Courage is reckoned the greatest of all virtues; because, unless a man has that virtue, he has no security for preserving any other.
~Samuel Johnson (Thanks, Frank Lynch)

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear.
~Ambrose Redmoon

Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every day you either see a scar or courage. Where you dwell will define your struggle.
~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com

Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.
~Winston Churchill

Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says I'll try again tomorrow.
~Mary Anne Radmacher

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

People are made of flesh and blood and a miracle fibre called courage.
~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.
~Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters to Lucilius

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave.
~Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar, 1894

It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived.
~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

Courage is being afraid but going on anyhow.
~Dan Rather

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

A coward is a hero with a wife, kids, and a mortgage.
~Marvin Kitman

Coward: A man in whom the instinct of self-preservation acts normally.
~Sultana Zoraya

Bravery is being the only one who knows you're afraid.
~Franklin P. Jones

Courage can't see around corners, but goes around them anyway.
~Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

If God wanted us to be brave, why did He give us legs?
~Marvin Kitman

Coward: One who, in a perilous emergency, thinks with his legs.
~Ambrose Bierce

Sometimes the biggest act of courage is a small one.
~Lauren Raffo

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.
~Ernest Hemingway, Men at War, 1942

Some have been thought brave because they were afraid to run away.
~Thomas Fuller

Fear and courage are brothers.
~Proverb

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

The courage of life is often a less dramatic spectacle than the courage of a final moment; but it is no less a magnificent mixture of triumph and tragedy.
~John F. Kennedy

One man with courage makes a majority.
~Andrew Jackson

Courage is the power to let go of the familiar.
~Raymond Lindquist

Valor is stability, not of legs and arms, but of courage and the soul.
~Michel de Montaigne

When we are afraid we ought not to occupy ourselves with endeavoring to prove that there is no danger, but in strengthening ourselves to go on in spite of the danger.
~Mark Rutherford

Courage is tiny pieces of fear all glued together.
~Terri Guillemets

True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.
~Alfred North Whitehead

Courage, in the final analysis, is nothing but an affirmative answer to the shocks of existence.
~Kurt Goldstein

To live with fear and not be afraid is the final test of maturity.
~Edward Weeks

A man of courage never wants weapons.
~Author Unknown

It is easy to be brave from a safe distance.
~Aesop

A brave arm makes a short sword long.
~Author Unknown

No one has yet computed how many imaginary triumphs are silently celebrated by people each year to keep up their courage.
~Henry S. Haskins

There is no such thing as bravery; only degrees of fear.
~John Wainwright

Look at hopelessness in the face and say: "We are simply not meant to be together." Hold courage's hand and walk away.
~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com

I'm not funny. What I am is brave.
~Lucille Ball

Courage is a peculiar kind of fear.
~Charles Kennedy

For without belittling the courage with which men have died, we should not forget those acts of courage with which men have lived.
~John F. Kennedy

Courage is fear that has said its prayers.
~Dorothy Bernard

Courage is fear holding on a minute longer.
~George Smith Patton

Courage is... the knowledge of how to fear what ought to be feared and how not to fear what ought not to be feared.
~David Ben-Gurion

Courage is knowing what not to fear.
~Plato

Optimism is the foundation of courage.
~Nicholas Murray Butler

Courage is as often the outcome of despair as of hope; in the one case we have nothing to lose, in the other everything to gain.
~Diane de Poitiers

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

Courage is being scared to death... and saddling up anyway.
~John Wayne

Necessity does the work of courage.
~Nicholas Murray Butler

Perfect courage means doing unwitnessed what we would be capable of with the world looking on.
~François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, 1678

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

Courage is the fear of being thought a coward.
~Horace Smith

Courage is to feel the daily daggers of relentless steel and keep on living.
~Douglas Malloch

The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.
~Albert Camus

Courage is nine-tenths context. What is courageous in one setting can be foolhardy in another and even cowardly in a third.
~Joseph Epstein

A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Courage is never to let your actions be influenced by your fears.
~Arthur Koestler

Courage is a kind of salvation.
~Plato

Valor is a gift. Those having it never know for sure if they have it till the test comes. And those having it in one test never know for sure if they will have it when the next test comes.
~Carl Sandburg

Courage ought to have eyes as well as arms.
~H.G. Bohn

You can't test courage cautiously.
~Anne Dillard

The only courage that matters is the kind that gets you from one moment to the next.
~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966

In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.
~Mark Twain, Notebook, 1935

I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.
~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

I believe that courage is the sum of strength and wisdom. You take away wisdom from the equation - courage may turn to rage.
~Dodinsky, www.dodinsky.com

A timid person is frightened before a danger, a coward during the time, and a courageous person afterward.
~Jean Paul Richter

Have the courage to live. Anyone can die.
~Robert Cody