courage on Cowardice

God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.

Despair gives courage to a coward.

Courage is a virtue only so far as it is directed by prudence.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear.

Courage is Fear That has said its prayers.

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live, taking the form of a readiness to die.

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.

The principal act of courage is to endure and withstand dangers doggedly rather than to attack them.

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

Honest and courageous people have very little to say about either their courage or their honesty.

Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intellige...

Take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to li...

There is plenty of courage among us for the abstract, but not for the concrete.

The virtue of courage is about the fear of dangers of death.

Silence is evil's closest ally.

Courage is putting one foot in front of the other when all you can see is a faint outline of the future.

It is easier to find a score of men wise enough to discover the truth than to find one intrepid enough, in the face of opposition, to stand up for it.

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

Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.

Courage does not always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, “I will try again tomorrow.”

Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothi...

Courage is like—it’s a habitus, a habit, a virtue: You get it by courageous acts. It’s like you learn to swim by swimming. You learn courage by couraging.

A fourteenth-century definition of courage is “to speak one’s mind by telling all of one’s heart.” Courage is connecting one’s heart back to one’s mind, stitching together the separated parts of ourse...

Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it is always himself that the coward abandoned first. Af...

“Real courage is when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”

The English word “courage” is derived from the French coeur, which literally means “heart.” And since “heart” has traditionally (and metaphorically) been regarded as the seat of emotion, spirit, and s...

Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without co...

Courage is always greatest when blended with meekness; intellectual ability is most admirable when it sparkles in the setting of a modest self-distrust; and never does the human soul appear so strong ...

In this short excerpt written by the Christian Ethicist Stanley Hauerwas to his godson, he pontificates on the topic of courage: Usually courage is identified with dramatic and heroic acts. Though I...