On Courage & Cowardice

Courage - n. kur'rage. Bravery; intrepidity; that quality of mind which enables men to encounter danger and difficulties with firmness... valor; boldness; resolution.

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Cowardice - n. Want of courage to face danger; timidity; pusillanimity; a fear of exposing one's person to danger.
Webster's 1828 Dictionary

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"... be strong and of good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest." The Bible

"Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die." G.K. Chesterton

   

"If all the world were just, there would be no need of valor." Plutarch

"Courage is grace under pressure." Ernest Hemingway

"Courage is not having the strength to go on; it is going on when you don't have the strength." Theodore Roosevelt

"Real valor consists not in being insensible to danger, but in being prompt to confront and disarm it." Sir Walter Scott

"Courage: the footstool of all virtues upon which they stand." Robert Louis Stevenson

"Among the Americans who served on Iwo Jima, uncommon valor was a common virtue." Fleet Admiral Chester. W. Nimitz

"There is a seed of courage hidden... waiting for some final and desperate danger to make it grow." J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

"Fear can keep a man out of danger, but courage can support him in it." Thomas Fuller

"In valor there is hope." Tactitus

"A coward dies a thousand deaths, the valiant dies but once." William Shakespeare

"Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty or mercy which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful until it became risky." C.S. Lewis

"One man with courage makes a majority." Andrew Jackson

"Chivalry is knowing what to do in a given situation and then having the courage to act without regard to the outcome." Rex Page

"A coward can fight any battle he's sure of winning; but give me the man who has the pluck to fight when he's sure of losing. That's my way, sir; and there are many victories worse than a defeat." George Eliot

"Where courage is not, no other virtue can survive except by accident." Samuel Johnson

"Tell a man he is brave, and you help him to become so." Thomas Carlyle

"Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen." Sir Winston Churchill

"Courage consists not in hazarding without fear, but being resolutely minded in a just cause." Plutarch

"To see what is right and not to do it is cowardice. It is never a question of who is right but what is right." John Buchan. 

"The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently but to live manfully." Thomas Carlyle

"Courage is resitance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear. Except of creature be part coward, it is no compliment to say it is brave." Mark Twain

"Courage and resolution are the spirit and soul of virtue." Thomas Fuller

"I prefer to strive in bravery with the bravest, rather than in wealth with the wealthiest, or in greed with the greediest." Plutarch

"There is little extraordinary about the achievements of a genius, a prodigy, or a savant. Inevitably, a great leader is someone who overcomes tremendous obstacles and still succeeds. That is the essence of courage. It is the ability to maintain, in the face of grave perils, a kind of incognizance of the consequences of doing right. It is the ability to maintain great strength without any impulsive compulsion to use it - that strength is to be held in reserve until and unless it becomes necessary to use it for the cause of right." Tristan Gylbard

"Boldness is prudence. Couage is manliness." James Longstreet

"But screw your courage to the sticking place and we'll not fail." William Shakespeare

"A pound of pluck is worth a ton of luck." James A. Garfield

"No coward soul is mine/No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere/I see Heaven's glories shine/And faith shines equal, arming me from fear." Emily Bronte

"The world has no room for cowards. We must all be ready somehow to suffer, to toil, to die. And yours is not the less noble because no drum beats before you when you go out into your daily battlefields, and no crowds shout about your coming when you return from your daily victory or defeat." Robert Louis Stevenson

"Cowardice alone is loss of fame." Dryden

"Courage that grows from constitution, often forsakes a man when he has occasion for it; courage which arises from a sense of duty, acts in a uniform manner." Joseph Addison

(The majority of these qoutations were

taken from The Christian Almanac, edited by

George Grant & Gregory Wilbur)

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Persevero,