courage

It is better to die on your feet
than live on your knees.

Dolores Ibarruri
in a 1936 speech

   

Courage is what preserves our liberty, safety, life, and our homes and parents, our country and children.  Courage comprises all things.

Plautus

      

The world is not perishing for the want of clever or talented or well-meaning people.  It is perishing for the want of people of courage and resolution.

Robert J. McCracken

  

The more you surrender to the fear of someone’s disapproval, the more you lose face in your own eyes, and the more desperate you become for someone’s approval.  Within you is a void that should have been filled by self-esteem.  When you attempt to fill it with the approval of others instead, the void grows deeper and the hunger for acceptance and approval grows stronger.  The only solution is to summon the courage to honor your own judgment, frightening though that may be in the beginning.

Nathaniel Branden

   
Courage is doing what you're afraid to do.  There can be no courage unless you're scared.

Eddie Rickenbacker

   
   
Courage is a quality so necessary for maintaining virtue that it is always respected, even when it is associated with vice.

Samuel Johnson

   

Because a person has failed once or twice or a dozen times,
you don't want to set that person down as a failure
till he or she's dead or loses their courage--and that's the same thing.

George Horace Lorimer

   

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Courage is a kind of salvation.

Plato

  
The brave person is not one who feels no fear, For that were stupid and
irrational; But one, whose noble soul its fear subdues, And bravely dares
the danger nature shrinks from.

Joanna Baillie
  

Courage is the price that life extracts for granting peace.  The
soul that knows it not, knows no release from little things.

Amelia Earhart

   

Courage is required not only in a person's occasional crucial decision for
one's own freedom, but in the little hour-to-hour decisions which place
the bricks in the structure of his building of oneself into a person
who acts with freedom and responsibility.

Rollo May

courage

  

Dare to begin!  One who postpones living rightly is like the rustic
who waits for the river to run out before he crosses.

Horace

   

We need the courage to start and continue what we
should do, and courage to stop what we shouldn't do.

Richard L. Evans

  

Great things are done more through courage than through wisdom.

German proverb

  

  

You will never do anything in this world without courage.

James Lane Allen

  

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God grant me the courage not to give up what I think
is right, even though I think it is hopeless.

Admiral Chester W. Nimitz

  

Greatness, in the last analysis, is largely bravery--courage
in escaping from old ideas and old standards.

James Harvey Robinson

   

We have to be braver than we think we can be, because God
is constantly calling us to be more than we are.

Madeleine L'Engle

 

Courage takes many forms.  There is physical courage, there is moral courage.
Then there is a still higher type of courage--the courage to brave pain,
to live with it, to never let others know of it and to still find joy in life;
to wake up in the morning with an enthusiasm for the day ahead.

Howard Cosell

  

It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human
history is shaped.  Each time a person stands up for an ideal or strikes out
against injustice, he or she sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing
each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those
ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest
walls of oppression and resistance.

Robert F. Kennedy

  

There is a quiet courage that comes from an inward spring of confidence
in the meaning and significance of life.  Such courage is an underground
river, flowing far beneath the shifting events of one’s experience,
keeping alive a thousand little springs of action.

Howard Thurman

  

   

  

You can’t be brave if you’ve only had wonderful things happen to you.

Mary Tyler Moore

  

What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?

Vincent van Gogh

  

One of the most courageous things you can do is identify yourself,
know who you are, what you believe in and where you want to go.

Sheila Murray Bethel

   

courage

It is not those who commit the least faults who are the most holy,
but those who have the greatest courage, the greatest generosity,
the greatest love, who make the boldest efforts to overcome themselves,
and are not immediately apprehensive about tripping.

Francis de Sales
   

Courage begins when we can admit that there is no life without some pain,
some frustration; that there is no tragic accident to which we are immune;
and that beyond the normal exercise of prudence we can do nothing about it.
  But courage goes on to see that the triumph of life is not in
pains avoided, but in joys lived completely in the moment of their happening.
Courage lies in never taking so much as a good meal or a day of health and
fair weather for granted.  It lies in learning to be aware of our moments of
happiness as sharply as our moments of pain.  We need not be afraid to
weep when we have cause to weep, so long as we can really
rejoice at every cause for rejoicing.

Victoria Lincoln

  

Life shrinks or expands according to one's courage.

Anaïs Nin

   

  

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It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies,
but just as much to stand up to our friends.

J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
  

There are so many ways to be brave in this world. Sometimes bravery
involves laying down your life for something bigger than yourself, or for
someone else. Sometimes it involves giving up everything you have ever
known, or everyone you have ever loved, for the sake of something greater.
But sometimes it doesn't.
Sometimes it is nothing more than gritting your teeth through pain, and the
work of every day, the slow walk toward a better life.
That is the sort of bravery I must have now.

Veronica Roth
Allegiant

   

It isn't for the moment you are struck that you need courage,
but for the long uphill climb back to sanity and faith and security.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

   
  
No great thing comes to any person unless that person has courage.

James Gibbons
  

We must never forget that today's legendary achievements--awesome as
they may seem--were yesterday's risky adventures.  Courage is not the
capacity never to be afraid; as Karl Barth reminds us,
"Courage is fear that has said its prayers."

John R. Claypool
Tracks of a Fellow Struggler

  

Courage. . . . It's just another word for inner strength, presence of mind
against odds, determination to hang in there, to venture, persevere, and
withstand hardship.  It's got keeping power. . . . It's what makes the
amputee reject pity and continue to take life by the throat.  It's what
forces every married couple having trouble never to say, "Let's terminate."
It's what encourages the divorcee to face tomorrow.  It's what upholds
the young mother with kids in spite of a personal energy crisis. . . . Every
day, in some way, your courage will be tested.  Your test may be as simple
as saying, "No," as uneventful as facing a pile of dirty laundry, or as unknown
and unheralded as an inner struggle between right and wrong.  God's
medal-of-honor winners are made in secret because most
of their courageous acts occur deep down inside.

Charles Swindoll
Killing Giants, Pulling Thorns

  

       
   

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(Found online images come from a variety of unattributed
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Yes, life can be mysterious and confusing--but there's much of life that's actually rather dependable and reliable.  Some principles apply to life in so many different contexts that they can truly be called universal--and learning what they are and how to approach them and use them can teach us some of the most important lessons that we've ever learned.
My doctorate is in Teaching and Learning.  I use it a lot when I teach at school, but I also do my best to apply what I've learned to the life I'm living, and to observe how others live their lives.  What makes them happy or unhappy, stressed or peaceful, selfish or generous, compassionate or arrogant?  In this book, I've done my best to pass on to you what I've learned from people in my life, writers whose works I've read, and stories that I've heard.  Perhaps these principles can be a positive part of your life, too!
Universal Principles of Living Life Fully.  Awareness of these principles can explain a lot and take much of the frustration out of the lives we lead.