When you’re faced with the decision to step outside your comfort zone, which will you choose: courage or comfort?
Your answer depends on your relationship with fear. Overcoming such an intense emotion isn’t easy, but you can change the narrative by stepping out from behind your fear and taking some powerful, calculated risks.
These 68 quotes about being brave will help you get started as you work to find your courage.
Life and courage quotes
1. “It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.” ―E.E. Cummings
2. “Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.” ―Steve Jobs
3. “The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud.” ―Coco Chanel
4. “Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.” ―Maya Angelou
5. “Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage which a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.” ―Ralph Waldo Emerson
6. “To a brave man, good and bad luck are like his left and right hand. He uses both.” ―St. Catherine of Siena
7. “Courage without conscience is a wild beast.” ―Robert G. Ingersoll
8. “Until the day of his death, no man can be sure of his courage.” —Jean Anouilh
9. “Be brave enough to live life creatively. The creative place where no one else has ever been.” —Alan Alda
10. “It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare.” ―Mark Twain
11. “Be bold, be brave enough to be your true self.” ―Queen Latifah
12. “The biggest adventure you can ever take is to live the life of your dreams.” ―Oprah Winfrey
13. “It’s your life; you don’t need someone’s permission to live the life you want. Be brave to live from your heart.” ―Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
14. “Hope awakens courage. He who can implant courage in the human soul is the best physician.” ―Karl Ludwig von Knebel
15. “Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.” —Dwight D. Eisenhower
16. “Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren’t always comfortable, but they’re never weakness.” ―Brené Brown
17. “Life is not about living the safer option. Life is about living a life worth living.” ―Robert Thier
Courage and bravery quotes
18. “Bravery is being the only one who knows you’re afraid.” ―Franklin P. Jones
19. “It is courage, courage, courage, that raises the blood of life to crimson splendor. Live bravely and present a brave front to adversity.” ―Horace
20. “You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.” ―William Faulkner
21. “The best way out is always through.” ―Robert Frost
22. “We can choose courage or we can choose comfort, but we can’t have both. Not at the same time.” ―Brené Brown, Rising Strong
23. “Be brave. Take risks. Nothing can substitute experience.” ―Paulo Coelho
24. “Fortune always favors the brave, and never helps a man who does not help himself.” ―P.T. Barnum
25. “Confront the dark parts of yourself, and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing.” ―August Wilson
Failure and bravery quotes
26. “Being brave means knowing that when you fail, you don’t fail forever.” ―Lana Del Rey
27. “Courage is being scared to death… and saddling up anyway.” ―John Wayne
28. “You can’t be brave if you’ve only had wonderful things happen to you.” ―Mary Tyler Moore
29. “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
―Winston S. Churchill
30. “Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says I’ll try again tomorrow.” ―Mary Anne Radmacher
31. “It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.” ―Theodore Roosevelt
32. “Keep in mind that many people have died for their beliefs; it’s actually quite common. The real courage is in living and suffering for what you believe.” ―Christopher Paolini, Eragon
33. “Take chances, make mistakes. That’s how you grow. Pain nourishes your courage. You have to fail in order to practice being brave.” ―Mary Tyler Moore
Bravery quotes about combating fear
34. “Courage is the complement of fear. A man who is fearless cannot be courageous. He is also a fool.” ―Robert A. Heinlein
35. “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.” ―Nelson Mandela
36. “Fear cuts deeper than swords.” ―George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
37. “There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me.” ― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
38. “Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.” ―Dale Carnegie
39. “Courage is never to let your actions be influenced by your fears.” —Arthur Koestler
40. “Don’t be afraid of your fears. They’re not there to scare you. They’re there to let you know that something is worth it.” ―C. JoyBell C.
41. “Being brave isn’t the absence of fear. Being brave is having that fear but finding a way through it.” ―Bear Grylls
42. “Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.” ―Jim Morrison
43. “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose missapplication of the word.” ―Mark Twain
44. “Scared is what you’re feeling. Brave is what you’re doing.” ― Emma Donoghue, Room
Quotes about courage and strength
45. “Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.” —Winston Churchill
46. “A brave man acknowledges the strength of others.” ―Veronica Roth, Divergent
47. “Courage isn’t having the strength to go on; it is going on when you don’t have the strength.” ―Stanley P. Cornils, The Mourning After
48. “The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave.” —Ronald Reagan
49. “Courage consists in equality to the problem before us.” ―Ralph Waldo Emerson
50. “You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’” ―Eleanor Roosevelt
51. “We don’t develop courage by being happy every day. We develop it by surviving difficult times and challenging adversity.” ―Barbara De Angelis
52. “It is not the size of the dog in the fight that counts, but the fight in the dog that wins.” ―Arthur G. Lewis, Stub Ends of Thought and Verse
53. “To share your weakness is to make yourself vulnerable; to make yourself vulnerable is to show your strength.” ― Criss Jami
Bravery quotes about taking chances
54. “You can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.” ―Stephen King, On Writing
55. “Great occasions do not make heroes or cowards; they simply unveil them to the eyes of men. Silently and perceptibly, as we wake or sleep, we grow strong or weak; and last some crisis shows what we have become.” ―Brooke Foss Westcott
56. “You’ll never do a whole lot unless you’re brave enough to try.” ―Dolly Parton
57. “The will to do, the soul to dare.” ―Sir Walter Scott
58. “It takes vision and courage to create—it takes faith and courage to prove.” ―Owen D. Young
59. “Courage is found in unlikely places.” ―J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
60. “The most sublime courage I have ever witnessed has been among that class too poor to know they possessed it, and too humble for the world to discover it.” ―George Bernard Shaw
61. “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” ―Anais Nin
62. “The secret to happiness is freedom… and the secret to freedom is courage.” —Thucydides
63. “I think luck falls on not just the brave but also the ones who believe they belong there.” —Novak Djokovic
64. “Effort and courage are not enough without purpose and direction.” —John F. Kennedy
65. “Courage is like a muscle. We strengthen it by use.” —Ruth Gordon
66. “Everyone has talent. What’s rare is the courage to follow it to the dark places where it leads.” ―Erica Jong
67. “It takes more than just awareness for us to change. It takes courage and humility and the willingness to occasionally feel like fools and laugh at ourselves.” —Bud Harris, Sacred Selfishness
68. “It is not the strength of the body that counts, but the strength of the spirit.” ―J.R.R. Tolkien
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