Tao Te Ching
Courage
The word, "courage" brings to mind super heroes and swash-buckling over-confidence. True courage, however, may have less bravado, more self-assurance; less impulsiveness, more strategy; less ego, more compassion. Often true courage shows as the choice to follow our own inner wisdom rather than the cultural or political prescription; to not be deterred by external criticism, by inner fears. Having to prove ourselves as a motivation, undermines bravery and encourages foolishness. Only the dedication to a meaningful vision over personal reward makes authentic courage possible. Not all failures arise from lack of courage; but, most may.
Quotes (77)
“It is only when we have the courage to face things exactly as they are, without any sort of self deception or illusion, that a light will develop out of events by which the path to success may be recognized.”
“Those with outer courage dare to die, those with inner courage dare to live.”
“He plans secretly, moves surreptitiously, and foils the enemy's intentions... but his victories bring him neither reputation for wisdom or credit for courage because the world at large knows nothing of them.”
“To persevere, trusting in what hopes he has, is courage in a man. The coward despairs.”
“I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is over self.”
“The skillful employer will employ the wise, the brave, the covetous, and the stupid because the wise delight in establishing merit, the brave in showing their courage in action, the covetous in seizing advantages, and the stupid in having no fear of death.”
“The first to apologize is the bravest, the first to forgive is the strongest, the first to forget is the happiest.”
“I have built a monument more lasting than bronze and set higher than the pyramids of kings. I shall not wholly die.”
“The agricultural population, says Cato, produces the bravest men, the most valiant soldiers, and a class of citizens the least given of all to evil designs…. A bad bargain is always a ground for repentance.”
“No labor, according to Diogenes, is good but that which aims at producing courage and strength of soul rather than of body.”
“The warrior who has no restraint,
Though hearty and brave, will die by the sword.”
“Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.”
“If a reader is brave enough and goes straight forward in his meditation, no delusions can disturb him. But if he hesitates one moment, he is as a person watching from a small window for a horseman to pass by, and in a wink he has missed seeing.”
“Come where thou need not to learn from me,
For thou shalt, by thine own experience,
Be able in a professorial chair to lecture on this subject
Better than Virgil, while he was alive”
“Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another. Have courage to use your own reason!”
“Life is short and truth works far and lives long: let us speak the truth.”
“Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace.”
“A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.”
“Live no longer to the expectation of those deceived and deceiving people with who we converse... I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you... I cannot sell my liberty and my power, to save their sensibility.”
“What recommends commerce to me is its enterprise and bravery. It does not clasp its hands and pray to Jupiter.”
“an utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward… the most reliable and useful courage is that which arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril.”
“People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbors.”
“To get the most out of life you must be active, you must live and you must have the courage to taste the thrill of being young ...”
“The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that's what an army is—a mob; the don't fight with courage that's born in them, but with courage that's borrowed from their mass”
“Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.”
“To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love... the glories of war are all blood-stained, delirious, and infected with crime; the combative instinct is a savage prompting by which one man's good is found in another's evil.”
“It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield.”
“If I keep on saying to myself that I cannot do a certain thing, it is possible that I may end by really becoming incapable of doing it. On the contrary, if I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning.”
“Talk about the courage to face cannon and Cossacks! It is nothing to the courage required to speak aloud in broad daylight of the finest things we have it us! I was not equal to it.”
“Old age is like death in that some face it with indifference, not because they have more courage than others, but because they have less imagination.”
“Many a man will have the courage to die gallantly, but will not have the courage to say, or even to think, that the cause for which he is asked to die is an unworthy one.”
“Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.”
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
“Here at last was a philosopher who had the courage to see that all was not for the best in the fundamentals of the universe, to be the first to speak of the suffering of the world which visibly and glaringly surrounds us, and of the confusion, passion, evil—all those things which the [other philosophers] hardly seemed to notice and always tried to resolve into all-embracing harmony and comprehensibility.”
“Don't tell me women are not the stuff of heroes... My body will not allow me to mingle with the men but my heart is far braver than that of a man.”
“But only a brief moment - one breath or two - is granted to the brave , whose wage is the long nights of the grave.”
“I knew that in this laughter were courage and integrity. Both the old man and my brother turned pale, awed by my courage and integrity.”
“by believing in a myth, desiring it, imbuing it with blood, sweat and tears (tears alone are not sufficient, nor is blood, nor sweat), man transforms that myth into reality.”
“It expected me to hear the Cry of the future, to exert every effort to divine what that Cry wanted, why it was calling, and where it invited us to go... Greetings, man, you little two-legged cock! It's really true (don't listen to what others say): if you don't crow in the morning, the sun does not come up!”
“We must give courage to our leaders to lead us, to re-create for us a Christianity that would be intelligible to Christ.”
“Upon Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and his native creed, Muhammad built a religion simple and clear and strong, and a morality of ruthless courage and racial price, which in a generation marched to 100 victories, in a century to empire, and remains to this day a virile force throughout half the world.”
“You could attach prices to thoughts. Some cost a lot, some a little. And how does one pay for thoughts? The answer, I think, is: with courage.”
“Shelley was an iconoclast, a fighter against the commonplace and against corruption. He was the singer of man's emancipation.”
“Grant to us the serenity of mind to accept that which cannot be changed; courage to change that which can be changed, and wisdom to know the one from the other.”
“The bitterest creature under heaven is the wife who discovers that her husband’s bravery is only bravado, that his strength is only a uniform, that his power is but a gun in the hands of a fool.”
“it is the human being's capacity for dreaming, his unwillingness to accept the gray wall of facts as his prison, his power of ... sallying forth to seek the adventure of the unknown and unrealized, that is the ticket to his redemption.”
“My generation of radicals and breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old graces of courtesy and politeness.”
“If you have character, endeavor, personality, courage and the capacity for concentrated labor, you will do what is your destiny – and, perhaps, even do it well.”
“The men and women who—at the height of World War II—raided the secondhand shops for his out-of-print books knew what they were about. For no writer ever raised a braver banner to which all who love freedom might adhere.”
“What T. S. Elliot meant in his poem, The Waste Land... a land where everybody is living an inauthentic life, doing as other people do, doing as you're told, with no courage for your own life. That is the wasteland.”
“From whatever aspect we consider the command, we can now see that, in the compact and perfected form it has acquired... it is the most dangerous single element in the social life of mankind. We must have the courage to stand against it and break its tyranny.”
“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction.”
“The courage to doubt, on which American pluralism, federalism, and religious liberty are founded, is a special brand of courage, a more selfless brand of courage than the courage of orthodoxy. A brand that has been rarer and more precious in the history of the West than the courage of the crusader.”
“In whatever arena of life one may meet the challenge of courage, whatever may be the sacrifices he faces if he follow his conscience - the loss of his friends, his fortune, his contentment, even the esteem of his fellow men - each man must decide for himself the course he will follow. The stories of past courage can define that ingredient - they can teach, they can offer hope, they provide inspiration. But they cannot supply courage itself. For this each man must look into his own soul.”
“How can a man be so brave and so stupid, so gentle and so cruel, so warming and so detestable — all at the same time?”
“The Greatest Generation? They tell me I am a member of the greatest generation. That's because I saw combat duty as a bombardier in World War II. But I refuse to celebrate "the greatest generation" because in so doing we are celebrating courage and sacrifice in the cause of war. And we are mis-educating the young to believe that military heroism is the noblest form of heroism, when it should be remembered only as the tragic accompaniment of horrendous policies driven by power and profit. The current infatuation with World War II prepares us—innocently on the part of some, deliberately on the part of others—for more war, more military adventures, more attempts to emulate the military heroes of the past.”
“I feel the hot winds of karma driving me. Nevertheless I remain here. I must not shrink from the clear white light”
“We need the courage to change our values to the regeneration of our families, the life that surrounds us.”
“What afflicted people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.”
“The demand for justice runs through the entirety of the Jewish tradition. I hope, in my years on the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States, I will have the strength and the courage to remain constant in the service of that demand.”
“The only reason we don't open our hearts and minds to other people is that they trigger confusion in us that we don't feel brave enough or sane enough to deal with. To the degree that we look clearly and compassionately at ourselves, we feel confident and fearless about looking into someone else's eyes.”
“You don't have to know how to do it... There is no help coming from anywhere at all. You have to make your own individual journey that is purely based on you.”
“If being an egomaniac means I believe in what I do and in my art or music, then in that respect you can call me that... I believe in what I do, and I'll say it.”
“Determination, energy, and courage appear spontaneously when we care deeply about something. We take risks that are unimaginable in any other context.”
“Curiosity can bring guts out of hiding but curiosity evaporates. We need guts to go for the long haul. Like an amusing friend you can’t really trust, curiosity turns you on but then leaves you to make it on your own—with whatever courage you can muster”
“Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo... They push the human race forward because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
“If we are serious about achieving enlightenment, we need the strength to renounce the things that are a big deal for us, we need a great dal of courage to step onto the path”
“We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.”
“these three characteristics of buddha nature can be summed up in a single word: courage—specifically the courage to be, just as we are, right here, right now... Facing experience directly”
“It takes a lot of courage to fight biases and oppressive regimes, but it takes even grater courage to admit ignorance and venture into the unknown.”
“Courage is the root of compassion. Compassion means you have the strong aspiration and in fact a firm resolve to do something to end the suffering.”
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