courage is the first of all human qualities

Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all the others.

- Winston Churchill

Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you, you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising which tempt you to believe that your critics are right. To map out a course of action, and follow it to an end, requires some of the same courage which a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Courage is the best gift of all; courage stands before everything. It is what preserves our liberty, safety, life, and our homes and parents, our country and our children. Courage comprises all things: a person with courage has every blessing.

- Plautus

We must have courage to bet on our ideas, to take the calculated risk, and to act. Everyday living requires courage if life is to be effective and bring happiness.

- Maxwell Maltz

The world has no room for cowards. We must all be ready somehow to toil, to suffer, to die. And yours is not the less noble because no drum beats before you when you go out to your daily battlefields, and no crowds shout your coming when you return from your daily victory and defeat.

- Robert Louis Stevenson

One has to abandon altogether the search for security, and reach out to the risk of living with both arms. One has to embrace the world like a lover. One has to accept pain as a condition of existence. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing. One needs a will stubborn in conflict, but apt always to total acceptance of every consequence of living and dying.

- Morris L. West

The courage of life is often a less dramatic spectacle than the courage of a final moment; but it is no less than a magnificent mixture of triumph and tragedy. A person does what he or she must--in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures--and that is the basis of all human morality.

- John F. Kennedy

Courage is resistance to fear, not absence of it.

- Mark Twain

Perfect courage is to do unwitnessed what we should be capable of doing before all the world.

- La Rochefoucauld

I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting an idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.

- Harper Lee

The hero is no braver than an ordinary person, but he or she is brave five minutes longer.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.

- Anon

Last, but by no means least, courage--moral courage, the courage of one's convictions, the courage to see things through. The world is in a constant conspiracy against the brave. It's the age-old struggle--the roar of the crowd on one side and the voice of your conscience on the other.

- Douglas MacArthur

Courage and cowardice are antithetical. Courage is an inner resolution to go forward in spite of obstacles and frightening situations; cowardice is a submissive surrender to circumstance. Courage breeds creative self-affirmation; cowardice produces destructive self-abnegation. Courage faces fear and thereby masters it; cowardice represses fear and is thereby mastered by it. Courageous men never lose the zest for living even though their life situation is zestless; cowardly men, overwhelmed by the uncertainties of life, lose the will to live. We must constantly build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

I do not ask to walk smooth paths
Nor bear an easy load.
I pray for strength and fortitude
To climb the rock-strewn road.

Give me such courage I can scale
The hardest peaks alone,
And transform every stumbling block
Into a steppingstone.

- Gail Brook Burket


I looked more widely around me, I studied the lives of the masses of humanity, and I saw that, not two or three, or ten, but hundreds, thousands, millions, had so understood the meaning of life that they were able both to live and to die. All these people were well acquainted with the meaning of life and death, quietly labored, endured privation and suffering, lived and died, and saw in all this, not a vain, but a good thing.

- Leo Tolstoy

When you get in a tight place and everything goes against you,
till it seems you could not hold on a minute longer,
never give up then, for that is just the place and time
that the tide will turn.

- Harriet Beecher Stowe

This is the art of courage: to see things as they are and still believe that the victory lies not with those who avoid the bad, but those who taste, in living awareness, every drop of the good.

- Victoria Lincoln

It takes more courage to reveal insecurities than to hide them, more strength to relate to people than to dominate them, more "manhood" to abide by thought-out principles rather than blind reflex. Toughness is in the soul and spirit, not in muscles and an immature mind.

- Alex Karras