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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #courage
So now begins the first war with Cordelia' in which I retreat and thereby teach her to be victorious as she pursues me. I continually fall back, and in this backward movement I teach her to know through me all the powers of erotic love, its turbulent thoughts' its passion, what longing is, and hope, and impatient expectancy. As I perform this set of steps before her' all this will correspondingly in her' It is a triumphant procession in which I am leading her, and I myself am just as much the one who dithyrambically sings praises to her victory as I am the one who shows the way. She will gain courage to believe in erotic love, to believe it is an etemal force, when she sees its dominion over me, sees my movements. She will believe me, partly because I rely on my artistry, and partly because at the bottom of what I am doing there is truth. If that were not the case, she would not believe me. With my every move, she becomes stronger and stronger; love is awakening in her soul; she is being enthroned in her meaning as a woman ↗
And after and for a long time to come he'd have reason to evoke the recollection of [the strangers'] smiles and to reflect upon the good will which provoked them for it had power to protect and to confer honor and to strengthen resolve and it had the power to heal men and to bring them to safety long after all other resources were exhausted. ↗
I feel good with my husband: I like his warmth and his bigness and his being-there and his making and his jokes and stories and what he reads and how he likes fishing and walks and pigs and foxes and little animals and is honest and not vain or fame-crazy and how he shows his gladness for what I cook him and joy for when I make him something, a poem or a cake, and how he is troubled when I am unhappy and wants to do anything so I can fight out my soul-battles and grow up with courage and a philosophical ease. I love his good smell and his body that fits with mine as if they were made in the same body-shop to do just that. What is only pieces, doled out here and there to this boy and that boy, that made me like pieces of them, is all jammed together in my husband. So I don't want to look around any more: I don't need to look around for anything. ↗
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 live taking the form of a readiness to die. 'He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,' is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if we will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying. ↗
Till we recognize what’s sick and messed up about ourselves this world is gonna stay sick and messed up. ↗
That growing seed of self-doubt that you’re just not good enough and everyone else is making a mockery of your anguish by celebrating without you (or so it seems)… An oh so familiar feeling. Neighborhood games, cliques, exercise, travel, writers’ groups, bridal showers, parties, gatherings and many others that has everyone wrapped up in each other’s “sense of belonging”. But you forget that you are, and have been in groups with as few members as two, which inadvertently and even deliberately excluded some and crushed egos like yours. It’s a self perpetuating thought that stings like hundreds of paper cuts when you feel like an outsider. You’re going to be fine—you know how this goes, the conflicted emotions that come with being left out to dry and somehow, albeit excruciatingly slow at first, you manage to navigate your way back to that place where you are happy to see others enjoying themselves and even wish them well and quite sincerely. And once again, you rediscover the sheer pleasure of your own company. When you can move on from being dumped—yes, dumped—and come to terms with how everything happens for a reason and that there are no magic formulas to relationships except being your truest self and letting chips fall where they may. And that there is no such thing as ‘novelty of beginnings’ because if you let it be—yourself and others— the universe will spin just as it should and not faster than you think, whenever you’re drowning in deep trepidation and isolation. That the waning is just as intense as the waxing. The path towards darkness isn’t as short and fast as you might think. It’s when you allow fear to guide your actions that you begin the nose-dive degradation into helplessness. But just because you are here right now doesn’t mean you don’t know or can’t return to the light of healing. And just because it cannot be seen, it doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Believe this—remind yourself (yet again)—this place is familiar territory. And it will repeat itself in dizzying succession because you’re human and you have emotions—raw and unprocessed. You will try everything, you will fall in love over and over again. It will never be perfect. And yet you have and will survive each and every single time—smarting, scathed, shattered, maybe not wiser—but you’ve had your practice and damn me if you say you didn’t so enjoy it while it lasted. It’s alright, faith isn’t supposed to make sense (most times). It’s meant to carry you through the darkest hours when you feel stripped off, of what little strength and courage you have left. It creeps up on you and carries you forward, a step at a time until, you can believe, again. Forgive yourself, then others and move right on. Take everything the same: triumph or defeat, winning or losing, in the company of, and in your sublime aloneness, fame or shame, sadness or gladness they’re all identical just cloaked differently. And temporary. And it’s all going to pass. As if you didn’t know that too, yet. Journey on and hold that heart of yours sacred. When it breaks, it feels like it’s never going to mend but it always does, scars included. Kindness is a gift we take delight in giving others. It’s now time to unwrap it for yourself. ↗
