#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

Who is better off? The one who writes to revel in the voluptuousness of the life that surrounds them? Or the one who writes to escape the tediousness of that which awaits them outside? Whose flame will last longer? ↗

— Roman Payne

#books #escape #flame #heroic #heroism

Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero. ↗

— Ursula K. Le Guin

#bravery #courage #curiousity #freedom #heroism

Sometimes standing against evil is more important than defeating it. The greatest heroes stand because it is right to do so, not because they believe they will walk away with their lives. Such selfless courage is a victory in itself. ↗

— N.D. Wilson

#heroism #victory #courage

You or I might think that at least one would show courage and put up a fight. But neither you nor I have suffered as they, and even we have born witness in silence to lesser ills under less dire threat. Yet, in the face of evil, to sit silent is an even greater evil. Complacency is ever the enabler of darkest deeds; ↗

— Robert Fanney

#courage #enablement #evil #fantasy #fight

There's no shame in fear. But understand this - the coward is ruled by fear, while the hero rides it like a wild stallion. ↗

— David Gemmell

#courage #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