This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Believe in yourself. You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you stop to look fear in the face. You must do that which you think you cannot do." - Eleanor Roosevelt, fully Anna Eleanor Roosevelt
"Courage is more exhilarating than fear, and in the long run, easier." - Eleanor Roosevelt, fully Anna Eleanor Roosevelt
"Courage is standing up for what you believe in. There are so many people who aren’t willing to stand up. You’ve got to fight." - Howard Stern
"He who does not have the courage to speak up for his rights cannot earn the respect of others." - Rene G. Torres
"The human being is so constructed that he pressed toward fuller and fuller being and this means pressing toward what most people would call good values, toward serenity, kindness, courage, honesty, love, unselfishness, and goodness." - Abraham Harold Maslow
"[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." - Adrienne Rich, fully Adrienne Cecil Rich
"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." - Alfred Whitney Griswold
"Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace. The soul that knows it not, knows no release from little things; knows not the livid loneliness of fear, nor mountain heights where bitter joy can hear the sound of wings." - Amelia Earhart, fully Amelia Mary Earhart
"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin, born Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell
"One man with courage makes a majority." - Andrew Jackson
"It takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried and succeeded." - Anne Morrow Lindbergh, born Anne Spencer Morrow
"[Paraphrase] List of virtues: courage, temperance, liberality, magnificence, pride, good temper, friendliness, truthfulness, wittiness, shame, justice." - Aristotle NULL
"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." - Aristotle NULL
"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." - Aristotle NULL
"You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor." - Aristotle NULL
"Courage is never to let your actions be influenced by your fears." - Arthur Koestler
"Courage is the power to let go of the familiar." - Author Unknown NULL
"It takes vision and courage to create. It takes faith and courage to prove." - Author Unknown NULL
"It takes courage to grow up and turn out to be who you really are." - Author Unknown NULL
"There are too many people praying for mountains of difficulty to be removed, when what they really need is courage to climb them." - Author Unknown NULL
"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear."" - Author Unknown NULL
"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." - Ayn Rand, born Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum
"Knowledge without courage is sterile." - Baltasar Gracián
"Having the courage to live within one's means is respectability." - Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
"The rarest and most admirable quality of public life, moral courage." - Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
"Moral courage – not afraid to say or do what you believe to be right." - Bernard Law "Monty" Montgomery, 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein
"Moral courage: not afraid to say or do what you believe to be right." - Bernard Law "Monty" Montgomery, 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein
"Many a man will have the courage to die gallantly, but will not have the courage to say, or even to think, that the cause for which he is asked to die is an unworthy one." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"The constant man does not lose his courage in misfortune. A torch may point toward the ground, but its flame will soar upwards." - Bhartrihari NULL
"Courage is contagious. When a brave man takes a stand, the spines of others are often stiffened." - Billy Graham, formally William Franklin "Billy" Graham
"Courage is contagious. When a brave man takes a stand, the spines of others are stiffened." - Billy Graham, formally William Franklin "Billy" Graham
"The significance of our lives and our fragile realm derives from our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life’s meaning." - Carl Sagan
"Courage is generosity of the highest order, for the brave are prodigal of the most precious things. Our blood is nearer and dearer to us than our money, and our life than our estate." - Charles Caleb Colton
"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." - Charles Caleb Colton
"To dare to live alone is the rarest courage; since there are many who had rather meet their bitterest enemy in the field, than their own hearts in their closet." - Charles Caleb Colton
"Courage is the ladder on which all other virtues mount." - Clare Booth Luce
"Courage is the ladder on which all the other virtues mount." - Clare Booth Luce
"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." - Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
"To be fond of learning is to draw close to wisdom. To practice with vigor is to draw close to benevolence. To know the seen of shame is to draw close to courage. He who knows these three things knows how to cultivate his own character. Knowing how to cultivate his own character, he knows how to govern other men. Knowing how to govern other men, he knows how to govern the world, it states, and its families." - Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
"To see what is right and not to do it is want of courage." - Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL
"To him that waits all things reveal themselves, provided that he has the courage not to deny, in the darkness, what he has seen in the light." - Coventry Patmore, fully Coventry Kersey Dighton Patmore
"Our love becomes impoverished if we lack the courage to sacrifice its object." - Dag Hammarskjöld
"If you want to develop courage, do the thing you fear to do and keep on doing it until you get a record of successful experiences behind you. That is the quickest and surest way ever yet discovered to conquer fear." - Dale Carnegie, originally spelled Dale Carnegey
"Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy." - Dale Carnegie, originally spelled Dale Carnegey
"Most of us have far more courage than we ever dreamed possible." - Dale Carnegie, originally spelled Dale Carnegey
"Whatever gave you the idea that fear was some kind of reason not to do something?... The only time you have a chance to show courage is when you're afraid." - Dan Millman, born Daniel Jay Millman
"Courage is a special kind of knowledge: the knowledge of how to fear what ought to be feared and how not to fear what ought not be feared." - David Ben-Gurion, born David Grün
"Courage, it would seem, is nothing less than the power to overcome danger, misfortune, fear, injustice, while continuing to affirm inwardly that life with all its sorrows is good; that everything is meaningful even if in a sense beyond our understanding; and that there is always tomorrow." - Dorothy Thompson