Courage Quotes

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The time has come for the Church to take up the joyful call to mercy once more. It is time to return to the basics and to bear the weaknesses and struggles of our brothers and sisters. Mercy is the force that reawakens us to new life and instils in us the courage to look to the future with hope.

For the wise man delights in establishing his merit, the brave man likes to show his courage in action, the covetous man is quick at seizing advantages, and the stupid man has no fear of death.

What such a man needs is not courage but nerve control, cool headedness. This he can get only by practice.

Theodore Roosevelt

Through words he gave voice to the voiceless. Through deeds he gave courage to the faint of heart.

The courage of one's opinions is always a form of calculating cowardice in the eyes of the "other side.

By how much unexpected, by so much
We must awake endeavour for defence;
For courage mounteth with occasion.

William Shakespeare

There's nothing America can't handle if we actually look squarely at the problem. And this is work for all Americans, not just some. Not just whites. Not just blacks. If we want to honor the courage of those who marched that day, then all of us are called to possess their moral imagination. All of us will need to feel as they did the fierce urgency of now. All of us need to recognize as they did that change depends on our actions, on our attitudes, the things we teach our children. And if we make such an effort, no matter how hard it may sometimes seem, laws can be passed, and consciences can be stirred, and consensus can be built.

Every attainment, every step forward in knowledge, follows from courage, from hardness against oneself, from cleanliness in relation to oneself.

Friedrich Nietzsche

My prayer for you is that you come to understand and have the courage to answer Jesus' call to you with the simple word 'yes'.

Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage.

There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one's grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past.

G. K. Chesterton

It [the Channel] is a mere ditch, and will be crossed as soon as someone has the courage to attempt it.

Napoleon I of France

And freedom will win — not because it's inevitable, not because it is ordained, but because these basic human yearnings for dignity and justice and democracy do not go away. They can be suppressed. At times, they can be silenced, but they burn in every human heart in a place where no regime could ever reach, a light that no army can ever extinguish. And so long as free peoples summon the confidence and the courage and the will to defend the values that we cherish, then freedom will always be stronger and our ideas will always prevail no matter what.

For the sake of historical truth I must verify that only the Greeks, of all the adversaries who confronted us, fought with bold courage and highest disregard of death.

Courage, hard work, self-mastery, and intelligent effort are all essential to successful life.

Theodore Roosevelt

As regards moral courage, then, it is not so much that the public schools support it feebly, as that they suppress it firmly.

G. K. Chesterton

Even the pluckiest among us has but seldom the courage of what he really knows.

Friedrich Nietzsche

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.

The difficult thing, the glorious thing, was to be who you really were, even if that person was cruel or dangerous, particularly if cruel and dangerous. There was courage in not distinguishing the animal you happened to be. On the other hand, you had to avoid pretending to be more of an animal than you were: take that path, start exaggerating or faking and you became just another Cubby, just as much of a liar, a hypocrite

Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point.

Confession is an act of honesty and courage - an act of entrusting ourselves, beyond sin, to the mercy of a loving and forgiving God.

Pope John Paul II

Franklin's illness...gave him strength and courage he had not had before. He had to think out the fundamentals of living and learn the greatest of all lessons - infinite patience and never ending persistence.

Eleanor Roosevelt

There is a virtue, Simmias, which is named courage. Is not that a special attribute of the philosopher?... Again, there is temperance. Is not the calm, and control, and disdain of the passions which even the many call temperance, a quality belonging only to those who despise the body and live in philosophy?

... let a man be of good cheer about his soul, who has cast away the pleasures and ornaments of the body as alien to him, and rather hurtful in their effects, and has followed after the pleasures of knowledge in this life; who has adorned the soul in her own proper jewels, which are temperance, and justice, and courage, and nobility, and truth—in these arrayed she is ready to go on her journey to the world below, when her time comes. You, Simmias and Cebes, and all other men, will depart at some time or other. Me already, as the tragic poet would say, the voice of fate calls.

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

G. K. Chesterton