Courage Quotes



I hope you enjoy this large collection of courage quotes. Learn the secrets of courage from some of the most famous and influential people in the world.

Courage Quotes Index

About Courage
Benefits of Courage
Building Blocks of Courage
Courage and Fear
Courage and Finances
Courage and Love
Courage and Perseverance
Courage Defined
Courage in Day to Day Life
Courage to Accept Yourself
Courage to Follow Your Intuition
Courage to Pursue Your Dreams
Humorous
Importance of Courage
Insightful
Inspirational
Jaded
Lack of Courage
Paradox of Courage
Potency of Courage
Rarity of Courage

About Courage

"There is nothing in the world so much admired as a man who knows how to bear unhappiness with courage."
~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca

"The more wit the less courage."
~ Thomas Fuller

"Courage is found in unlikely places."
~ J. R. R. Tolkien

"Courage, not compromise, brings the smile of God's approval."
~ Thomas S. Monson

"Courage without conscience is a wild beast."
~ Robert Green Ingersoll

"Determination, energy, and courage appear spontaneously when we care deeply about something. We take risks that are unimaginable in any other context."
~ Margaret J. Wheatley

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Benefits of Courage

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

"Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace."
~ Amelia Earhart

"Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties."
~ Erich Fromm

"One man scorned and covered with scars still strove with his last ounce of courage to reach the unreachable stars; and the world will be better for this."
~ Miguel de Cervantes

"There can be no failure to a man who has not lost his courage, his character, his self respect, or his self-confidence. He is still a King."
~ Orison Swett Marden

"Courage conquers all things: it even gives strength to the body."
~ Ovid

"Genius is talent set on fire by courage."
~ Henry Van Dyke

"The courage to imagine the otherwise is our greatest resource, adding color and suspense to all our life."
~ Daniel J. Boorstin

"Freedom is a system based on courage."
~ Charles Peguy

"I beg you take courage; the brave soul can mend even disaster."
~ Catherine II

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Building Blocks of Courage

"You cannot build character and courage by taking away a man's initiative and independence."
~ Abraham Lincoln

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Courage and Fear

"We gain strength, and courage, and confidence by each experience in which we really stop to look fear in the face... we must do that which we think we cannot."
~ Eleanor Roosevelt

"You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.'"
~ Eleanor Roosevelt

"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."
~ Nelson Mandela

"Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others."
~ Robert Louis Stevenson

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Courage and Finances

"In all realms of life it takes courage to stretch your limits, express your power, and fulfill your potential... it's no different in the financial realm."
~ Suze Orman

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Courage and Love

"My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return."
~ Maya Angelou

"Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage."
~ Lao Tzu

"You don't develop courage by being happy in your relationships everyday. You develop it by surviving difficult times and challenging adversity."
~ Epicurus

"To me, there is no greater act of courage than being the one who kisses first."
~ Janeane Garofalo

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Courage and Perseverance

"Courage means to keep working a relationship, to continue seeking solutions to difficult problems, and to stay focused during stressful periods."
~ Denis Waitley

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Courage Defined

"Courage is simply the willingness to be afraid and act anyway."
~ Robert Anthony

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

"Courage consists not in blindly overlooking danger, but in seeing it, and conquering it."
~ Jean Paul

"He is a man of courage who does not run away, but remains at his post and fights against the enemy."
~ Socrates

"Courage is grace under pressure."
~ Ernest Hemingway

"Courage is knowing what not to fear."
~ Plato

"Courage is a kind of salvation."
~ Plato

"Courage consists not in hazarding without fear; but being resolutely minded in a just cause."
~ Plutarch

"Perfect courage is to do without witnesses what one would be capable of doing with the world looking on."
~ Francois de La Rochefoucauld

"To persevere, trusting in what hopes he has, is courage in a man."
~ Euripides

"Courage is the capacity to confront what can be imagined."
~ Leo Rosten

"Courage - a perfect sensibility of the measure of danger, and a mental willingness to endure it."
~ William Tecumseh Sherman

"Courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair."
~ Rollo May

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Courage in Day to Day Life

"Sometimes even to live is an act of courage."
~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca

"To have courage for whatever comes in life - everything lies in that."
~ Saint Teresa of Avila

"The only courage that matters is the kind that gets you from one moment to the next."
~ Mignon McLaughlin

"Every day begins with an act of courage and hope: getting out of bed."
~ Mason Cooley

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Courage to Accept Yourself

"The courage to be is the courage to accept oneself, in spite of being unacceptable."
~ Paul Tillich

"I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody."
~ J. D. Salinger

"It is a blessed thing that in every age some one has had the individuality enough and courage enough to stand by his own convictions."
~ Robert Green Ingersoll

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Courage to Follow Your Intuition

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition."
~ Steve Jobs

"Often the difference between a successful man and a failure is not one's better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on his ideas, to take a calculated risk, and to act."
~ Maxwell Maltz

"Each person has inside a basic decency and goodness. If he listens to it and acts on it, he is giving a great deal of what it is the world needs most. It is not complicated but it takes courage. It takes courage for a person to listen to his own goodness and act on it."
~ Pablo Casals

"Two qualities are indispensable: first, an intellect that, even in the darkest hour, retains some glimmerings of the inner light which leads to truth; and second, the courage to follow this faint light wherever it may lead."
~ Karl Von Clausewitz

"It requires greater courage to preserve inner freedom, to move on in one's inward journey into new realms, than to stand defiantly for outer freedom. It is often easier to play the martyr, as it is to be rash in battle".
~ Rollo May

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Courage to Pursue Your Dreams

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

"It takes someone with a vision of the possibilities to attain new levels of experience. Someone with the courage to live his dreams."
~ Les Brown

"There is hope in dreams, imagination, and in the courage of those who wish to make those dreams a reality."
~ Jonas Salk

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Humorous

"Nothing gives us courage more readily than the desire to avoid looking like a damn fool."
~ Dean Koontz

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Importance of Courage

"Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities... because it is the quality which guarantees all others."
~ Winston Churchill

"Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others."
~ Aristotle

"You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor."
~ Aristotle

"Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can't practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage."
~ Maya Angelou

"One isn't necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can't be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest."
~ Maya Angelou

"Whether you be man or woman you will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor."
~ James Allen

"Courage is the greatest of all virtues, because if you haven't courage, you may not have an opportunity to use any of the others."
~ Samuel Johnson

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Insightful

"It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power."
~ Alan Cohen

"History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again."
~ Maya Angelou

"Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction."
~ John F. Kennedy

"The test of courage comes when we are in the minority. The test of tolerance comes when we are in the majority."
~ Ralph W. Sockman

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

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage."
~ Anais Nin

"Courage is very important. Like a muscle, it is strengthened by use."
~ Ruth Gordon

"Whatever enlarges hope will also exalt courage."
~ William Samuel Johnson

"Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear."
~ Umberto Eco

"A man of courage is also full of faith."
~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

"Just remaining quietly in the presence of God, listening to Him, being attentive to Him, requires a lot of courage and know-how."
~ Thomas Merton

"A lot of people do not muster the courage to live their dreams because they are afraid to die."
~ Les Brown

"Have the courage to act instead of react."
~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

"Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character had abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and courage which it contained."
~ John Stuart Mill

"The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully."
~ Thomas Carlyle

"He who loses wealth loses much; he who loses a friend loses more; but he that loses his courage loses all."
~ Miguel de Cervantes

"When God speaks, oftentimes His voice will call for an act of courage on our part."
~ Charles Stanley

"Without courage, wisdom bears no fruit."
~ Baltasar Gracian

"Courage can't see around corners but goes around them anyway."
~ Mignon McLaughlin

"The greatest test of courage on earth is to bear defeat without losing heart."
~ Robert Green Ingersoll

"Those who won our independence... valued liberty as an end and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty."
~ Louis D. Brandeis

"It is only necessary to have courage, for strength without self-confidence is useless."
~ Giacomo Casanova

"It takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried and succeeded."
~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh

"We need to find the courage to say NO to the things and people that are not serving us if we want to rediscover ourselves and live our lives with authenticity."
~ Barbara de Angelis

"To dare to live alone is the rarest courage; since there are many who had rather meet their bitterest enemy in the field, than their own hearts in their closet."
~ Charles Caleb Colton

"Physical courage, which despises all danger, will make a man brave in one way; and moral courage, which despises all opinion, will make a man brave in another."
~ Charles Caleb Colton

"The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity."
~ Rollo May

"He who knows no hardships will know no hardihood. He who faces no calamity will need no courage. Mysterious though it is, the characteristics in human nature which we love best grow in a soil with a strong mixture of troubles."
~ Harry Emerson Fosdick

"The secret to happiness is freedom... And the secret to freedom is courage."
~ Thucydides

"Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads."
~ Erica Jong

"Never undertake anything for which you wouldn't have the courage to ask the blessings of heaven."
~ Georg C. Lichtenberg

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Inspirational

"If you could get up the courage to begin, you have the courage to succeed."
~ David Viscott

"Then there is a still higher type of courage - the courage to brave pain, to live with it, to never let others know of it and to still find joy in life; to wake up in the morning with an enthusiasm for the day ahead."
~ Howard Cosell

"We must build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear."
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts."
~ Winston Churchill

"I hope America can also be the cultural leader of the world, and use this frontier spirit to lead and show others that we need courage to go places where we have not gone before."
~ Tadao Ando

"One man with courage is a majority."
~ Thomas Jefferson

"Mistakes are always forgivable, if one has the courage to admit them."
~ Bruce Lee

"The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself."
~ George Bernard Shaw

"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."
~ Reinhold Niebuhr

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

"You may not always have a comfortable life and you will not always be able to solve all of the world's problems at once but don't ever underestimate the importance you can have because history has shown us that courage can be contagious and hope can take on a life of its own."
~ Michelle Obama

"Suffering! We owe to it all that is good in us, all that gives value to life; we owe to it pity, we owe to it courage, we owe to it all the virtues."
~ Anatole France

"Success is not measured by what you accomplish, but by the opposition you have encountered, and the courage with which you have maintained the struggle against overwhelming odds."
~ Orison Swett Marden

"Courage and perseverance have a magical talisman, before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish into air."
~ John Quincy Adams

"The principles of living greatly include the capacity to face trouble with courage, disappointment with cheerfulness, and trial with humility."
~ Thomas S. Monson

"Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore."
~ Lord Chesterfield

"Courage is the ladder on which all the other virtues mount."
~ Clare Boothe Luce

"Real courage is when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what."
~ Harper Lee

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Jaded

"People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest."
~ Hermann Hesse

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Lack of Courage

"A great deal of talent is lost to the world for want of a little courage. Every day sends to their graves obscure men whose timidity prevented them from making a first effort."
~ Sydney Smith

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Paradox of Courage

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

"The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it."
~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

"Courage stands halfway between cowardice and rashness, one of which is a lack, the other an excess of courage."
~ Plutarch

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Potency of Courage

"Courage is contagious. When a brave man takes a stand, the spines of others are often stiffened."
~ Billy Graham

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Rarity of Courage

"How few there are who have courage enough to own their faults, or resolution enough to mend them."
~ Benjamin Franklin

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