Quotes About Courage

Brave young American men climbed the rugged slopes of Korean mountains and fought in homesickness and desperate weariness for the sake of a people strange to them and for reasons they scarcely understood, even when they yielded up their lives. With such noble impulse and final sacrifice, let the past be forgot, except for what it teaches for the future.

I know that if i could imbue her with a superpower, it would be the ability to withstand the pressures of the cultures around her, to be her own woman despite the potential costs: i would give her the courage of her convictions

So even if the hot loneliness is there, and for 1.6 seconds we sit with that restlessness when yesterday we couldn't sit for even one, that's the journey of the warrior. (68)

No one ever tells us to stop running away from fear...the advice we usually get is to sweeten it up, smooth it over, take a pill, or distract ourselves, but by all means make it go away. (5)

Rejoicing in ordinary things is not sentimental or trite. It actually takes guts. Each time we drop our complaints and allow everyday good fortune to inspire us, we enter the warrior's world.

Trying to run away is never the answer to being a fully human. Running away from the immediacy of our experience is like preferring death to life.

None of us is ever OK, but we all get through everything just fine.

The essence of bravery is being without self-deception.

we can let the circumstances of our lives harden us so that we become increasingly resentful and afraid, or we can let them soften us and make us kinder and more open to what scares us. We always have this choice.

Patience is not learned in safety.

Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.

Compassion practice is daring. It involves learning to relax and allow ourselves to move gently toward what scares us. The trick to doing this is to stay with emotional distress without tightening into aversion, to let fear soften us rather than harden into resistance.

learning how to fail will help us more than anything else in life

The way to dissolve our resistance to life is to meet it face-to-face.

The essence of life is that it's challenging.

However, no matter what the size, color, or shape is, the point is still to lean toward the discomfort of life and see it clearly rather than to protect ourselves from it.

Rejoicing in ordinary things is not sentimental or trite. It actually takes guts.

Each day, we're given many opportunities to open up or shut down. The most precious opportunity presents itself when we come to the place where we think we can't handle whatever is happening. It's too much. It's gone too far. We feel bad about ourselves. There's no way we can manipulate the situation to make ourselves come out looking good. No matter how hard we try, it just won't work. Basically, life has just nailed us.

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." —Samuel Beckett

the point is still to lean toward the discomfort of life and see it clearly rather than to protect ourselves from it.

I take refuge in the Buddha," that means I take refuge in the courage and the potential of fearlessness, of removing all the armor that covers this awakeness of mine. I am awake; I will spend my life taking this armor off. Nobody else can take it off because nobody else knows where all the little locks are, nobody else knows where it's sewed up tight, where it's going to take a lot of work to get that particular iron thread untied.

And that can never be a mistake--to fly instead of staying in the nest with all the poop and everything that's in there.

we can let the circumstances of our lives harden us so that we become increasingly resentful and afraid, or we can let them soften us and make us kinder and more open to what scares us.

We can use our difficulties and problems to awaken our hearts.