Quotes About Heroic

We struggle with, agonize over and bluster heroically about the great questions of life when the answers to most of these lie hidden in our attitude toward the thousand minor details of each day.

In Puritan thinking, the Christian life was a heroic venture, requiring a full quota of energy.

The crisis of modern society is precisely that the youth no longer feel heroic in the plan for action that their culture has set up. They don't believe it is empirically true to the problems of their lives and times.

This penetrating vocabulary of initiatory acts, the infectiousness of the unconflicted person, priority magic, and so on allows us to understand more subtly the dynamics of group sadism, the utter equanimity with which groups kill. It is not just that father permits it or orders it. It is more: the magical heroic transformation of the world and of oneself. This is the illusion that man craves, as Freud said, and that makes the central person so effective a vehicle for group emotion.

This is the uniquely human need, what man everywhere is really all about—each person's need to be an object of primary value, a heroic contributor to world-life—the heroic contributor to the destiny of man.

When Norman O. Brown said that Western society since Newton, no matter how scientific or secular it claims to be, is still as religious as any other, this is what he meant: civilized society is a hopeful belief and protest that science, money and goods make man count for more than any other animal. In this sense everything that man does is religious and heroic, and yet in danger of being fictitious and fallible.

Neurosis is today a widespread problem because of the disappearance of convincing dramas of heroic apotheosis of man. The subject is summed up succinctly in Pinel's famous observation on how the Salpetriere mental hospital got cleared out at the time of the French Revolution. All the neurotics found a ready-made drama of self-transcending action and heroic identity. It was as simple as that.

His Raskolnikov eyes, like dead coals, were altogether of too fine cast – speaking too much blighted and heroic romanticism – for a poor shivering wretch such as himself.

Not everyone is born to fulfill an heroic role. The only realistic ambition is to live in the present. And sometimes, quite often in fact, this is more than enough to keep one busy. Time, which was once squandered, must now be given over to the actual, the possible, and perhaps that evanescent hope of a good outcome which never deserts one, and which should never be abandoned.

I think for some reason we're conditioned in movies that the protagonist must be heroic or redeemable in some way, whereas in theater, that's not a necessary.

The Catholic Church's job is to call people to sanctity and to equip them for living saintly lives. Its mission is not to produce nice people, or people with hearts of gold, or people with good intentions; its mission is to produce saints, people of heroic virtue… To dial down the demands because they are hard, and most people have a hard time realizing them, is to compromise the very meaning and purpose of the Church.

We struggle with, agonize over and bluster heroically about the great questions of life when the answers to most of these lie hidden in our attitude toward the thousand minor details of each day.

Indeed, the idea that doubt can be heroic, if it is locked into a structure as grand as that of the paintings of Cezanne's old age, is one of the keys to our century. A touchstone of modernity itself.

He made the mistake of booking first-class passage on the maiden voyage of the Titanic. When that liner struck an iceberg, the crew asked him, because of his sailing expertise, to row a lifeboat full of passengers to safety. He was an honorable man—the president of the Standard Chemical Company and a major in the Queen's Own Rifles—and he was doing a heroic deed.

These selfless warriors of the Revolution and sages of the Constitutional Convention had been forced to descend from their Olympian heights and adjust to a rougher world of everyday politics, where they cultivated their own interests and tried to capitalize on their former glory. In consequence, the founding fathers all appear to us in two guises: as both sublime and ordinary, selfless and selfish, heroic and humdrum

In Michelangelo was realized the grandeur of Italy struggling vainly against crushing oppression. He expressed that which was highest in it, reflecting the loftiest side of its idealism mingled with deep pessimism in his survey over life; for, wrapped in austerity, he saw mankind in heroic terms of sadness.

Titian, who painted the living man of action, the man of parts, susceptible alike to the appreciation of ideal beauty and heroic impulse, but guided withal by expediency, reflected this more practical aspect of life. In his portraiture he expressed the statecraft for which Italians found opportunity beyond the Alps, since in Italy it was denied them; and Titian found even Venice too narrow for the scope of his art.

He plants his feet stubbornly, adopting what he must think is an heroic post. He's just begging for a pigeon to fly by and relieve itself.

being a good and reliable friend was pretty heroic when it came down to it.

She'd taken some anthropology courses, because they'd seemed interesting, so she knew the dynamics of sexual instincts. That had to be it. Women responded to strong, powerful, or heroic men. In caveman days, that had meant higher chances of survival. Women didn't have to do that now, but the old instincts remained; how else could one explain the allure of Donald Trump for so many women?

We must be prepared to make the same heroic sacrifices for the cause of peace that we make ungrudgingly for the cause of war.

God's the reason for everything noble and fine and heroic.

Exultante ante el pensamiento de que se hallaba solo, enzarzado en una lucha heroica contra el orden de las cosas; animado por la embriagadora conciencia de su significación e importancia individual.

He learned from the Greek poets "not to expect too much from life; not to dream of a chimerical bliss, ... but to do his duty, without expecting to be rewarded ..., to cultivate his friends and love his country even to the point of self sacrifice." From ancient writers he learned the possibility of courageous resignation, and under their inspiration he worked out for himself a program which was little short of the heroic.