Courage

Life Shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.

                        -- Anais Nin

Courage is the atom of change.

            --  Bettina R. Flores

You are never asked

to do more than you are able

without being given

the strength and ability

to do it.

            --  Eileen Caddy

Until you try, you don’t know that you can’t do.

            -- Henry James

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.

            -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Our doubts are traitors,

and make us lose the good we oft might win

by fearing to attempt.

            -- William Shakespeare

Courage is rarely reckless or foolish . . . courage usually involves a highly realistic estimate of the odds that must be faced.

            -- Margaret Truman

Sometimes even to live is an act of courage.

            -- Lucius Annaeus Seneca

 Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.

            -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds. The latter cannot understand it when a [person] does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses their intelligence.

            -- Albert Einstein

Everyone has talent.

What is rare

is the courage

to follow that talent

to dark place where it leads.

            -- Erica Jong 

Self-esteem is so delicate a flower that praise tends to make it bloom, while discouragement often nips it in the bud.

            -- Alex F. Osborn

You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

            -- Eleanor Roosevelt

To have courage for whatever comes in life-everything lies in that.

            -- Mother Teresa

It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.

            -- Alan Cohen

If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all. And so today I still have a dream.

            – Martin Luther king, Jr., The Trumpet of Conscience

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.

            -- Maya Angelou

You don't develop courage by being happy in your relationships everyday. You develop it by surviving difficult times and challenging adversity.

            -- Barbara De Angelis

Often the difference between a successful person and a failure is not one has better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on one's ideas, to take a calculated risk -- and to act.

            -- Maxwell Maltz

Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers, but to be fearless in facing them. Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain, but for the heart to conquer it.

            -- Rabindranath Tagore

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.

            --  Ambrose Redmoon

Courage is reclaiming your life after a devastating event robs you of your confidence and self-esteem. It is facing tomorrow with a firm resolve to reach deep within yourself to find another strength, another talent. ... It is taking yourself to another level of your own existence where you are once again whole, productive, special...

            --  Catherine Britton

Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.

            --  Aristotle

The courage of life is often a less dramatic spectacle than the courage of a final moment, but it is no less than a magnificent mixture of triumph and tragedy. People do what they must–in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures–and that is the basis of all human morality.

            --  John F. Kennedy