Courage Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche

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

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

Theodore Roosevelt

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.

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.

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

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

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

The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.

G. K. Chesterton

All free peoples are deeply impressed by the courage and steadfastness of the Greek nation.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Courage is in the air in bracing whiffs
Better than all the stalemate an's and ifs.

The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their houses and farms are to be pillaged and destroyed, and themselves consigned to a state of wretchedness from which no human efforts will deliver them. The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army. Our cruel and unrelenting enemy leaves us only the choice of brave resistance, or the most abject submission. We have, therefore, to resolve to conquer or die.

George Washington

The way of the superior man is threefold, but I have not been able to attain it. The man of wisdom has no perplexities; the man of humanity has no worry; the man of courage has no fear.

Hope is the bedrock of this nation. The belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us, by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be.

The Soviet Union, as everybody who has the courage to face the fact knows, is run by a dictatorship as absolute as any other dictatorship in the world.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

There is a seed of courage hidden (often deeply, it is true) in the heart of the fattest and most timid hobbit, waiting for some final and desperate danger to make it grow.

J. R. R. Tolkien

I have never been more hopeful about America. And I ask you to sustain that hope. I'm not talking about blind optimism, the kind of hope that just ignores the enormity of the tasks ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. I'm not talking about the wishful idealism that allows us to just sit on the sidelines or shirk from a fight. I have always believed that hope is that stubborn thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us so long as we have the courage to keep reaching, to keep working, to keep fighting.

The three-o'-clock in the morning courage, which Bonaparte thought was the rarest.

Henry David Thoreau

Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities, because, as has been said, 'it is the quality which guarantees all others.'

Winston Churchill

I think if I had met him [Lenin] without knowing who he was, I should not have guessed that he was a great man; he struck me as too opinionated and narrowly orthodox. His strength comes, I imagine, from his honesty, courage, and unwavering faith—religious faith in the Marxian gospel, which takes the place of the Christian martyr's hopes of Paradise, except that it is less egotistical... I went to Russia a Communist; but contact with those who have no doubts has intensified a thousandfold my own doubts, not as to Communism in itself, but as to the wisdom of holding a creed so firmly that for its sake men are willing to inflict widespread misery.

Bertrand Russell