Motivational Quotes

Heroes and heroism

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

Best Quotes about Heroes and heroism

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

Proverb, English

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

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

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

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

George, David Lloyd

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

The hero draws inspiration from the virtue of his ancestors.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Johnson, Gerald W.

10.

One murder makes a villain, millions often a hero.

Porteous, Bishop

11.

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

Hegel, Georg

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

16.

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.

17.

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

Mencken, H. L.

18.

Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes.

Brecht, Bertolt

19.

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

Sarton, May

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Rogers, Will

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

You cannot be a hero without being a coward.

Shaw, George Bernard

28.

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

Durrell, Lawrence

29.

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

Horton, Doug

30.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

31.

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

32.

A hero is someone right who doesn't change.

Foreman, George

33.

Aspire rather to be a hero than merely appear one.

Gracian, Baltasar

34.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

35.

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

36.

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

Coolidge, Calvin

37.

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.

38.

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

39.

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

Paul, Jean

40.

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

41.

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

Miller, Henry

42.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

43.

A hero is someone we can admire without apology.

Kelley, Kitty

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

47.

There are heroes in evil as well as in good.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

48.

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

49.

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