Quotes

Valor is stability, not of legs and arms, but of courage and the soul.
-Michel de Montaigne

Perfect courage means doing unwitnessed what we would be capable of with the world looking on.
-Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, 1678

A coward is a hero with a wife, kids, and a mortgage.
-Marvin Kitman

Sometimes the biggest act of courage is a small one.
-Lauren Raffo

Coward: One who, in a perilous emergency, thinks with his legs.
-Ambrose Bierce

Courage is to feel the daily daggers of relentless steel and keep on living.
-Douglas Malloch

Courage is fear holding on a minute longer.
-George Smith Patton

Look at hopelessness in the face and say: "We are simply not meant to be together." Hold courage's hand and walk away.
-Dodinsky

Courage ought to have eyes as well as arms.
-H.G. Bohn

For without belittling the courage with which men have died, we should not forget those acts of courage with which men have lived.
-John F. Kennedy

When we are afraid we ought not to occupy ourselves with endeavoring to prove that there is no danger, but in strengthening ourselves to go on in spite of the danger.
-Mark Rutherford

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.
-G.K. Chesterton

Fear and courage are brothers.
-Proverb

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.
-Ernest Hemingway, Men at War, 1942

Courage is the fear of being thought a coward.
-Horace Smith

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.
-C.S. Lewis

Courage can't see around corners, but goes around them anyway.
-Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Necessity does the work of courage.
-Nicholas Murray Butler

Valor is a gift. Those having it never know for sure if they have it till the test comes. And those having it in one test never know for sure if they will have it when the next test comes.
-Carl Sandburg

Courage is a peculiar kind of fear.
-Charles Kennedy

Courage is fear that has said its prayers.
-Dorothy Bernard

Courage is the power to let go of the familiar.
-Raymond Lindquist

Coward: A man in whom the instinct of self-preservation acts normally.
-Sultana Zoraya

In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.
-Mark Twain, Notebook, 1935

Courage is being afraid but going on anyhow.
-Dan Rather

Courage is knowing what not to fear.
-Plato

The courage of life is often a less dramatic spectacle than the courage of a final moment; but it is no less a magnificent mixture of triumph and tragedy.
-John F. Kennedy

If God wanted us to be brave, why did He give us legs?
-Marvin Kitman

Courage is tiny pieces of fear all glued together.
-Terri Guillemets

Courage is as often the outcome of despair as of hope; in the one case we have nothing to lose, in the other everything to gain.
-Diane de Poitiers

You can't test courage cautiously.
-Anne Dillard

Optimism is the foundation of courage.
-Nicholas Murray Butler

Courage is doing what you're afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you're scared.
-Edward Vernon Rickenbacker

Some have been thought brave because they were afraid to run away.
-Thomas Fuller

The only courage that matters is the kind that gets you from one moment to the next.
-Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

One man with courage makes a majority.
-Andrew Jackson

Courage is a kind of salvation.
-Plato

I'm not funny. What I am is brave.
-Lucille Ball

Courage is never to let your actions be influenced by your fears.
-Arthur Koestler

Courage is... the knowledge of how to fear what ought to be feared and how not to fear what ought not to be feared.
-David Ben-Gurion

To him that waits all things reveal themselves, provided that he has the courage not to deny, in the darkness, what he has seen in the light.
-Coventry Patmore

True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.
-Alfred North Whitehead

Courage is being scared to death... and saddling up anyway.
-John Wayne