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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"I just don't see anything available that gives any reasonable hope of delivering such a good year and I have no desire to grope around, hoping to 'get lucky' with other people's money. I am not attuned to this market environment, and I don't want to spoil a decent record by trying to play a game I don't understand just so I can go out a hero."
"None of us know all the potentialities that slumber in the spirit of the population, or all the ways in which that population can surprise us when there is the right interplay of events."
"Every man is the hero of his own song."
"But whoso is heroic must find crises to try his edge. Human virtue demands her champions and martyrs, and the trial of persecution always proceeds."
"The hero is suffered to be himself."
"Our globe discovers its bidden virtues, not only in heroes and arch-angels, but in gossips and nurses."
"I see it only that thyself is here, and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels and the supreme being shall not be absent from the chamber where thou sittest."
"Nothing detains the reader's attention more powerfully than deep involutions of distress, or sudden vicissitudes of fortune; and these might be abundantly afforded by memoirs of the sons of literature. They are entangled by contracts which they know not how to fulfill, and obliged to write on subjects which they do not understand. Every publication is a new period of time, from which some increase or declension of fame is to be reckoned. The gradations of a hero's life are from battle to battle, and of an author's from book to book."
"Natural selection saw to it that professional heroes who at a crucial moment tended to ask themselves questions like 'What is my purpose in life?' very quickly lacked both."
"No, what he didn't like about heroes was that they were usually suicidally gloomy when sober and homicidally insane when drunk."
"First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him."
"If Hero means sincere man, why may not every one of us be a Hero?"
"It is not to taste sweet things; but to do noble and true things, and vindicate himself under God's heaven as a God-made man, that the poorest son of Adam dimly longs. Show him the way of doing that, the dullest day-drudge kindles into a hero. They wrong man greatly who say he is to be seduced by ease. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death, are the allurements that act on the heart of man. Kindle the inner genial life of him, you have a flame that burns up all lower considerations."
"At that moment his soul is fuller of the tomb and him who lies there than of the altar and Him of whom it speaks. Such stages have to be gone through, I believe, by all young and brave souls, who must win their way through hero-worship to the worship of Him who is the King and Lord of heroes."
"Truth is certainly a branch of morality and a very important one to society."
"Decisive inventions and discoveries always are initiated by an intellectual or moral stimulus as their actual motivating force, but, usually, the final impetus to human action is given by material impulses ... merchants stood as a driving force behind the heroes of the age of discovery; this first heroic impulse to conquer the world emanated from very mortal forces"
"In a truly heroic life there is no peradventure. It is always doing or dying."
"There must be no fear, no begging, but demanding - demanding the Highest. The true devotees of the Mother are as hard, as adamant and as fearless as lions. They are not in the least upset if the whole universe suddenly crumbles into dust at their feet. Make Her listen to you. None of that cringing to Mother! Remember, She is all-powerful; She can make heroes out of stones."
"To know that the odds are so high that only through the perishing of your life will the minions survive, that's love. That's heroism."
"I never looked at Noah as an animal collector. I always thought of him as an apocalyptic character. I read everything I found about it and was surprised to find that in all religions there is the story of the flood, and that one "hero" saved the world. This proved that Noah and his Ark - were not a religious myth, and is evidence that humanity really went through the flood."
