Courage is reckoned the greatest of all virtues; because, unless a man has that virtue, he has no security for preserving any other.
What it means
Courage comes first among the virtues because the others depend on it. Without it, you can’t count on keeping any of your other good qualities once holding on to them gets risky.
Honesty, kindness or loyalty only last as long as you are willing to pay for them. Courage is what lets you pay.
The context
James Boswell, Johnson’s friend and biographer, recorded the remark at a dinner at the Dillys’ on Wednesday, 5 April 1775. The talk had turned to public speaking. Johnson said “it is more disgraceful never to try to speak, than to try it and fail; as it is more disgraceful not to fight, than to fight and be beaten.”
Boswell thought the argument didn’t hold, and asked why it was thought disgraceful for a man not to fight, but not disgraceful not to speak in public. Johnson answered that there may be other reasons for not speaking “than want of resolution: he may have nothing to say,” laughing, and then added this line. Boswell published his Life of Samuel Johnson in 1791.
Why it matters
It explains why good intentions so often fail at the moment they’re needed. Most of us know what the honest or kind thing is; what we lack, in that moment, is the nerve to do it when it costs something.
Johnson’s point turns courage into a practical habit rather than a heroic one. Each small brave act, saying the uncomfortable thing or owning a mistake, protects every other virtue you want to keep.
About Samuel Johnson
English writer and lexicographer, 1709–1784
Samuel Johnson was born in 1709 above his father’s bookshop in Lichfield, England, and died in London in 1784. After nine years’ work, with a few assistants copying out the quotations he marked in books, he published A Dictionary of the English Language (1755). It was the most used English dictionary for the next 150 years, until the Oxford English Dictionary was completed.
While working on the dictionary, he wrote The Rambler, essays that came out every Tuesday and Saturday from March 1750 and sold for twopence each. There were 208 of them, often on moral and religious questions and more serious than the title suggests. He later edited Shakespeare’s plays (1765) and wrote Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1779–1781). His friend James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) was called by the Johnson biographer Walter Jackson Bate “the most famous single work of biographical art in the whole of literature.”
The source, and how we checked it
It comes from James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, 5 April 1775.
The full passage:
Whereas, Sir, you know courage is reckoned the greatest of all virtues; because, unless a man has that virtue, he has no security for preserving any other.
We matched the words against the Project Gutenberg text of Boswell's Life of Johnson, in his entry for Wednesday, 5 April 1775. These are Johnson's words as Boswell recorded them in conversation. We start the quote at "courage" and capitalise it; the full sentence, which opens "Whereas, Sir, you know", is given as the passage. We last checked this on 7 November 2026.