#hum

Last year I built a Courage Machine, but I thought it might be noisy and was too afraid to turn it on. So I coated it with glue, covered it with cat hair, mounted it on my wall, and started claiming it was an exotic animal I killed on a Safari in Africa. I'd like to believe people believe me, on account of it being so strange that it has to be true. ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#africa #cat-hair #courage #exotic-animal #fear

May the New Year bring you courage to break your resolutions early! My own plan is to swear off every kind of virtue, so that I triumph even when I fall! ↗

— Aleister Crowley

#new-year #courage

The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always. ↗

— Arthur Miller

#bravery #courage #embarassment #fear #fury

If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#sagan #science #courage

Great occasions do not make heroes or cowards; they simply unveil them to the eyes of men. Silently and perceptibly, as we wake or sleep, we grow strong or weak; and last some crisis shows what we have become. ↗

— Brooke Foss Westcott

#courage #cowardice #development #humanity #strength

Before I could lose my courage, I said, "Don't I get a kiss for luck? It's kind of a tradition, right?" I figured she would punch me. Instead, she drew her knife and stared at the army marching toward us. "Come back alive, Seaweed Brain. Then, we'll see. ↗

— Rick Riordan

#kiss #percabeth #courage

Human misery must somewhere have a stop; there is no wind that always blows a storm; great good fortune comes to failure in the end. All is change; all yields its place and goes; to persevere, trusting in what hopes he has, is courage in a man. The coward despairs. ↗

— Euripides

#humor #philosophical #change

I believe it will have become evident why, for me, adjectives such as happy, contented, blissful, enjoyable, do not seem quite appropriate to any general description of this process I have called the good life, even though the person in this process would experience each one of these at the appropriate times. But adjectives which seem more generally fitting are adjectives such as enriching, exciting, rewarding, challenging, meaningful. This process of the good life is not, I am convinced, a life for the faint-fainthearted. It involves the stretching and growing of becoming more and more of one's potentialities. It involves the courage to be. It means launching oneself fully into the stream of life. Yet the deeply exciting thing about human beings is that when the individual is inwardly free, he chooses as the good life this process of becoming. ↗

— Carl R. Rogers

#inspirational #life #courage

Small men oft feel a need to prove their courage with unseemly boasts," he declared. "I doubt if he could kill a duck." Tyrion shrugged. "Fetch the duck. ↗

— George R.R. Martin

#courage #dance #dragons #duck #funny

We have made men proud of most vices, but not of cowardice. Whenever we have almost succeeded in doing so, God permits a war or an earthquake or some other calamity, and at once courage becomes so obviously lovely and important even in human eyes that all our work is undone, and there is still at least one vice of which they feel genuine shame. The danger of inducing cowardice in our patients, therefore, is lest we produce real self-knowledge and self-loathing, with consequent repentance and humility. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#human-nature #humility #courage