Motivational Quotes

Heroes and heroism

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

Best Quotes about Heroes and heroism

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

Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes.

Brecht, Bertolt

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

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

Durrell, Lawrence

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

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

Children demand that their heroes should be freckleless, and easily believe them so: perhaps a first discovery to the contrary is less revolutionary shock to a passionate child than the threatened downfall of habitual beliefs which makes the world seem to totter for us in maturer life.

Eliot, George

What is a society without a heroic dimension?

Baudrillard, Jean

The hero draws inspiration from the virtue of his ancestors.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

10.

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

11.

What is a hero without love for mankind.

Lessing, Doris

12.

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

Johnson, Gerald W.

13.

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

14.

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.

15.

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

Miller, Henry

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

20.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

21.

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

Paul, Jean

22.

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.

23.

Chandler, Raymond

24.

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

Horton, Doug

25.

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

26.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

27.

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

28.

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

Proverb, English

29.

Most people aren't appreciated enough, and the bravest things we do in our lives are usually known only to ourselves. No one throws ticker tape on the man who chose to be faithful to his wife, on the lawyer who didn't take the drug money, or the daughter who held her tongue again and again. All this anonymous heroism.

Noonan, Peggy

30.

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

31.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

32.

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

33.

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

Thompson, Roy

34.

One murder makes a villain, millions often a hero.

Porteous, Bishop

35.

A hero is someone we can admire without apology.

Kelley, Kitty

36.

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

Rogers, Will

37.

Aspire rather to be a hero than merely appear one.

Gracian, Baltasar

38.

You cannot be a hero without being a coward.

Shaw, George Bernard

39.

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

Irving, Washington

40.

Heroism is not only in the man, but in the occasion.

Coolidge, Calvin

41.

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

Rogers, Will

42.

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

43.

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

44.

A hero is someone right who doesn't change.

Foreman, George

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Mencken, H. L.

48.

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

Rogers, Will

49.

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

50.

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