Motivational Quotes

Heroes and heroism

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

- Coolidge, Calvin

Best Quotes about Heroes and heroism

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

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

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

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

Horton, Doug

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

Carlyle, Thomas

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

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

Johnson, Gerald W.

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

Sarton, May

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

10.

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

11.

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

Hayes, Helen

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

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.

What is a society without a heroic dimension?

Baudrillard, Jean

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

23.

A hero is someone right who doesn't change.

Foreman, George

24.

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

Hegel, Georg

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

28.

Aspire rather to be a hero than merely appear one.

Gracian, Baltasar

29.

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

George, David Lloyd

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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.

35.

You cannot be a hero without being a coward.

Shaw, George Bernard

36.

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.

37.

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

Thompson, Roy

38.

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

Rogers, Will

39.

A hero is someone we can admire without apology.

Kelley, Kitty

40.

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.

41.

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

Rogers, Will

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Durrell, Lawrence

45.

The hero draws inspiration from the virtue of his ancestors.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

46.

What is a hero without love for mankind.

Lessing, Doris

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

There are heroes in evil as well as in good.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De