Quotes About Heroism

To encounter 'Beowulf' is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in there.

September 11th has produced only miniature heroes because our culture has freed itself from many of the old, dangerous, elitist fantasies of heroism... But in so doing, we have not only tamed and diminished heroes. We have risked taming and diminishing ourselves.

A modern hero is very ambiguous. I went through some very rough times in Czechoslovakia - the occupation by the Germans at the end of the war. We had people going against their tanks with brooms. Are they nuts, or are they heroes?

On the TV, some poor Indian has just died hauling Fitzcarraldo's boat over the mountain. The Indian's friends are gathered around his body, but Fitz is screaming for them to keep pulling his boat. He's the hero of the story and he's completely nuts. This isn't going to have a happy ending.

One need not fight every battle, or die in the struggle, to be a hero.

Heroes are heroes precisely because they are willing to do what everyone else won't—oppose the popular voice. But we will know what you have done. And in your heart, so will you. And that is more than heroic. It is noble.

Someday you may be celebrated, but it might not be in your lifetime. Heroes are heroes precisely because they are willing to do what everyone else won't—oppose the popular voice.

To stand up on a stage alone with an acoustic guitar requires bravery bordering on heroism. Bordering on insanity.

Wow. What'd he do to deserve that? Rescue orphans from a burning building? If so, you might want to make sure he didn't set the building on fire in the first place.

RAMCHARITMANAS

Heroism' often consists in keeping your head in an emergency and doing the best you can with what you have instead of panicking and being shot in the tail. People who fight this way win more battles than do intentional heroes; a glory hound often throws away the lives of his mates as well as his own.

contrary to some opinions, it is better to be a dead hero than a live louse. Dying is messy and inconvenient but even a louse dies someday no matter what he will do to stay alive and he is forever having to explain his choice.

Robert A. Heinlein

Joyce announced that he did not believe in heroes, and Bloom is no hero: just an ordinary decent man. There are a million like him in any large city: Joyce was merely the first to put him in a novel, with biological functions and timid courage unglamorized and uncensored.

That frail and stooped old man is Bud Day. That is Misty 1.

yet love can move people to act in unexpected ways and move them to overcome the most daunting obstacles with startling heroism

Ben presto si sarebbe ritrovato adulto. E allora non ci sarebbe stato modo di tornare indietro, perché l'essere adulto era qualcosa di simile a ciò che suo padre una volta aveva detto a proposito dell'essere un eroe di guerra. Quando si diventa eroe, si muore eroe.

Unexpected Elizabeth wasn't falling into his arms as he'd anticipated, even after he had acted heroic and been valiantly injured. Perhaps he had lost her.

True religion comes not front the teaching of men or the reading of books; it is the awakening of the spirit within us, consequent upon pure and heroic action.

Heroism, self-denial, and magnanimity, in all instances where they do not spring from a principle of religion, are but splendid altars on which we sacrifice one kind of self-love to another.

There's nothing romantic, nothing grand, nothing heroic, nothing brave, nothing like that about drinking. It's a real coward's death.

We are passing through an unheroic phase of history when the man who has escaped passive conformism and follows the voice of his own conscience is a hero.

If the concept of the hero is a physical one, then, just as Alexander the Great acquired heroic stature by modeling himself on Achilles, the conditions necessary for becoming a hero must be both a ban on originality and a true faithfulness to a classical model; unlike the words of a genius, the words of a hero must be selected as the most impressive and noble from among ready-made concepts.

We live in an age in which there is no heroic death.