This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Five minutes, just before going to sleep, given to a bit of directed imagination regarding achievement possibilities of the morrow, will steadily and increasingly bear fruit, particularly if all ideas of difficulty, worry or fear are resolutely ruled out and replace by those of accomplishment and smiling courage." -
"To achieve something great in the world you need Passion To fulfill vision, a great leader’s courage comes from Passion Whatever it may be, you must find your Passion If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins Follow your passion and success will follow you! Never underestimate the power of passion Without passion religion is spiritless Without Passion history is meaningless Without Passion art is useless Follow your passion and success will follow you! When you take up a mission with passion There are no dreams too large No innovation unimaginable No frontiers beyond reach Follow your passion and success will follow you! Our passions are the winds that propel our vessel Our reason is the pilot that steers her Without winds the vessel would not move Without a pilot she would be lost Follow your passion and success will follow you! There is no end and there is no beginning There is only the passion of life Passion is universal humanity Passion is the genesis of genius Follow your passion and success will follow you! " - Pooja Natarajan
"Courage is by no means incompatible with tenderness. On the contrary, gentleness and tenderness have been found to characterize the men, no less than the women, who have done the most courageous deeds." - Samuel Smiles
"What is more mortifying than to feel that you've missed the plum for want of courage to shake the tree?" - Logan Pearsall Smith
"True courage scorns to vent her prowess in a storm of words; and to the valiant action speaks alone." - Tobias Smollett, fully Tobias George Smollett
"Worry, whatever its source, weakens, takes away courage, and shortens life." - John Lancaster Spalding
"Give us grace and strength to forbear and to preserve. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind. Spare to us our friends and soften to us our enemies. Give us the strength to encounter that which is to come, that we may be brave in peril, constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath and in all changes of fortune, and down to the gates of death, loyal and loving to one another." - Robert Louis Stevenson, fully Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson
"Keep your fears to yourself but share your courage with others." - Robert Louis Stevenson, fully Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson
"What is the real relation between happiness and goodness? It is only within a few generations that men have found the courage to say that there is none." - William Graham Sumner
"A man is seldom more manly than when he is what you called unmanned - the source of his emotion is championship, pity, and courage; the instinctive desire to cherish those who are innocent and unhappy, and defend those who are tender and weak." - William Makepeace Thackeray
"All art requires courage." - Anne Wilkes Tucker
"There is strength of quiet endurance as significant courage as the most daring fears of prowess." - Henry Theodore Tuckerman
"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." - Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens
"It isn't life that matters; it's the courage you bring to it." - Hugh Walpole, fully Sir Hugh Seymour Walpole
"True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason." - Paul Whitehead
"Let's learn and label properly Disappointment and Discouragement for what they are - two completely different states of mind. Disappointment can be a spur to improvement that will contribute to success. But Discouragement is a mortal enemy that destroys courage and robs one of the will to fight. It is not circumstance that causes Discouragement, but one's own reaction to that circumstance. Everyone must meet Disappointment, many times; it is simply a part of life. When it is met, we may resign ourselves to Discouragement and failure. Or we may recognize each Disappointment as an asset by which we can profit, and take new strength from a lesson learned. The choice is ours, each time, to make." - John M. Wilson, fully John Moulder Wilson
"There is a single reason why 99 out of 100 average business men never become leaders. That is their unwillingness to pay the price of responsibility. By the price of responsibility I mean hard driving, continual work... the courage to make decisions, to stand the gaff... the scourging honesty of never fooling yourself about yourself... And the grooves that lead to the heights are not made between nine and five. They are burned in by the midnight oil." - Owen D. Young
"I believe that courage is all too often mistakenly seen as the absence of fear... Courage is seeing your fear, in a realistic perspective, defining it, considering alternatives and choosing to function in spite of risks." - Leonard M. Zunin
"While an open mind is priceless, it is priceless only when its owner has the courage to make a final decision which closes the mind for action after the process of viewing all sides of the question has been completed. Failure to make a decision after due consideration of all the facts will quickly brand a man unfit for a position of responsibility. Not all of your decisions will be correct. None of us is perfect. But if you get into the habit of making decisions, experience will develop your judgment to a point where more and more of your decisions will be right. After all, it is better to be right 51 percent of the time and get something done, than it is to get nothing done because you fear to reach a decision." - H. W. Andrews
"All happiness depends on courage and work. I have had my periods of wretchedness, but with energy and above all with illusions, I pulled through them all." - Honoré de Balzac
"Hope is the better half of courage. Hope has it not sustained the work, and given the fainting heart time and patience to outwit the chances and changes of life." - Honoré de Balzac
"Extreme old age is childhood; extreme wisdom is ignorance, for so it may be called, since the man whom the oracle pronounced the wisest of men professed that he knew nothing; yea, push a coward to the extreme and he will show courage; oppress a man to the last, and he will rise above oppression." - J. Beaumont
"Fear is an insidious virus. Given a breeding place in our minds, it will permeate the whole body of our work; it will eat away our spirit and block the forward path of our endeavors. Fear is the greatest enemy of progress... Fear is met and destroyed with courage." - James Ford Bell
"People are much greater and stronger than we imagine, and when unexpected tragedy comes we see them often grow to a stature that is far beyond anything we imagined. We must remember that people are capable of greatness, of courage, but not in isolation. They need the conditions of solidly linked human unit in which everyone is prepared to bear the burden of others." - Anthony of Sourozh, fully Archbishop Metropolitan Anthony Bloom of Sourozh NULL
"The professors laugh at themselves, they laugh at life; they long ago abjured the bitch-goddess Success, and the best of them will fight for his scholastic ideals with a courage and persistence that would shame a soldier. The professor is not afraid of words like truth; in fact he is not afraid of words at all." - Catherine Bowen, née Catherine Shober Drinker
"Yes, as my swift days near their goal, 'Tis all that I implore: In life and death a chainless soul, With courage to endure." - Emily Brontë, fully Emily Jane Brontë, aka pseudonym Ellis Bell
"The greatest asset of any nation is the spirit of its people, and the greatest danger that can menace any nation is the breakdown of that spirit - the will to win and the courage to work." - George B. Cortelyou, fully George Bruce Cortelyou
"Set the course of your life by the three stars - sincerity, courage and unselfishness. From these flow a host of other virtues. He who follows them will obtain the highest type of success, that which lies in the esteem of others." - Monroe E. Deutsch, fully Monroe Emanuel Deutsch
"Every serious-minded person knows that a large part of the effort required in moral discipline consists in the courage needed to acknowledge the unpleasant consequences of one's past and present acts." - John Dewey
"Intelligence is not something possessed once for all. It is in constant process of forming, and its retention requires constant alertness in observing consequences, an open-minded will to learn and courage in re-adjustment." - John Dewey
"He that resolves upon any great and good end, has, by the very resolution, scaled the chief barrier to it. He will find such resolution removing difficulties, searching out or making means, giving courage for despondency, and strength for weakness and like the star to the wise men of old, ever guiding him nearer and nearer to perfection." - Tyron Edwards
"I believe that whoever tries to think things through honestly will soon recognize how unworthy and even fatal is the traditional bias against Negroes. What can the man of good will do to combat this deeply rooted prejudice? He must have the courage to set an example by words and deed, and must watch lest his children become influenced by racial bias." - Albert Einstein
"Is it any weakness, pray, to be wrought on by exquisite music? to feel its wondrous harmonies searching the subtlest windings of your soul, the delicate fibres of life where no memory can penetrate, and binding together your whole being, past and present, in one ;unspeakable vibration; melting you in one moment with all the tenderness, all the love, that has been scattered through the toilsome years, concentrating in one emotion of heroic courage or resignation all the hard-learned lessons of self-renouncing sympathy, blending your present joy with past sorrow, and your present sorrow with all your past joy?" - George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans
"Mighty is the force of motherhood! It transforms all things by its vital heat; it turns timidity into fierce courage, and dreadless defiance into tremulous submission; it turns thoughtlessness into foresight, and yet stills all anxiety into calm content; it makes selfishness become self-denial, and gives even to hard vanity the glance of admiring love." - George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans
"He who knows no hardships will know no hardihood. He who faces no calamity will need no courage. Mysterious though it is, the characteristics in human nature which we love best grow in the soil with strong mixture of troubles." - Harry Emerson Fosdick
"Nature reacts not only to physical disease, but also to moral weakness; when the danger increases, she gives us greater courage." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Moral courage is a virtue of higher cast and nobler origin than physical. It springs from a consciousness of virtue, and renders a man, in the pursuit of defense of right, superior to the fear of reproach, opposition, or contempt." - S. G. Goodrich, fully Samuel Griswold Goodrich, pen name Peter Praley
"Give us the fortitude to endure the things which cannot be changed, and the courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to know one from the other." - Oliver J. Hart, fully Bishop Oliver J. Hart
"If suicide be supposed a crime, it is only cowardice can impel us to it. If it be no crime, both prudence and courage should engage us to rid ourselves at once of existence when it becomes a burden." - David Hume