Quotes about Heroes and Heroism

Heroism feels and never reasons and therefore is always right.

Heroes are made in the hour of defeat.

defeat

Worship your heroes from afar; contact withers them.

hero worship

Never put your sheroes and heroes up on pedestals; placing them on pedestals is setting yourself up for disappointment. You must take the good that people do and put the bright light on that good, but human beings can never withstand such light without showing their shadows and warts. All mortals have their shortcomings and weaknesses. Their skills and deeds are what we must applaud. Don't fall victim to the cult of personality.

hero worship

We live in direct relation to the heroes and sheroes we have. The men and women who without knowing our names or recognizing our faces, risked and sometimes gave their lives to support our country and our way of living. We must acknowledge them and say thank you.

The difference between a hero and a coward is one step sideways.

cowardice

High sentiments always win in the end. The leaders who offer blood, toil, tears and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.

leadership

Calculation never made a hero.

hesitation

Heroism is the dazzling and glorious concentration of courage.

concentration

No man is a hero to his valet.

familiarity

Hero worship has died with horses, and if someone bows down today, it is to pick up something.

hero worship

Hero-worship exists, has existed, and will forever exist, universally among mankind.

hero worship

Worship of a hero is transcendent admiration of a great man.

hero worship

The hero is brave in deeds as well as words.

Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.

He whom prosperity humbles, and adversity strengthens, is the true hero.

Once having traversed the threshold, the hero moves in a dream landscape of curiously fluid forms, where he must survive a succession of trials.

A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.

I should say sincerity, a deep, great, genuine sincerity, is the first characteristic of all men in any way heroic.

sincerity

The legacy of heroes—the memory of a great name and the inheritance of a great example.

The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.

Every hero becomes a bore at last.

Most American heroes...are by now two men, the actual man and the romantic image.  Some are even three men—the actual man, the image, and the debunked remains.

The human passions transform man from a mere thing into a hero, into a being that in spite of tremendous handicaps tries to make sense out of life.

transformation

The hero sees values beyond what's possible. That's the nature of a hero.  It kills him, of course, ultimately. But it makes the whole struggle of humanity worthwhile.

God knows it must be tough to be a hero
To wake up in a hero's state of mind
They say it's hard to be heroic
Easier to blow it
Somebody's watching all the time
 And you're dancing on the thin edge of a dime.

A hero is somebody who voluntarily walks into the unknown.

The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one's self a fool; the truest heroism is to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to be resisted, and when to be obeyed.

obstacles

Everyone is the chief personage, the hero, of his own baptism, his own wedding, and his own funeral.

Life, misfortune, isolation, abandonment, poverty, are battlefields which have their heroes; obscure heroes, sometimes greater than the illustrious heroes.

misfortune

When the will defies fear, when duty throws the gauntlet down to fate, when honor scorns to compromise with death—this is heroic.

Heroes are created by popular demand, sometimes out of the scantiest materials, or none at all.

Heroism is endurance for one moment more.

There are heroes in evil as well as of good.

Without heroes, we're all plain people and don't know how far we can go.

Every man is the hero of his own story, however unheroic he may appear to himself or to others.

What makes us heroic?  Confronting simultaneously our supreme suffering and our supreme hope.

Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours.

A hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles.

obstacles

Heroing is one of the shortest-lifed [sic] professions there is.

This thing of being a hero, about the main thing to do is to know when to die.  Prolonged life has ruined more men than it ever made.

We can't all be heroes, for someone has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by.

A hero is a man who does what he can.

Whoe'er excels in what we prize,
Appears a hero in our eyes.

The hero obeys his own law.

To be a hero, one must give an order to oneself.

To have no heroes is to have no aspiration, to live on the momentum of the past, to be thrown back upon routine, sensuality, and the narrow self.

aspiration