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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"If you look in real life, it is very hard to describe people as good people, bad people, heroes or villains. People aren't bad people. They all have their justifications."
"There are no heroes...in life, the monsters win."
"We were king’s men, knights, and heroes . . . but some knights are dark and full of terror, my lady. War makes monsters of us all.” “Are you saying you are monsters?” “I am saying we are human. You are not the only one with wounds, Lady Brienne"
"In ancient shadows and twilightsWhere childhood had strayed,The world's great sorrows were bornAnd its heroes were made.In the lost boyhood of JudasChrist was betrayed."
"Bradley Manning should be regarded as a hero. He is doing what an honest, decent citizen should be doing: letting your population know what the government, the people who rule you are doing. They want to keep it secret of course."
"I've never tried to reach a certain demographic of an audience or try to say: OK, now I'm going to do this type of film to transition myself into more adult roles. Or a romantic hero. Or whatever it may be."
"A hero's love is as delicate as a maiden's."
"When we want culture more than potatoes, and illumination more than sugar-plums, then the great resources of a world are taxed anddrawn out, and the result, or staple production, is, not slaves, nor operatives, but men,--those rare fruits called heroes, saints, poets, philosophers, and redeemers."
"Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes."
"Fame is an illusive thing - here today, gone tomorrow. The fickle, shallow mob raises its heroes to the pinnacle of approval today and hurls them into oblivion tomorrow at the slightest whim; cheers today, hisses tomorrow; utter forgetfulness in a few months."
"Why let your fury lay deep inside you, sullenly boiling your blood into silent steam and griding your bones to dust? I it not better to thrust it out with great velocity from every pore, with your every action? Let your actions speak your legend. The physical is the manifestation of the spirit. Let your spirit be teeming with fury. Let your strength be unusual and controlled. 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."
"The ordinary man is as courageous and invulnerable as a hero when he does not recognize any danger, when he has no eyes to see it.Conversely, the hero's only vulnerable spot is on his back, and so exactly where he has no eyes."
"Higher than "thou shalt" stands "I will" (the heroes), and higher than "I will" stands "I am" (the Greek gods)."
"What makes a hero? Courage, strength, morality, withstanding adversity? Are these the traits that truly show and create a hero? Is the light truly the source of darkness or vice versa? Is the soul a source of hope or despair? Who are these so called heroes and where do they come from? Are their origins in obscurity or in plain sight?"
"The fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them."
"How many famous and high-spirited heroes have lived a day too long?"
"But for me there is neither Monday nor Sunday: there are days which pass in disorder, and then, sudden lightning like this one. Nothing has changed and yet everything is different. I can't describe it, it's like the Nausea and yet it's just the opposite: at last an adventure happens to me and when I question myself I see that it happens that I am myself and that I am here; I am the one who splits in the night, I am as happy as the hero of a novel."
"It is said, that no one is a hero to their butler. The reason is, that it requires a hero to recognize a hero. The butler, however, will probably know well how to estimate his equals."
"I grew up in the '80s in L.A., so Ice Cube and Magic Johnson are my heroes."
"I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are."
