Motivational Quotes

Heroes and heroism

Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes.

- Brecht, Bertolt

Best Quotes about Heroes and heroism

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

Carlyle, Thomas

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

Sarton, May

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

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

Rogers, Will

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

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

Johnson, Gerald W.

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

10.

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

11.

Be your own hero, it's cheaper than a movie ticket.

Horton, Doug

12.

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

George, David Lloyd

13.

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

14.

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

Miller, Henry

15.

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.

16.

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

Proverb, English

17.

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

18.

A hero is someone we can admire without apology.

Kelley, Kitty

19.

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

Durrell, Lawrence

20.

What is a hero without love for mankind.

Lessing, Doris

21.

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

22.

A hero is someone right who doesn't change.

Foreman, George

23.

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

24.

One murder makes a villain, millions often a hero.

Porteous, Bishop

25.

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

26.

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

Andrews, C. D.

27.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

28.

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

29.

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

Paul, Jean

30.

What is a society without a heroic dimension?

Baudrillard, Jean

31.

The characteristic of genuine heroism is its persistency. All men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when you have resolved to be great, abide by yourself, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

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

33.

You cannot be a hero without being a coward.

Shaw, George Bernard

34.

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

35.

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

Hayes, Helen

36.

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

37.

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

Rogers, Will

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

The hero draws inspiration from the virtue of his ancestors.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

42.

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

43.

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

Jordan, Michael

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.

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

46.

There are heroes in evil as well as in good.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

47.

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

48.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

49.

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

50.

Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes.

Brecht, Bertolt