» On courage

Courage and bravery: there’s a difference, I am not quite sure what it is…

The qualities which produce the dogged, unbeatable courage of the British, personified at the time by Winston Churchill, can appear in other settings as stubbornness bordering on stupidity.

Dean Acheson . 1893-1971 . senior American politician . Present at the Creation: my years in the State Department (1969)

Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it.

Simone de Beauvoir . 1908-1986 . French author and philosopher . Force of circumstances (1963)

Every day begins with an act of courage and hope: getting out of bed.

Mason Cooley . 1927-2002 . American literary academic and aphorist . City aphorisms

Courage is grace under pressure.

Ernest Hemingway . 1899-1961 . American novelist and short story writer . letter to F Scott Fitzgerald (1926) . [in the letter, he wrote that he was ‘not referring to guts but to something else.’]

Life shrinks or expands according to one’s courage.

Anaïs Nin . 1903-1977 . French-born author

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.

Ambrose Redmoon [James Neil Hollingworth] . 1933-1996 . American writer and manager of folk rock bands

Be bloody, bold, and resolute…
Be lion-mettled, proud.

William Shakespeare . 1564-1616 . English poet and playwright . the witches’ advice to Macbeth, Macbeth, IV i

Anxiety is the unwillingness to play even when you know the odds are for you. Courage is the willingness to play even when you know the odds are against you.

Thomas Szasz . 1920-2012 . Hungarian-American professor, and critic, of psychiatry . The second sin

The brave and bold persist even against fortune; the timid and cowardly rush to despair through fear alone.

Tacitus . c56-c117 . Roman orator, lawyer and historian . Annals, II 46

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On courage