Courage

This is another one of those trailing threads.  This one is on courage.

I actually have a distinct reason for posting these, which I'm not really going to go into.  But it comes up in the context of somebody actually telling me, in an odd particular situation, to my surprise "you're courageous."  The statement was genuinely made, and much appreciated, but it's incorrect.  In that matter, at that particular time, I was doing something that I had no other choice but to do, or so I felt.  I replied that "No, I'm not.  I have no choice on this matter.  Courage implies a choice."  In retrospect, I did have a choice, which would have involved a pretty strong element of deception, to include self deception, but I don't care for deception.  Honesty isn't really the same thing as courage, but perhaps a person has to be honest with themselves to have genuine courage.

Anyhow, the term "courage" like that of "hero" is grossly overused these days.  It upsets people to note it, but I'll see, for example, popular citations to a persons "heroic battle with" or "courageous fight against" in those circumstances in which the writer often means nothing more than that the person was afflicted by some terrible tragedy, or present in one. That's not necessarily courage, so much as it is resignation or acceptance, or simply bad luck.  Anyhow, some statements regarding courage, which I think are noteworthy.

On these, I think Rickenbacker is particularly correct.  There can, really, be no courage without fear.   To be courageous implies fear.  It isn't absence of fear that makes a person courageous, it's the overwhelming presence of it.

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Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.

Winston Churchill

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 It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.

 E.E. Cummings

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Courage is grace under pressure.”

Ernest Hemingway

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I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.

Harper Lee, in the voice of Atticus Finch, in To Kill a Mockingbird
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I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.

Nelson Mandela

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Courage is fear holding on a minute longer.

George Patton

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Courage is doing what your afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you’re scared.

Eddie Rickenbacker

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Courage is found in unlikely places.

J.R.R. Tolkien

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Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.

Mark Twain

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Courage is being scared to death but saddling up anyway.

John Wayne


Courage is doing what your afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you’re scared.

Eddie Rickenbacker