Quotes about Courage

As long as matters are really hopeful," wrote Chesterton, "hope is mere flattery or platitude. It is only when everything is hopeless that hope begins to be a strength at all. Like all the Christian virtues, it is as unreasonable as it is indispensable.

The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't be complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us.

Audacious quip of Teresa of Avila when she was energetically engaged in reforming the Carmelite monasteries, traveling all over Spain by oxcart on bad roads. One day she was thrown from her cart into a muddy stream. She shook her fist at God, "God, if this is the way you treat your friends, no wonder you don't have many.

A beautiful discipline of the soul can become sappy, mindless counsel, if we divorce it from the biblical roots of honesty, grief, lament, and genuine celebration from which it originates. No! If we are to live praising lives, robust lives of affirmation, we must live truly, honestly, and courageously. We cannot take shortcuts to the act of praising. We cannot praise prematurely.

For redemption is not a rescue from evil—it is a redemption of evil. Salvation is not luck but rather a courageous confrontation that is victorious in battle. And that is why praise is so exhilarating. It has nothing to do with slapping a happy face on a bad situation and grinning through it. It is fashioned deep within us, out of the sin and guilt and doubt and lonely despair that nevertheless believes. And, in that believing, becomes whole.

A Christian is a person who decides to face and live through suffering.

And yet I decide, every day, to set aside what I can do best and attempt what I do very clumsily--open myself to the frustrations and failures of loving, daring to believe that failing in love is better than succeeding in pride.

To persevere, trusting in what hopes he has, is courage in a man.

Reason can wrestle and overthrow terror.

This is courage in a man to bear unflinchingly what heaven sends.

I would rather die on my feet than live on my knees.

I want to remind women of color out there to stand your ground, and don't ever be afraid to speak up.