Quotes About Courage

Fear holds us and binds us and keeps us from growing, Nicholas." Pug's voice took on an insistent quality. "It kills a small piece of us each day. It holds us to what we know and keeps us from what's possible, and it is our worst enemy. Fear doesn't announce itself; it's disguised, and it's subtle. It's choosing the safe course; most of us feel we have 'rational' reasons to avoid taking risks.

Raymond E. Feist

To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.

she was an army of one and was stronger than the invading force.

Every morning I had to force myself to leave the apartment, so dark and protected, its walls lined with books. I stared longingly at the few English titles scattered among them. No, I'd tell myself sternly, you will not sit in an apartment in Rome reading William James' Varieties of Religious Experience. Get out there and have some experiences for yourself, religious or otherwise. And I'd push myself out into the relentless noise and glare.

Sometimes the greatest gifts can be found in the darkest, deepest closets of the mind.

Still, even now, when a woman says something uncomfortable about male misconduct, she is routinely portrayed as delusional, a malicious conspirator, a pathological liar, a whiner who doesn't recognize it's all in fun, or all of the above.

Hope just means another world might be possible, not promise, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.

Your opponents would love you to believe that it's hopeless, that you have no power, that there's no reason to act, that you can't win. Hope is a gift you don't have to surrender, a power you don't have to throw away.

Go to hell, but keep moving once you get there, come out the other side.

Resistance is first of all a matter of principle and a way to live, to make yourself one small republic of unconquered spirit. You hope for results, but you don't depend on them.

I believe in hope as an act of defiance, or rather as the foundation for an ongoing series of acts of defiance, those acts necessary to bring about some of what we hope for while we live by principle in the meantime. There is no alternative, except surrender. And surrender not only abandons the future, it abandons the soul.

Hope locates itself in the premises that we don't know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.

I argued that you don't know if your actions are futile; that you don't have the memory of the future; that the future is indeed dark, which is the best thing it could be; and that, in the end, we always act in the dark.

Who drinks your tears, who has your wings, who hears your story?

What you imagine as overwhelming or terrifying while at leisure becomes something you can cope with when you must-there is no time for fear.

Never turn down an adventure without a really good reason.

It's important to say what hope is not: it is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine.

Fear of making mistakes can itself become a huge mistake, one that prevents you from living, for life is risky and anything less is already loss.

Not a few stories are sinking ships, and many of us go down with these ships even when the lifeboats are bobbing all around us.

There is no good answer to being a woman; the art may instead lie in how we refuse the question.

Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.

Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.

We often hear about heroes in disasters, but the window of time when acts of physical courage matter is often very brief, and those when generosity and empathy are more important to survival last for weeks, months, years.