Hero quotes
3.2K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside hero — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Luck is everything... My good luck in life was to be a really frightened person. I'm fortunate to be a coward, to have a low threshold of fear, because a hero couldn't make a good suspense film."
"To harbor spiteful feelings against ordinary people for not being heroes is possible only for narrow-minded or embittered man."
"A tragedy is that moment where the hero comes face to face with his true identity."
"Every hero is a Samson. The strong man succumbs to the intrigues of the weak and the many; and if in the end he loses all patience he crushes both them and himself."
"He who wins a thousand common hearts is entitled to some renown; but he who keeps undisputed sway over the heart of a coquette is indeed a hero."
"The idol of today pushes the hero of yesterday out of our recollection; and will, in turn, be supplanted by his successor of tomorrow."
"The characteristic of genuine heroism is its persistency. All men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when you have resolved to be great, abide by yourself, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic."
"Heroes aren't athletes who set new sports records, or Hollywood actors who make 'daring' films or politicians who make bold promises. Heroes are people who place themselves at risk for the benefit of others."
"Most have been forgotten. Most deserve to be forgotten. The heroes will always be remembered. The best. The best and the worst. And a few who were a bit of both."
"The hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men."
"The ordinary man is involved in action, the hero acts. An immense difference."
"The average is the borderline that keeps mere men in their place. Those who step over the line are heroes by the very act. Go."
"What I regretted in La Nausee was not to have put myself completely into the thing. I remained outside my hero's disease, protected by my neurosis which, through writing, gave me happiness."
"Jack Nicholson is a hero of mine."
"I stand in this parking lot, realizing that I’ve never been this far from home, and here is this girl I love and cannot follow. I hope this is the hero’s errand, because not following her is the hardest thing I’ve ever done."
"Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in storytelling, and our story shall be the education of our heroes."
"It isnt only fictional heroes to whom toast means home and comfort. It is related of the Duke of Wellington - I believe by Lord Ellesmere - that when he landed at Dover in 1814, after six years absence from England, the first order he gave at the Ship Inn was for an unlimited supply of buttered toast."
"I think that Richard Nixon will go down in history as a true folk hero, who struck a vital blow to the whole diseased concept of the revered image and gave the American virtue of irreverence and skepticism back to the people."
"Skywalker is a direct translation of the word shaman out of the Tungusic, which is where Siberian shamanism comes from. So these heroes that are being instilled in the heart of the culture are shamanic heroes. They control a force which is bigger than everybody and holds the galaxy together."
"Heroes have gone out; quacks have come in; the reign of quacks has not ended with the nineteenth century. The sceptre is held with a firmer grasp; the empire has a wider boundary. We are all the slaves of quackery in one shape or another. Indeed, one portion of our being is always playing the successful quack to the other."
