Quotes About Courage

Søren Kierkegaard: «Atreverse es perderse un instante, no atreverse es perderse para siempre».

sociales, la envidia y la cobardía. Si esos rebaños se compusieran de bestias corajudas lo hubieran hecho pedazos todo. Creer en el montón es creer que se puede tocar la luna con la mano. Vea lo que le pasó a Lenin con el campesino ruso. Pero ya está todo organizado y no cabe otra cosa

cuestión de tiempo y audacia, pero cuando se den cuenta que el espíritu se les hunde en la letrina de esta civilización, antes de ahogarse van a torcer el camino. Lo que hay es que el hombre no ha reparado que está enfermo de cobardía y de cristianismo.

Rajá turrito, rajá

I decided to tell the truth even if it meant being pointed at.

Le daría el consejo que nos dábamos los jóvenes infrarrealistas en México. Cuando teníamos 20, 21 años, teníamos un grupo poético, y éramos jóvenes, mal educados y valientes. Nos decíamos: vivir mucho, leer mucho y follar mucho".

Only great challenges make it worthwhile to pack up and move all one's books.

Exile is courage. True exile is the true measure of each writer.

Of what is lost, irretrievably lost, all I wish to recover is the daily availability of my writing, lines capable of grasping me by the hair and lifting me up when I'm at the end of my strength. (Significant, said the foreigner.) Odes to the human and the divine. Let my writing be like the verses of by Leopardi that Daniel Biga recited on a Nordic bridge to gird himself with courage.

La literatura se parece mucho a la pelea de los samuráis, pero un samurái no pelea contra otro samurái: pelea contra un monstruo. Generalmente sabe, además, que va a ser derrotado. Tener el valor, sabiendo previamente que vas a ser derrotado, y salir a pelear: eso es la literatura.

the borders he respected were the borders of dreams, the misty borders of love and indifference, the borders of courage and fear, the golden borders of ethics.

Posthumous: It sounds like the name of a Roman gladiator, an unconquered gladiator. At least that's what poor Posthumous would like to believe. It gives him courage.

Los alumnos de Almafitano aprendieron...] Que la principal enseñanza de la literatura era la valentía, una valentía rara, como un pozo de piedra en medio de un paisaje lacustre, una valentía semejante a un torbellino y a un espejo. Que no era más cómodo leer que escribir. Que leyendo se aprendía a dudar y a recordar. Que la memoria era el amor.

I wrote this book for the ghosts, who, because they're outside of time, are the only ones with time. After the last rereading (just now), I realize that time isn't the only thing that matters, time isn't the only source of terror. Pleasure can be terrifying too, and so can courage.

When they turned, Pelletier and Espinoza saw an older woman in a white blouse and black skirt, a woman with a figure like Marlene Dietrich, as Pelletier would say much later, a woman who despite her years was still as strong willed as ever, a woman who didn't cling to the edge of the abyss but plunged into it with curiosity and elegance. A woman who plunged into the abyss sitting down .

Leer es aprender a morir, pero también es aprender a ser feliz, a ser valiente.

Suddenly drawing courage from nowhere, he decided he was not going to die. Now or never, he thought, and began to swim back up. It seemed to take forever to reach the surface and then he could hardly manage to keep himself afloat, but he did. That afternoon he learnt to swim without arms, like an eel or a snake. In the current socio-political climate, he said to himself, committing suicide is absurd and redundant. Better to become an undercover poet.

These weren't comforting nights, much less pleasant ones, but Espinoza discovered two things that helped him mightily in the early days: he would never be a fiction writer, and, in his own way, he was brave.

quieren ver a los grandes maestros en sesiones de esgrima de entrenamiento, pero no quieren saber nada de los combates de verdad, en donde los grandes maestros luchan contra aquello, ese aquello que nos atemoriza a todos, ese aquello que acoquina y encacha, y hay sangre y heridas mortales y fetidez.

a woman who didn't cling to the edge of the abyss but plunged into it with curiosity and elegance.

a woman who despite her years was still as strong willed as ever, a woman who didn't cling to the edge of the abyss but plunged into it with curiosity and elegance. A woman who plunged into the abyss sitting down.

I have hope in children. In children and warriors. In children who fuck like children and warriors who fight like brave men.

Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

Yo soy de los que creen que el ser humano está condenado de antemano a la derrota, a la derrota sin apelaciones, pero que hay que salir y dar la pelea y darla, además, de la mejor forma posible, de cara y limpiamente, sin pedir cuartel (porque además no te lo darán) e intentar caer como un valiente, y que eso es nuestra victoria.