Motivational Quotes

Heroes and heroism

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

- Durrell, Lawrence

Best Quotes about Heroes and heroism

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.

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

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

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

One murder makes a villain, millions often a hero.

Porteous, Bishop

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

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

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

A hero is someone right who doesn't change.

Foreman, George

10.

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

Coolidge, Calvin

11.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

12.

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

Jordan, Michael

13.

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

14.

What is a society without a heroic dimension?

Baudrillard, Jean

15.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Durrell, Lawrence

21.

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

Mencken, H. L.

22.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

23.

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

Hayes, Helen

24.

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

George, David Lloyd

25.

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

26.

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

Andrews, C. D.

27.

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

28.

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

Horton, Doug

29.

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

30.

The hero draws inspiration from the virtue of his ancestors.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

38.

There are heroes in evil as well as in good.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

39.

A hero is someone we can admire without apology.

Kelley, Kitty

40.

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

Hegel, Georg

41.

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

Paul, Jean

42.

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

Rogers, Will

43.

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

Proverb, English

44.

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

Rogers, Will

45.

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

46.

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

Johnson, Gerald W.

47.

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

48.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

49.

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

50.

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