Quotes About Courage

For outlandish creatures like us, on our way to a heart, a brain, and courage, Bethlehem is not the end of our journey but only the beginning - not home but the place through which we must pass if ever we are to reach home at last.

Faith is stepping out into the unknown with nothing to guide us but a hand just beyond our grasp.

One life on this earth is all we get, whether it is enough or not enough, and the obvious conclusion would seem to be at the very least we are fools if we do not live it as fully and bravely and beautifully as we can.

The decisive war is the other one - to become fully human, which means to become compassionate, honest, brave. And this is a war against the darkness which no man fights alone.

I have spent uncounted hours of my life in such haggard waiting, crazy in my conviction that they would never come back at all because something unspeakable had happened to them the way I had learned as a child that unspeakable things happen. And it has taken me years to understand that what I feared most of all was perhaps less the disaster that might have befallen them than the disaster of being locked up in the dark of my own fear. The Cowardly Lion.

If the truth is worth telling, it is worth making a fool of yourself to tell.

I had as well be killed running as die standing

The soul that is within me no man can degrade.

The man who is right is a majority. He who has God and conscience on his side, has a majority against the universe.

Freedom is a road seldom traveled by the multitude.

The silver trump of freedom roused in my soul eternal wakefulness.

But I should be false in the earliest sentiments of my soul, if I suppressed the opinion. I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my own abhorrence.

My long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place; and I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact.

For my part, I should prefer death to hopeless bondage.

How do you feel, said a friend to me, when you are hooted and jeered on the street on account of your color? I feel as if an ass had kicked, but had hit nobody, was my answer.

The truth was, that he had not whipped me at all. I considered him as getting entirely the worst end of the bargain; for he had drawn no blood from me, but I had from him. The whole six months afterwards, that I spent with Mr. Covey, he never laid the weight of his finger upon me in anger. He would occasionally say, he didn't want to get hold of me again. No, thought I, you need not; for you will come off worse than you did before.

He was whipped oftener who was whipped easiest.

I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my own abhorrence. From my earliest recollection, I date the entertainment of a deep conviction that slavery would not always be able to hold me within its foul embrace.

A man's troubles are always half disposed of when he finds endurance the only alternative.

Our past was slavery. We cannot recur to it with any sense of complacency or composure. The history of it is a record of stripes, a revelation of agony. It is written in characters of blood. Its breath is a sigh, its voice a groan, and we turn from it with a shudder. The duty of to-day is to meet the questions that confront us with intelligence and courage. —Frederick Douglass, "The Nation's Problem

I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my own abhorrence

most successful one was that of tarring his fence all around; after which, if a slave was caught

I had reached the point, at which I was not afraid to die. This spirit made me a Freeman in fact, while I remained a slave in form,

and stature commanding and exact—in intellect richly endowed—in natural eloquence a prodigy—in soul manifestly created but a little lower than the angels—yet a slave, ay, a fugitive slave,—trembling for his safety, hardly daring to believe