Motivational Quotes

Heroes and heroism

Now stiff on a pillar with a phallic air nelson stylites in Trafalgar square reminds the British what once they were.

- Durrell, Lawrence

Best Quotes about Heroes and heroism

How many famous and high-spirited heroes have lived a day too long?

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

Being a hero is about the shortest lived profession on earth.

Rogers, Will

Bardot, Byron, Hitler, Hemingway, Monroe, Sade: we do not require our heroes to be subtle, just to be big. Then we can depend on someone to make them subtle.

Enright, D. J.

Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation.

Mailer, Norman

The hero draws inspiration from the virtue of his ancestors.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

We relish news of our heroes, forgetting that we are extraordinary to somebody too.

Hayes, Helen

The opportunities for heroism are limited in this kind of world: the most people can do is sometimes not to be as weak as they've been at other times.

Wilson, Angus

In war the heroes always outnumber the soldiers ten to one.

Mencken, H. L.

Now stiff on a pillar with a phallic air nelson stylites in Trafalgar square reminds the British what once they were.

Durrell, Lawrence

10.

Heroes are created by popular demand, sometimes out of the scantiest materials.

Johnson, Gerald W.

11.

What makes a hero truly great is that they never despair.

Thompson, Roy

12.

A man can be a hero if he is a scientist, or a soldier, or a drug addict, or a disc jockey, or a crummy mediocre politician. A man can be a hero because he suffers and despairs; or because he thinks logically and analytically; or because he is sensitive; or because he is cruel. Wealth establishes a man as a hero, and so does poverty. Virtually any circumstance in a man's life will make him a hero to some group of people and has a mythic rendering in the culture -- in literature, art, theater, or the daily newspapers.

Dworkin, Andrea

13.

The legacy of heroes is the memory of a great name and the inheritance of a great example.

Disraeli, Benjamin

14.

The world's battlefields have been in the heart chiefly; more heroism has been displayed in the household and the closet, than on the most memorable battlefields in history.

Beecher, Henry Ward

15.

No heroine can create a hero through love of one, but she can give birth to one.

Paul, Jean

16.

The characteristic of genuine heroism is its persistency. All men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when you have resolved to be great, abide by yourself, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

To have no heroes is to have no aspiration, to live on the momentum of the past, to be thrown back upon routine, sensuality, and the narrow self.

Cooley, Charles Horton

18.

Most people aren't appreciated enough, and the bravest things we do in our lives are usually known only to ourselves. No one throws ticker tape on the man who chose to be faithful to his wife, on the lawyer who didn't take the drug money, or the daughter who held her tongue again and again. All this anonymous heroism.

Noonan, Peggy

19.

Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes.

Brecht, Bertolt

20.

My heroes are and were my parents. I can't see having anyone else as my heroes.

Jordan, Michael

21.

It's true that heroes are inspiring, but mustn't they also do some rescuing if they are to be worthy of their name? Would Wonder Woman matter if she only sent commiserating telegrams to the distressed?

Winterson, Jeanette

22.

Had we lived I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale.

Scott, Robert Falcon

23.

Heroism is the divine relation which, in all times, unites a great man to other men.

Carlyle, Thomas

24.

The ordinary man is involved in action, the hero acts. An immense difference.

Miller, Henry

25.

One murder makes a villain, millions often a hero.

Porteous, Bishop

26.

The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one's self a fool; the truest heroism is to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to be resisted, and when it be obeyed.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel

27.

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, This was their finest hour.

Churchill, Winston

28.

What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes --ah, they have all the necessary leisure.

Huxley, Aldous

29.

Children demand that their heroes should be freckleless, and easily believe them so: perhaps a first discovery to the contrary is less revolutionary shock to a passionate child than the threatened downfall of habitual beliefs which makes the world seem to totter for us in maturer life.

Eliot, George

30.

No man is a hero to his valet. This is not because the hero is no hero, but because the valet is a valet.

Hegel, Georg

31.

There are heroes in evil as well as in good.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

32.

Heroes are not known by the loftiness of their carriage; the greatest braggarts are generally the merest cowards.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

33.

Sometimes, when one person is missing, the whole world seems depopulated.

Lamartine, Alphonse De

34.

Listen, my friend, there are two races of beings. The masses teeming and happy --common clay, if you like --eating, breeding, working, counting their pennies; people who just live; ordinary people; people you can't imagine dead. And then there are the others --the noble ones, the heroes. The ones you can quite well imagine lying shot, pale and tragic; one minute triumphant with a guard of honor, and the next being marched away between two gendarmes.

Anouilh, Jean

35.

Aspire rather to be a hero than merely appear one.

Gracian, Baltasar

36.

All our lives we fought against exalting the individual, against the elevation of the single person, and long ago we were over and done with the business of a hero, and here it comes up again: the glorification of one personality. This is not good at all. I am just like everybody else.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

37.

You lived too long, we have supped full with heroes, they waste their deaths on us.

Andrews, C. D.

38.

Once the state has been founded, there can no longer be any heroes. They come on the scene only in uncivilized conditions.

Hegel, Georg

39.

If we are marked to die, we are enough to do our country loss; and if to live, the fewer men, the greater share of honor.

Shakespeare, William

40.

Heroism is not only in the man, but in the occasion.

Coolidge, Calvin

41.

It is said, that no one is a hero to their butler. The reason is, that it requires a hero to recognize a hero. The butler, however, will probably know well how to estimate his equals.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

42.

A hero is someone right who doesn't change.

Foreman, George

43.

It doesn't take a hero to order men into battle. It takes a hero to be one of those men who goes into battle.

Schwarzkopf, Norman

44.

In our world of big names, curiously, our true heroes tend to be anonymous. In this life of illusion and quasi-illusion, the person of solid virtues who can be admired for something more substantial than his well-knownness often proves to be the unsung hero: the teacher, the nurse, the mother, the honest cop, the hard worker at lonely, underpaid, unglamorous, unpublicized jobs.

Boorstin, Daniel J.

45.

True heroism consists in being superior to the ills of life, in whatever shape they may challenge us to combat.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

46.

The great destroyers of nations and men are comfort, plenty and security. A coward gets scared and quits. A hero gets scared, but still goes on.

47.

Be your own hero, it's cheaper than a movie ticket.

Horton, Doug

48.

The hero is one who kindles a great light in the world, who sets up blazing torches in the dark streets of life for men to see by.

Adler, Felix