Courage and Strength

We must travel in the direction of our fear.

Why should I let the toad work Squat on my life? Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork And drive the brute off?

A glimpse is not a vision. But to a man on a mountain road by night, a glimpse of the next three feet of road may matter more than a vision of the horizon.

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.

A man has no business to be depressed by a disappointment, anyway; he ought to make up his mind to get even.

I was never afraid of failure, for I would sooner fail than not be among the best.

Don’t you know, there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight? Awkwardnessand stupidity can. The best swordsman in the world doesn’t need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn’t do the thing he ought to.

At the center of all these noble races we cannot fail to see the blond beast of prey, the magnificent blond beast avidly prowling round for spoil and victory.

I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—and I will be heard!

To sin by silence when we should protest, Makes cowards of men.

What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.

When the going gets tough, the tough get going.

 

I haven’t lost a battle yet but I am tense for the first losing.

I praise, I do not reproach, [nihilism's] arrival. I believe it is one of the greatest crises, a moment of the deepest self-reflection of humanity. Whether man recovers from it, whether he becomes master of this crisis, is a question of his strength.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word. Consider the flea!—incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage.

Now all the youth of England are on fire,

 

No coward soul is mine,

 

Hence a commander who advances without any thought of winning personal fame andwithdraws in spite of certain punishment, whose only concern is to protect his people and promote the interests of his ruler, is the nation’s treasure.

Macte nova virtute, puer, sic itur ad astra.

Valour needs first strength, then a weapon. J. R. R.

 

In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong.

I shouldered a kind of manhood stepping in to lift the coffins of dead relations.

I have been in Sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and a sword in my hands.

[ Of Socrates :] Such, Echecrates, was the end of our comrade, who was, we may fairly say, of all those whom we knew in our time, the bravest and also the wisest and most upright man.