Motivational Quotes

Heroes and heroism

You lived too long, we have supped full with heroes, they waste their deaths on us.

- Andrews, C. D.

Best Quotes about Heroes and heroism

Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation.

Mailer, Norman

The great destroyers of nations and men are comfort, plenty and security. A coward gets scared and quits. A hero gets scared, but still goes on.

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty, 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.

Churchill, Winston

There are heroes in evil as well as in good.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

Once the state has been founded, there can no longer be any heroes. They come on the scene only in uncivilized conditions.

Hegel, Georg

Sometimes, when one person is missing, the whole world seems depopulated.

Lamartine, Alphonse De

I offer neither pay, nor quarters, nor food; I offer only hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles and death. Let him who loves his country with his heart, and not merely with his lips, follow me.

Garibaldi, Giuseppe

It's true that heroes are inspiring, but mustn't they also do some rescuing if they are to be worthy of their name? Would Wonder Woman matter if she only sent commiserating telegrams to the distressed?

Winterson, Jeanette

What is a hero without love for mankind.

Lessing, Doris

10.

A hero is someone right who doesn't change.

Foreman, George

11.

No heroine can create a hero through love of one, but she can give birth to one.

Paul, Jean

12.

The fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them.

Genet, Jean

13.

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid... He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.

Chandler, Raymond

14.

All our lives we fought against exalting the individual, against the elevation of the single person, and long ago we were over and done with the business of a hero, and here it comes up again: the glorification of one personality. This is not good at all. I am just like everybody else.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

15.

Bardot, Byron, Hitler, Hemingway, Monroe, Sade: we do not require our heroes to be subtle, just to be big. Then we can depend on someone to make them subtle.

Enright, D. J.

16.

Now stiff on a pillar with a phallic air nelson stylites in Trafalgar square reminds the British what once they were.

Durrell, Lawrence

17.

One murder makes a villain, millions often a hero.

Porteous, Bishop

18.

The opportunities for heroism are limited in this kind of world: the most people can do is sometimes not to be as weak as they've been at other times.

Wilson, Angus

19.

One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.

Sarton, May

20.

Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes.

Brecht, Bertolt

21.

Aspire rather to be a hero than merely appear one.

Gracian, Baltasar

22.

What makes a hero truly great is that they never despair.

Thompson, Roy

23.

The prudent see only the difficulties, the bold only the advantages, of a great enterprise; the hero sees both; diminishes the former and makes the latter preponderate, and so conquers.

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

24.

Heroes are created by popular demand, sometimes out of the scantiest materials.

Johnson, Gerald W.

25.

You lived too long, we have supped full with heroes, they waste their deaths on us.

Andrews, C. D.

26.

Heroes are not known by the loftiness of their carriage; the greatest braggarts are generally the merest cowards.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

27.

The ordinary man is involved in action, the hero acts. An immense difference.

Miller, Henry

28.

The hero is one who kindles a great light in the world, who sets up blazing torches in the dark streets of life for men to see by.

Adler, Felix

29.

We can't all be heroes, because somebody has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by.

Rogers, Will

30.

What is our task? To make Britain a fit country for heroes to live in.

George, David Lloyd

31.

How many famous and high-spirited heroes have lived a day too long?

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

32.

What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes --ah, they have all the necessary leisure.

Huxley, Aldous

33.

We relish news of our heroes, forgetting that we are extraordinary to somebody too.

Hayes, Helen

34.

A man can be a hero if he is a scientist, or a soldier, or a drug addict, or a disc jockey, or a crummy mediocre politician. A man can be a hero because he suffers and despairs; or because he thinks logically and analytically; or because he is sensitive; or because he is cruel. Wealth establishes a man as a hero, and so does poverty. Virtually any circumstance in a man's life will make him a hero to some group of people and has a mythic rendering in the culture -- in literature, art, theater, or the daily newspapers.

Dworkin, Andrea

35.

The hero draws inspiration from the virtue of his ancestors.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

36.

The legacy of heroes is the memory of a great name and the inheritance of a great example.

Disraeli, Benjamin

37.

Mankind's common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism. In heroism, we feel, life's supreme mystery is hidden. We tolerate no one who has no capacity whatever for it in any direction. On the other hand, no matter what a man's frailties otherwise may be, if he be willing to risk death, and still more if he suffer it heroically, in the service he has chosen, the fact consecrates him forever.

James, William

38.

The world's battlefields have been in the heart chiefly; more heroism has been displayed in the household and the closet, than on the most memorable battlefields in history.

Beecher, Henry Ward

39.

Being a hero is about the shortest lived profession on earth.

Rogers, Will

40.

In our world of big names, curiously, our true heroes tend to be anonymous. In this life of illusion and quasi-illusion, the person of solid virtues who can be admired for something more substantial than his well-knownness often proves to be the unsung hero: the teacher, the nurse, the mother, the honest cop, the hard worker at lonely, underpaid, unglamorous, unpublicized jobs.

Boorstin, Daniel J.

41.

A boy doesn't have to go to war to be a hero; he can say he doesn't like pie when he sees there isn't enough to go around.

Howe, Edgar Watson

42.

Listen, my friend, there are two races of beings. The masses teeming and happy --common clay, if you like --eating, breeding, working, counting their pennies; people who just live; ordinary people; people you can't imagine dead. And then there are the others --the noble ones, the heroes. The ones you can quite well imagine lying shot, pale and tragic; one minute triumphant with a guard of honor, and the next being marched away between two gendarmes.

Anouilh, Jean

43.

The main thing about being a hero is to know when to die.

Rogers, Will

44.

What is a society without a heroic dimension?

Baudrillard, Jean

45.

The poetry of heroism appeals irresistibly to those who don't go to a war, and even more to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy. It's always so.

Celine, Louis-Ferdinand

46.

A hero is a man who is afraid to run away.

Proverb, English

47.

In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.

Mencken, H. L.

48.

Heroism is the divine relation which, in all times, unites a great man to other men.

Carlyle, Thomas

49.

As a rule, all heroism is due to a lack of reflection, and thus it is necessary to maintain a mass of imbeciles. If they once understand themselves the ruling men will be lost.

Renan, Ernest

50.

It is said, that no one is a hero to their butler. The reason is, that it requires a hero to recognize a hero. The butler, however, will probably know well how to estimate his equals.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von