This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Adrienne Rich, fully Adrienne Cecil Rich
[Responsibility to yourself] means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short, simply to avoid conflict and confrontation. And this, in turn, means resisting the forces in society which say that women should be nice, play safe, have low professional expectations, drown in love and forget about work, live through others, and stay in places assigned to us. It means that we insist on a life of meaningful work, insist that work be as meaningful as love and friendship in our lives. It means, therefore, the courage to be “different”; not to be continuously available to others when we need time for ourselves and our work; to be able to demand of others – parents, friends, roommates, teachers, lovers, husbands, children – that they respect our sense of purpose and our integrity as persons.
Children | Courage | Integrity | Life | Life | Love | Means | Need | Parents | Play | Purpose | Purpose | Respect | Responsibility | Safe | Sense | Society | Time | Work | Friendship | Society | Respect |
If appeasing our enemies is not the answer, neither is hating them... Somewhere between the extremes of appeasement and hate there is a place for courage and strength to express themselves in magnanimity and charity, and this is the place we must find.
Charity | Courage | Hate | Magnanimity | Strength |
Anne Morrow Lindbergh, born Anne Spencer Morrow
It takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried and succeeded.
Courage |
The coward... is a despariging sort of person; for he fears everything. The brave man, on the other hand, has the opposite disposition; for confidence is the mark of a hopeful disposition... Courage is a mean with respect to things that inspire confidence or fear.
When men hear imitations, even apart from the rhythms and tunes themselves, their feelings move in sympathy. Since then music is a pleasure, and virtue consists in rejoicing and loving and hating aright, there is clearly nothing which we are so much concerned to acquire and to cultivate as the power of forming right judgments and of taking delight in good dispositions and noble actions. Rhythm and melody supply imitations of anger and gentleness, and also of courage and temperance, and of all the qualities contrary to these, and of the other qualities of character, which hardly fall short of the actual affections, as we know form our own experience, for in listening to such strains our souls undergo a change. The habit of feeling pleasure or pain at mere representation is not far removed from the same feeling about realities.
Anger | Change | Character | Courage | Experience | Feelings | Gentleness | Good | Habit | Listening | Melody | Men | Music | Nothing | Pain | Pleasure | Power | Qualities | Right | Sympathy | Virtue | Virtue |
It takes vision and courage to create. It takes faith and courage to prove.
It takes courage to grow up and turn out to be who you really are.
Courage |
Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum
Anything may be betrayed, anyone may be forgiven. But not those who lack the courage of their own greatness… It does not matter that only a few in each generation will grasp and achieve the full reality of man’s proper stature – and the rest will betray it. It is those few that move the world and give it meaning – and it is those few that I have always sought to address. The rest are of no concern of mine; it is not me or “The Fountainhead” that they will betray: it is their own souls.
Courage | Greatness | Man | Meaning | Reality | Rest | Will | World |
Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
Having the courage to live within one's means is respectability.
There are too many people praying for mountains of difficulty to be removed, when what they really need is courage to climb them.
Courage | Difficulty | Need | People |
Bernard Law "Monty" Montgomery, 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein
Moral courage – not afraid to say or do what you believe to be right.
The constant man does not lose his courage in misfortune. A torch may point toward the ground, but its flame will soar upwards.
Courage | Man | Misfortune | Will |
Physical courage which despises all danger, will make a man brave in one way; and moral courage, which despises all opinion, will make a man brave in another. The former would seem most necessary for the camp; the latter for the council; but to constitute a great man both are necessary.
Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
Wisdom, compassion and courage - these are three universally recognized moral qualities of man. It matters not in what way men come to the exercise of these moral qualities, the result is one and the same. When a man understands the nature and use of these three moral qualities, he will then understand how to put in order his personal conduct and character; he will understand how to govern men.
Character | Compassion | Conduct | Courage | Man | Men | Nature | Order | Qualities | Will | Wisdom | Govern | Understand |
Dale Carnegie, originally spelled Dale Carnegey
Most of us have far more courage than we ever dreamed possible.
Courage |