#heroism

The truth is that the heroism of your childhood entertainments was not true valor. It was theatre. The grand gesture, the moment of choice, the mortal danger, the external foe, the climactic battle whose outcome resolves all--all designed to appear heroic, to excite and gratify and audience. Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality--there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand?Here is the truth--actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#real-life #design

Israel has created a new image of the Jew in the world - the image of a working and an intellectual people, of a people that can fight with heroism. ↗

— Nnamdi Azikiwe

#fight #heroism #image #intellectual #israel

Heroism is endurance for one moment more. ↗

— George F. Kennan

#heroism #moment #more

Being terrified but going ahead and doing what must be done—that's courage. The one who feels no fear is a fool, and the one who lets fear rule him is a coward. ↗

— Piers Anthony

#fear #heroism #courage

A friend once asked me why it was that stories about animals and their heroism...are so compelling. ...we love them because they're the closest thing we have to material evidence of an objective moral order--or, to put it another way, they're the closest thing we have to proof of the existence of God. They seem to prove that the things that matter to and move us the most--things like love, courage, loyalty, altruism--aren't just ideas we made up from nothing. To see them demonstrated in other animals proves they're real things, that they exist in the world independently of what humans invent and tell each other in the form of myth or fable. ↗

— Gwen Cooper

#courage

When he endures nothing but endless miseries-- What pleasure is there in living the day after day, Edging slowly back and forth toward death? Anyone who warms their heart with the glow Of flickering hope is worth nothing at all. The noble man should either live with honor or die with honor. That's all there is to be said. ↗

— Sophocles

#nobility #suicide #death

I do not believe that I am made of the stuff which constitutes heroes, because, in all of the hundreds of instances that my voluntary acts have placed me face to face with death, I cannot recall a single one where any alternative step to that I took occurred to me until many hours later. ↗

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

#death

Vanye: You're asking me to kill you. Luthiel: I'm asking you to save her. ↗

— Robert Fanney

#heroism #luthiel #vanye #death

Each one of us has the power — and must develop the will — to be the hero of his own life. We believe in goals, in purposes, in achievement and in the joy of living. ↗

— Andrew Bernstein

#life

No one is an unjust villain in his own mind. Even - perhaps even especially - those who are the worst of us. Some of the cruelest tyrants in history were motivated by noble ideals, or made choices that they would call 'hard but necessary steps' for the good of their nation. We're all the hero of our own story. ↗

— Jim Butcher

#heroism #tyranny #motivational