Courage quotes

Do not wait; the time will never be 'just right.' Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along.

No matter what happens, always be yourself!

Take a chance! All life is a chance. The man who goes farthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare.

Someone's opinion of you does not have to become your reality.

Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears.

If you put yourself in a position where you have to stretch outside your comfort zone, then you are forced to expand your consciousness.

All you need is the plan, the road map, and the courage to press on to your destination.

If you put off everything till you're sure of it, you'll get nothing done.

Everything you want is on the other side of fear.

Set a goal to achieve something that is so big, so exhilarating that it excites you and scares you at the same time.

Faith and fear both demand you believe in something you cannot see. You choose!

Your excuses are seducers, your fears are liars and your doubts are thieves.

If you have an instinct to act on a goal, you must physically move within 5 seconds or your brain will kill it.

Vulnerability is not weakness; it's our greatest measure of courage.

Avoidance will make you feel less vulnerable in the short run, but it will never make you less afraid.

We have to belong to ourselves as much as we need to belong to others. Any belonging that asks us to betray ourselves is not true belonging.

Shame hates to have words wrapped around it. If we talk about it, it loses its grip on us.

Owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing we'll ever do.

In a crowded marketplace, fitting in is a failure.

What we fear doing most is usually what we most need to do.

A person's success in life can usually be measured by the number of uncomfortable conversations he or she is willing to have.

Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.

Stand with anybody that stands right. Stand with him while he is right and part with him when he goes wrong.

We are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.

There is not a truth existing which I fear or would wish unknown to the whole world.

It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much.

We cannot avoid meeting great issues. All that we can determine for ourselves is whether we shall meet them well or ill.

We shall make mistakes; and if we let these mistakes frighten us from our work we shall show ourselves weaklings.

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.

You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

The purpose of life... is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.

Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog.

America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand.

Let us renew our determination, our courage, and our strength. And let us renew our faith and our hope.

Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it and to work for it and to fight for it.

Do not ever let anyone make you feel like you don't matter, or like you don't have a place in our American story, because you do.

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.

We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'

Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities, because, as has been said, 'it is the quality which guarantees all others.'

I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.

Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good.

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

The time is always right to do what's right.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

I would unite with anybody to do right; and with nobody to do wrong.

I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my own abhorrence.

I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say; I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.

I had crossed the line of which I had so long been dreaming. I was free; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom.

The only tired I was, was tired of giving in.

I have learned over the years that when one's mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear.

I did not get on the bus to get arrested. I got on the bus to go home.

Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.

We may not have chosen the time, but the time has chosen us.

Woman must not depend upon the protection of man, but must be taught to protect herself.

Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.

If you just set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything, wouldn't you, at any time? And you would achieve nothing!

Dissents speak to a future age.

We realise the importance of light when we see darkness. We realise the importance of our voice when we are silenced.

Courage is the price that Life exacts for granting peace.

Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others.

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.

Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character.

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.

In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.

Obstacles cannot crush me. Every obstacle yields to stern resolve.

The chief penalty is to be governed by someone worse if a man will not himself hold office and rule.

It would be better for me that multitudes of men should disagree with me rather than that I, being one, should be out of harmony with myself.

When you have faults, do not fear to abandon them.

We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.

It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, but because we do not dare, things are difficult.

For it is not death or pain that is to be feared, but the fear of pain or death.

The lion who breaks the enemy's ranks is a minor hero compared to the lion who overcomes himself.

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.

Man is free at the instant he wants to be.

What does not kill me, makes me stronger.

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms, to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.

We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful.

All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.

Courage is the main quality of leadership, in my opinion, no matter where it is exercised.

If you absolutely can't tolerate critics, then don't do anything new or interesting.

I knew that if I failed I wouldn't regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying.

To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it's going to work, it's not an experiment.

Screw it, let's do it.

Don't be intimidated by what you don't know. That can be your greatest strength and ensure that you do things differently from everyone else.

Failure for me became not trying, versus the outcome.

What would you do if you weren't afraid?

If we start acknowledging what the real issues are, we can solve them. It's not that hard.

Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom.

Aerodynamically, the bumblebee shouldn't be able to fly, but the bumblebee doesn't know it so it goes on flying anyway.

The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud.

Success is often achieved by those who don't know that failure is inevitable.

The cowards never started and the weak died along the way. That leaves us, ladies and gentlemen. Us.

Have faith in yourself, but also have faith in faith.

An entrepreneur is someone who will jump off a cliff and assemble an airplane on the way down.

Fearlessness is like a muscle. I know from my own life that the more I exercise it, the more natural it becomes to not let my fears run me.

You are neither right nor wrong because the crowd disagrees with you. You are right because your data and reasoning are right.

The sidelines are not where you want to live your life. The world needs you in the arena.

Growth and comfort do not coexist.

When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.

Develop enough courage so that you can stand up for yourself and then stand up for somebody else.

Without courage we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.

If we are bold, love strikes away the chains of fear from our souls.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.

Our doubts are traitors, And make us lose the good we oft might win, By fearing to attempt.

But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

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

It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.

It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case, you fail by default.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me.

We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.

Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

It's a lack of faith that makes people afraid of meeting challenges, and I believe in myself.

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.

I can accept failure. Everyone fails at something. But I can't accept not trying.

Limits, like fears, are often just an illusion.

You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.

Pressure is a privilege.

If you hear a voice within you saying, 'You are not a painter,' then by all means paint, boy, and that voice will be silenced, but only by working.

They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.

I know how it looks. But just start. Nothing is insurmountable.