Motivational Quotes

Heroes and heroism

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

- Lamartine, Alphonse De

Best Quotes about Heroes and heroism

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

One murder makes a villain, millions often a hero.

Porteous, Bishop

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

Rogers, Will

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

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

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

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

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

10.

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

Horton, Doug

11.

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

Miller, Henry

12.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

13.

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

14.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

15.

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

Hegel, Georg

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Thompson, Roy

19.

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

20.

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

Rogers, Will

21.

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

George, David Lloyd

22.

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

23.

Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes.

Brecht, Bertolt

24.

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

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.

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

27.

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

Proverb, English

28.

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

Coolidge, Calvin

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.

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.

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Hayes, Helen

35.

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

36.

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

Andrews, C. D.

37.

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

Johnson, Gerald W.

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

The hero draws inspiration from the virtue of his ancestors.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

42.

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

43.

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

Rogers, Will

44.

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

45.

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.

46.

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

Lamartine, Alphonse De

47.

What is a society without a heroic dimension?

Baudrillard, Jean

48.

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

49.

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

Durrell, Lawrence

50.

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