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.
We are face to face with our destiny and we must meet it with a high and resolute courage. For ours is the life of action, of strenuous performance of duty; let us live in the harness, striving mightily; let us rather run the risk of wearing out than rusting out.
We are caught in a paradox: the more we study the conditions of courage, the more we see how few people have ever been free enough from want and fear to practice it. Courage is not a virtue but a grace — and perhaps the rarest of all.
It is not the same to talk of bulls from behind the barriers as to be in the bullring. I have been in the bullring, and I know that fear is not in the legs but in the soul.
To know how to say what others only know how to think is what makes men poets or sages; and to dare to say what others only dare to think makes men martyrs or reformers — or both.
We shall not pretend that life is all beauty; we shall, as tragic poets always do, start with evil, and only then show that the noblest response to evil is not flight from it but the courage to face it.
It is not the strength of the body that counts, but the strength of the spirit. The world is not in your books and maps; it is out there.
We are dying from civilisation and its discontents, and only the most radical knowledge and the most intimate courage can possibly enable us to endure.
An exploration is a traversal of the unknown, of landscapes you didn't even know existed, with all the courage and vulnerability and openness to experience that demands; its payoff is discovery — of unimagined wonders, of yourself in the face of the unimagined.
as an artist, as a lover, as a person who lived with extraordinary vulnerability, extraordinary courage, and the precocious awareness that the conversation between the two is the measure of a life.
We accept the verdict of the past until the need for change cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of inertia and the necessity, or duty, of further evolution.
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
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