J. R. R. Tolkien
Novelist, Scholar
"Living by faith includes the call to something greater than cowardly self-preservation."
Heroism quotes
Heroism
123 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Philosopher
"No man is a hero to his valet. This is not because the hero is no hero, but because the valet is a valet."
John Keats
Poet
"There is an electric fire in human nature tending to purify - so that among these human creatures there is continually some birth of new heroism. The pity is that we must wonder at it, as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish."
Arthur Conan Doyle
Writer, Physician
"There are heroisms all round us waiting to be done."
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Novelist
"A hero cannot be a hero unless in a heroic world."
Explore further
Topics related to Heroism
Browse quotes that often appear alongside heroism — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Heroism quotes (page 1 of 7)
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"A fixed idea ends in madness or heroism."
Read quote
13 likes
"My father always says that heroism is in the Pashtun DNA."
Read quote
13 likes
"Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur"
Read quote
11 likes
"Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice."
Read quote
10 likes
"There is only one way fit for a man - Heroism, or Master-Morality, or Violence. All the other people in between are ploughing the sand."
Read quote
9 likes
"True heroism consists in rising superior to misfortune."
Read quote
9 likes
"Heroism is accessible. Happiness is more difficult."
Read quote
8 likes
"Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind and in contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and good. Heroism is an obedience to a secret impulse of an individual"
Read quote
8 likes
"I pay tribute to the endless heroism of youth."
Read quote
8 likes
"What is a society without a heroic dimension?"
Read quote
8 likes
"No one is so cowardly that Love could not inspire him to heroism."
Read quote
7 likes
"But, you know, I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints. Heroism and sanctity don't really appeal to me, I imagine. What interests me is being a man."
Read quote
7 likes
"What makes a hero truly great is that they never despair."
Read quote
7 likes
"Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality – there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth – actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested."
Read quote
6 likes
"The hero is suffered to be himself."
Read quote
6 likes
"Every heroic act measures itself by its contempt of some external good. But it finds its own success at last, and then the prudent also extol."
Read quote
6 likes
"The true epic of our times is not "Arm's and the Man," but "Tools and the Man"--an infinitely wider kind of epic."
Read quote
6 likes
"In a truly heroic life there is no peradventure. It is always doing or dying."
Read quote
6 likes
"There are heroes in evil as well as in good."
Read quote
6 likes
"You cannot be a hero without being a coward."
Read quote
6 likes