whom the instinct of self-preservation acts normally.  ~Sultana Zoraya


Bravery is being the only one who knows you're afraid.  ~Franklin P. Jones


Courage can't see around corners, but goes around them anyway.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960


If God wanted us to be brave, why did He give us legs?  ~Marvin Kitman


Coward:  One who, in a perilous emergency, thinks with his legs.  ~Ambrose Bierce


Sometimes the biggest act of courage is a small one.  ~Lauren Raffo


Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.  ~Ernest Hemingway, Men at War, 1942


Some have been thought brave because they were afraid to run away. ~Thomas Fuller


Fear and courage are brothers. ~Terri Guillemets


Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point. ~C.S. Lewis


The courage of life is often a less dramatic spectacle than the courage of a final moment; but it is no less a magnificent mixture of triumph and tragedy.  ~John F. Kennedy


One man with courage makes a majority.  ~Andrew Jackson


Courage is the power to let go of the familiar.  ~Raymond Lindquist


Valor is stability, not of legs and arms, but of courage and the soul.  ~Michel de Montaigne


When we are afraid we ought not to occupy ourselves with endeavoring to prove that there is no danger, but in strengthening ourselves to go on in spite of the danger.  ~Mark Rutherford


True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.  ~Alfred North Whitehead




Courage, in the final analysis, is nothing but an affirmative answer to the shocks of existence.  ~Kurt Goldstein


To live with fear and not be afraid is the final test of maturity.  ~Edward Weeks


A man of courage never wants weapons.  ~Author Unknown


Do not look upon this world with fear and loathing.  Bravely face whatever the gods offer.  ~Morihei Ueshiba


Healing takes courage, and we all have courage, even if you have to dig a little.  ~Tori Amos


It is easy to be brave from a safe distance.  ~Aesop


Cowards, 'tis said, in certain situations,
Derive a sort of courage from despair,
And then perform, from downright desperation,
Much more than many a bolder man would dare.
~Thomas Ingoldsby, "The Ghost," 1837


A brave arm makes a short sword long.  ~Author Unknown


No one has yet computed how many imaginary triumphs are silently celebrated by people each year to keep up their courage.  ~Henry S. Haskins


There is no such thing as bravery; only degrees of fear.  ~John Wainwright





I'm not funny.  What I am is brave.  ~Lucille Ball


Courage is a peculiar kind of fear.  ~Charles Kennedy


For without belittling the courage with which men have died, we should not forget those acts of courage with which men have lived.  ~John F. Kennedy


Courage is fear that has said its prayers.  ~Dorothy Bernard


Courage is fear holding on a minute longer.  ~George Smith Patton


I have no fear! what is in store for me
Shall find me self-reliant, undismayed.
God grant my only cowardice may be:
Afraid to be afraid!
~Everard Jack Appleton, quoted in Journal of Education, vol. 81, Boston University, 1915


Courage is tiny pieces of fear all glued together. ~Terri Guillemets


Courage is... 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


Courage is knowing what not to fear.  ~Plato


Optimism is the foundation of courage.  ~Nicholas Murray Butler


To a coward, courage always looks like stupidity. ~Bill Maher, Real Time with Bill Maher (season 13, episode 1, original airdate 2015 January 9th)


If there's one thing that I pray for,
As I live my daily life,
It's that I may be courageous
When I'm faced with bitter strife!...
So, I humbly pray for courage
To be with me morn and night,
Thro' the coldness of the Winter
And the Summer's bright sunlight!
~Gertrude T. Buckingham, "Courage"


Courage is as often the outcome of despair as of hope; in the one case we have nothing to lose, in the other everything to gain.  ~Diane de Poitiers


To him that waits all things reveal themselves, provided that he has the courage not to deny, in the darkness, what he has seen in the light.  ~Coventry Patmore


Courage is being scared to death... and saddling up anyway.  ~John Wayne


Necessity does the work of courage.  ~Nicholas Murray Butler


Perfect courage means doing unwitnessed what we would be capable of with the world looking on.  ~François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, 1678


Courage is almost a contradiction in terms.  It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.  ~G.K. Chesterton


Courage crawls atop fear and screams loud its mighty victory! ~Terri Guillemets


Courage is the fear of being thought a coward.  ~Horace Smith


Courage is to feel the daily daggers of relentless steel and keep on living.  ~Douglas Malloch


The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.  ~Albert Camus


Courage is nine-tenths context.  What is courageous in one setting can be foolhardy in another and even cowardly in a third.  ~Joseph Epstein


A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


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


Courage is a kind of salvation. ~Plato


Underneath courage shouts fear but of a hoarse voice. ~Terri Guillemets


Valor is a gift. Those having it never know for sure if they have it till the test comes. And those having it in one test never know for sure if they will have it when the next test comes. ~Carl Sandburg


Courage ought to have eyes as well as arms.  ~H.G. Bohn


You can't test courage cautiously.  ~Anne Dillard


The only courage that matters is the kind that gets you from one moment to the next.  ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned.  When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.  ~Mark Twain, Notebook, 1935


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.  You rarely win, but sometimes you do.  ~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird





A timid person is frightened before a danger, a coward during the time, and a courageous person afterward.  ~Jean Paul Richter


Have the courage to live.  Anyone can die.  ~Robert Cody