Quotes About Courage

I pray for the courage To walk naked At any age To wear red and purple, To be unladylike, Inappropriate, Scandalous and incorrect To the very end.

All movements need a few people who can't be fired.

The best way for us to cultivate fearlessness in our daughters and other young women is by example. If they see their mothers and other women in their lives going forward despite fear, they'll know it's possible.

Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as either one.

There is power in proximity. Get close to the problem you feel drawn to. Change the narrative. Stay hopeful. Be willing to do uncomfortable things.

Don't worry, honey," she said to me comfortingly, "it's important for someone who could play the game—and win—to say: 'The game isn't worth shit.'

If hard things ultimately have a purpose, then they aren't so hard anymore.

Laughter is a rescue.

Whatever you've imagined your limits of strength and daring to be, the strongest woman in the world can inspire you to go beyond them. That's what champions are for.

Childbirth is more admirable than conquest, more amazing than self-defense, and as courageous as either one. Yet one of the strongest, most thoughtful feminists I know still hides in one-piece bathing suits to conceal her two Cesarean scars. And one of the most hypocritical feminists I know (that is, one who loves feminism but dislikes women) had plastic surgery to remove the tiny scar that gave her face character.

Now when I'm asked with condescension why I don't drive, I just say: Beacause adventure starts the moment I leave my door.

Power can be taken but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.

But many of women's body scars have a very different context, and thus an emotional power all their own. Stretch marks and Cesarean incisions from giving birth are very different from accident, war, and fight scars. They evoke courage without violence, strength without cruelty, and even so, they're far more likely to be worn with diffidence than bragging. That gives them a moving, bittersweet power, like seeing a room where a very emotional event in our lives once took place.

Six years after that, I went to the White House with Wilma and watched as President Clinton and Hillary Clinton presented her with a Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor. As she stood there, strong, kind, and not at all intimidated by another chief of state, I was not the only one in the audience who thought, She could be president. I also thought, In a just country, she would be.

We've begun to raise daughters more like sons… but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.

Yet, I doubt he would have chosen such a risky life if he hadn't been fleeing an orderly one.

If I pressed and said, "But why didn't you leave? Why didn't you take my sister and go to New York?" she would say it didn't matter, that she was lucky to have my sister and me. If I pressed hard enough, she would add, "If I'd left, you never would have been born." I never had the courage to say: But you would have been born instead.

I don't know enough to be a feminist." Or even "I'm not smart enough to be a feminist." It breaks my heart.

Carolyn Heilbrun's

Revolutionary Petunias: Blooming Gloriously For its Self

Have great, secret, big, fat hopes for yourself.

Years ago I asked my friend, the great actress Ruth Gordon, to articulate in a few words the secret to her indomitable, unsinkable spirit. Her reply was a gift that became a mantra for me: "It takes courage. It takes believing in it. It takes work. It takes rising above it. It takes me liking you, and you liking me. It takes the dreaming soul of the human race that wants it to go right. Never stop dreaming. Think about it.

It is hard to give up what you know for what you don't know.

However far you go from here, you must carry me with you in your heart. If you are lonely, you must know that every hour I will be thinking of you. If you are among evil people, you must be like the lion, gathering your strength and awaiting your time. That time will come, and when it comes, you will come back to us.