Courage is acting when you’re afraid. These quotes agree it matters more than it first seems, and most of them are about the ordinary kind: speaking, trying, doing the right thing when it would be easier not to.
Three explain why it comes first. Samuel Johnson says “courage is reckoned the greatest of all virtues,” because without it a person “has no security for preserving any other.” C. S. Lewis puts the same idea more sharply: courage is “the form of every virtue at the testing point.” And Confucius names its absence: “to see what is right and not to do it is want of courage.”
Four show what it looks like to act anyway. Shakespeare’s Lucio names the enemy: “our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt.” Theodore Roosevelt gives the credit to “the man who is actually in the arena,” who, if he fails, “at least fails while daring greatly.” Socrates, on trial for his life, says a good man “ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying.” And Frederick Douglass, still enslaved, describes the fight that turned him from “a slave” into “a man.”
Read together, they make courage less a feeling than a decision: to act while the fear is still there, because waiting for it to leave means losing what you could have done.
Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
To see what is right and not to do it is want of courage.
見義不為、無勇也。
Confucius, Analects, Book II, chapter 24 (translated by James Legge), Confucius lived c. 551–479 BC
Meaning and context
A man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong—acting the part of a good man or of a bad.
