1. Courage is knowing what not to fear.
- Plato
2. Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.
- Lao Tzu
3. Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.
- Winston S. Churchill
4. It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.
- E.E. Cummings
5. 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 see it through no matter what.
- Atticus Finch
- Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
6. Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently.
- Maya Angelou
7. To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.
- George Orwell
8. You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.
- William Faulkner
9. Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
- Anaïs Nin
10. Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.
- Mark Twain
11. All happiness depends on courage and work.
- Honoré de Balzac
12. Courage is found in unlikely places.
- J.R.R. Tolkien
13. Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
14. Courage isn't having the strength to go on - it is going on when you don't have strength.
- Napoléon Bonaparte
15. Courage is grace under pressure.
- Ernest Hemingway
16. A man with outward courage dares to die; a man with inner courage dares to live.
- Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
17. It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.
- Mark Twain
18. One's dignity may be assaulted, vandalized and cruelly mocked, but it can never be taken away unless it is surrendered.
- Michael J. Fox
19. Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.
- Robert Louis Stevenson
20. What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?
- Vincent van Gogh
21. ...Who could refrain,
That had a heart to love, and in that heart
Courage to make love known?
- William Shakespeare, Macbeth
22. It takes great courage to back truth unacceptable to our times. There's a punishment for it, and it's usually crucifixion.
- John Steinbeck, East of Eden
23. Anybody can learn to think, or believe, or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel... the moment you feel, you're nobody - but-yourself - in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting.
- E.E. Cummings, E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany Revised
24. Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid ... Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.
- Bertrand Russell, Why Men Fight
How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
25. So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloudshadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you.
- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
26. Self-control is the chief element in self-respect, and self-respect is the chief element in courage.
- Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
27. Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things--childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves--that go on slipping , like sand, through our fingers.
- Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991
28. Are you ready? Klaus asked finally.
No, Sunny answered.
Me neither, Violet said, but if we wait until we're ready we'll be waiting for the rest of our lives, Let's go.
- Lemony Snicket, The Ersatz Elevator
29. I know what I want, I have a goal, an opinion, I have a religion and love. Let me be myself and then I am satisfied. I know that I’m a woman, a woman with inward strength and plenty of courage.
- Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
30. I remembered that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitments, awaited those who had the courage to go forth into it's expanse, to seek real knowledge of life amidst it's perils.
- Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
31. The courage it took to get out of bed each
morning
to face the same things
over and over
was
enormous.
- Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense
32. He who is brave is free
- Seneca
33. This is what I believe: That I am I. That my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest. That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back. That I must have the courage to let them come and go. That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women. There is my creed.
- D.H. Lawrence
34. How do you defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized.
- Salman Rushdie, Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002
35. Art is a personal act of courage, something one human does that creates change in another.
- Seth Godin, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?
36. The only tyrant I accept in this world is the 'still small voice' within me. And even though I have to face the prospect of being a minority of one, I humbly believe I have the courage to be in such a hopeless minority.
- Mahatma Gandhi, The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
37. The bravest thing I ever did was continuing my life when I wanted to die.
- Juliette Lewis
38. Make voyages. Attempt them. There's nothing else.
- Tennessee Williams, Camino Real
39. What makes a hero? Courage, strength, morality, withstanding adversity? Are these the traits that truly show and create a hero? Is the light truly the source of darkness or vice versa? Is the soul a source of hope or despair? Who are these so called heroes and where do they come from? Are their origins in obscurity or in plain sight?
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
40. One cannot answer for his courage when he has never been in danger.
- François de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims
41. For the whole earth is the tomb of famous men; not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions in their own country, but in foreign lands there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not on stone but in the hearts of men. Make them your examples, and, esteeming courage to be freedom and freedom to be happiness, do not weigh too nicely the perils of war.
[Funeral Oration of Pericles]
- Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
42. Courage is like love, it must have hope for nourishment.
- Napoléon Bonaparte
43. Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it is always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals come easily.
- Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
44. Without courage, wisdom bears no fruit.
- Baltasar Gracián
45. Everyone who has ever taken a shower has had an idea. It's the
person who gets out of the shower, dries off, and does something
about it that makes a difference.
- Nolan Bushnell
46. Even in the mud and scum of things, something always, always sings.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
47. Giving style to one’s character - a great and rare art! It is exercised by those who see all the strengths and weaknesses of their own natures and then comprehend them in an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason and even weakness delights the eye.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
48. Anger is the prelude to courage.
- Eric Hoffer
49. Do anything, save to lie down and die!
- Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
50. Fear makes strangers of people who would be friends.
- Shirley Maclaine
51. It is better by noble boldness to run the risk of being subject to half of the evils we anticipate than to remain in cowardly listlessness for fear of what might happen.
- Herodotus, The Histories
52. I know that life is a doorway to eternity, and yet my heart so often gets lost in petty anxieties. It forgets the great way home that lies before it.
- Sophie Scholl
53. Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don't dare express themselves as we did.
- Sophie Scholl
54. If your enemy is hungry, feed him;
if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.
- Anonymous, Holy Bible: King James Version
55. We ought to face our destiny with courage.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
56. If you don't know how to pronounce a word, say it loud! (William Strunk) ... Why compound ignorance with inaudibility?
- E.B. White, The Elements of Style
57. You might, from your appearance, be the wife of Lucifer, said Miss Pross, in her breathing. Nevertheless, you shall not get the better of me. I am an Englishwoman.
- Charles Dickens
58. Sooner or later even the fastest runners have to stand and fight.
- Stephen King
59. To look at something as though we had never seen it before requires great courage.
- Henri Matisse
60. Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.
- Albert Camus
61. Do I dare Disturb the universe?
- T.S. Eliot
62. You make all kinds of mistakes, but as long as you are generous and true and also fierce, you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her.
- Winston S. Churchill
63. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.
- Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
64. If I charge, follow me. If I retreat, kill me. If I die, revenge me.
- U.S. Marine Corps
65. Face your fears or they will climb over your back.
- Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune
66. Man conquers the world by conquering himself.
- Zeno of Citium
67. Those who can truly be accounted brave are those who best know the meaning of what is sweet in life and what is terrible, and then go out, undeterred, to meet what is to come.
- Pericles
68. The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.
- Arthur Miller
69. Courage is the thing. All goes if courage goes.
- J.M. Barrie
Thank you for reading.
If you found this list useful, please share this with your friends and family.
There are 200+ guides to succeeding in business, career and personal life in The Success Manual. Get the pdf ebook for $12 only.