Motivational Quotes

Heroes and heroism

What is a society without a heroic dimension?

- Baudrillard, Jean

Best Quotes about Heroes and heroism

If we are marked to die, we are enough to do our country loss; and if to live, the fewer men, the greater share of honor.

Shakespeare, William

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

The hero draws inspiration from the virtue of his ancestors.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Carlyle, Thomas

A hero is someone we can admire without apology.

Kelley, Kitty

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

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

Paul, Jean

No man is a hero to his valet. This is not because the hero is no hero, but because the valet is a valet.

Hegel, Georg

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.

10.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

11.

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

Proverb, English

12.

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

13.

The paper tiger hero, James Bond, offering the whites a triumphant image of themselves, is saying what many whites want desperately to hear reaffirmed: I am still the White Man, lord of the land, licensed to kill, and the world is still an empire at my feet.

Cleaver, Eldridge

14.

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

15.

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

Rogers, Will

16.

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

Rogers, Will

17.

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.

18.

The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one's self a fool; the truest heroism is to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to be resisted, and when it be obeyed.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel

19.

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

Mencken, H. L.

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Miller, Henry

24.

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

25.

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

26.

One murder makes a villain, millions often a hero.

Porteous, Bishop

27.

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

28.

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

29.

It doesn't take a hero to order men into battle. It takes a hero to be one of those men who goes into battle.

Schwarzkopf, Norman

30.

A hero is someone right who doesn't change.

Foreman, George

31.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

32.

Had we lived I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale.

Scott, Robert Falcon

33.

What is a hero without love for mankind.

Lessing, Doris

34.

The more characteristic American hero in the earlier day, and the more beloved type at all times, was not the hustler but the whittler.

Sullivan, Mark

35.

To have no heroes is to have no aspiration, to live on the momentum of the past, to be thrown back upon routine, sensuality, and the narrow self.

Cooley, Charles Horton

36.

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

Hegel, Georg

37.

Aspire rather to be a hero than merely appear one.

Gracian, Baltasar

38.

There are heroes in evil as well as in good.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

39.

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

Thompson, Roy

40.

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

Rogers, Will

41.

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.

42.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

43.

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

44.

They wouldn't be heroes if they were infallible, in fact they wouldn't be heroes if they weren't miserable wretched dogs, the pariahs of the earth, besides which the only reason to build up an idol is to tear it down again.

Bangs, Lester

45.

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

46.

True heroism consists in being superior to the ills of life, in whatever shape they may challenge us to combat.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

47.

My heroes are and were my parents. I can't see having anyone else as my heroes.

Jordan, Michael

48.

Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes.

Brecht, Bertolt

49.

The idol of today pushes the hero of yesterday out of our recollection; and will, in turn, be supplanted by his successor of tomorrow.