Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear--not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward, it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word. Consider the flea!--incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage. Whether you are asleep or awake he will attack you, caring nothing for the fact that in bulk and strength you are to him as are the massed armies of the earth to a sucking child; he lives both day and night and all days and nights in the very lap of peril and the immediate presence of death, and yet is no more afraid than is the man who walks the streets of a city that was threatened by an earthquake ten centuries before. When we speak of Clive, Nelson, and Putnam as men who didn't know what fear was, we ought always to add the flea--and put him at the head of the procession.
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On the view of earth from 3.7 billion miles away: 'Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home, That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. [...] There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.'
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A Whig is properly what is called a Trimmer -- that is, a coward to both sides of the question, who dare not be a knave nor an honest man, but is a sort of whiffing, shuffling, cunning, silly, contemptible, unmeaning negation of the two.
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Any coward can sit in his home and criticize a pilot for flying into a mountain in a fog. But I would rather, by far, die on a mountainside than in bed. What kind of man would live where there is no daring And is life so dear that we should blame men for dying in adventure Is there a better way to die
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The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.
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A timid person is frightened before a danger, a coward during the time, and a courageous person afterward.
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A brave man dies but once, a coward many times.
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I am convinced that a light supper, a good night's sleep, and a fine morning, have sometimes made a hero of the same man, who, by an indigestion, a restless night, and rainy morning, would have proved a coward.
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Yet each man kills the thing he loves, from all let this be heard. Some does it with a bitter look, some with a flattering word. The coward does it with a kiss the brave man with the sword
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Be scared. You cant help that. But dont be afraid. Aint nothing in the woods going to hurt you unless you corner it, or it smells that you are afraid. A bear or a deer, too, has got to be scared of a coward the same as a brave man has got to be.
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None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear.
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A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deniest the least syllable of thy addition.
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A coward turns away, but a brave man's choice is danger.
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That man is not truly brave who is afraid either to seem or to be, when it suits him, a coward.
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A dog barks when his master is attacked. I would be a coward if I saw that God's truth is attacked and yet would remain silent.
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The brave man inattentive to his duty, is worth little more to his country than the coward who deserts in the hour of danger.
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One of the reasons for the failure of feminism to dislodge deeply held perceptions of male and female behavior was its insistence that women were victims, and men powerful patriarchs, which made a travesty of ordinary people's experience of the mutual interdependence of men and women.
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Mourn not the dead that in the cool earth lie, but rather mourn the apathetic, throng the coward and the meek who see the world's great anguish and its wrong, and dare not speak.
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The man who gets drunk in peacetime is a coward. The man who gets drunk in wartime goes on being a coward.
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My nonviolence does not admit of running away from danger and leaving dear ones unprotected. Between violence and cowardly flight, I can only prefer violence to cowardice. I can no more preach nonviolence to a coward than I can tempt a blind man to enjoy healthy scenes.
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Even when someone battles hard, there is an equal portion for one who lingers behind, and in the same honor are held both the coward and the brave man the idle man and he who has done much meet death alike.
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To express hostility without consequence is to be an anonymous coward.
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The real hero is always a hero by mistake he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.
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Those who know the truth are not equal to those who love it Confucius All truth is safe and nothing else is safe, but he who keeps back truth, or withholds it from men, from motives of expediency, is either a coward or a criminal.
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'Man Without Enemies: You have no enemies you say? Alas, my friend, the boast is poor. He who has mingled in the fray Of duty, that the brave endure, Must have made foes. If you have none, Small is the work that you have done. You've hit no traitor on the hip, You've dashed no cup from perjured lip, You've never turned the wrong to right, You've been a coward in the fight.'
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A light supper, a good night's sleep, and a fine morning have sometimes made a hero of the same man who, by an indigestion, a restless night, and a rainy morning would have proved a coward.
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But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? The entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world -- a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.
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There's always something fishy about the French.
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Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear-not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave.
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As the ostrich when pursued hideth his head, but forgetteth his body; so the fears of a coward expose him to danger.
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