Choosing courage over comfort is the best decision you will ever make in life. You can only overcome fear with courage and even though it won’t be easy, it is definitely worth it in the end. If you’re starting to doubt yourself, always head over to this list of quotes about bravery that we compiled to help give you that extra push during difficult times.
Be Brave Quotes
1. Bravery is being the only one who knows you’re afraid. – Franklin P. Jones
2. It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are. – E.E. Cummings
3. It is courage, courage, courage, that raises the blood of life to crimson splendor. Live bravely and present a brave front to adversity. – Horace
4. You cannot swim for new horizons until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore. – William Faulkner
5. The best way out is always through. – Robert Frost
6. You can choose courage, or you can choose comfort, but you cannot choose both. – Brené Brown
7. Being brave means knowing that when you fail, you don’t fail forever. – Lana Del Rey
8. Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. – Steve Jobs
9. Be brave. Take risks. Nothing can substitute experience. – Paulo Coelho
10. Fortune always favors the brave, and never helps a man who does not help himself. – P. T. Barnum
11. The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud. – Coco Chanel
12. To a brave man, good and bad luck are like his left and right hand. He uses both. – St. Catherine of Siena
13. Courage is being scared to death and saddling up anyway. – John Wayne
14. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest. – Maya Angelou
15. You can’t be brave if you’ve only had wonderful things happen to you. – Mary Tyler Moore
16. One isn’t necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest. – Maya Angelou
17. Without courage, wisdom bears no fruit. – Baltasar Gracian
18. Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage. – Anais Nin
19. When things go wrong as they sometimes will, when the road you’re trudging seems all uphill, when the funds are low and the debts are high, and you want to smile but you have to sigh, when care is pressing you down a bit, rest if you must, but don’t you quit. Success is failure turned inside out, the silver tint on the clouds of doubt, and you can never tell how close you are. It may be near when it seems afar. So, stick to the fight when you’re the hardest hit. It’s when things go wrong that you mustn’t quit.
20. Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness. – Bertrand Russell
21. The best way out is always through. – Robert Frost
22. Only be you strong, and very courageous, then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good success. – Joshua 1:7-8
23. The greatest test of courage on the earth is to bear defeat without losing heart. – R. G. Ingersoll
24. It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done 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 and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows 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 know neither victory nor defeat. – Theodore Roosevelt
25. Don’t get discouraged, it is often the last key in the bunch that opens the lock.
26. To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. To not dare is to lose oneself. – Soren Kierkegaard
27. Remember that failure is an event, not a person.
28. Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
29. Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others. – Winston Churchill
30. The encouraging thing is that every time you meet a situation, though you may think of the impossibility and you go through the tortures of the damned, once you have met it and lived through it you find that forever after you are freer than you ever were before. If you can live through that you can live through anything. You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you 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.’ The danger lies in refusing to face the fear, in not daring to come to grips with it. If you fail anywhere along the line, it will take away your confidence. You must make yourself succeed every time. You must do the thing you think you cannot do. – Eleanor Roosevelt
31. The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise. – Tacitus
32. I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflections. – Thomas Paine
34. There is nothing in the world so much admired as a man who knows how to bear unhappiness with courage. – Seneca
35. Bravery is a complicated thing to describe. You can’t say it’s three feet long and two feet wide and that it weighs four hundred pounds or that it’s colored bright blue or that it sounds like a piano or that it smells like roses. It’s a quality, not a thing. – Mickey Mantle
36. Courage is doing what you’re afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you’re scared. – Eddie Rickenbacker
37. Fight hard when you are down, die hard determine at least to do and you won’t die at all. – James H. West
38. Whatever your sex or position, life is a battle in which you are to show your pluck, and woe be to the coward. Whether passed on a bed of sickness or a tented field, it is ever the same fair play and admits no foolish distinction. Despair and postponement are cowardice and defeat. Men were born to succeed, not to fail. – Henry David Thoreau
39. What separates the winners from the losers is how a person reacts to each new twist of fate. – Donald Trump
40. Courage is not limited to the battlefield or the Indianapolis 500 or bravely catching a thief in your house. The real tests of courage are much quieter. They are the inner tests, like remaining faithful when nobody’s looking, like enduring pain when the room is empty, like standing alone when you’re misunderstood. – Charles Swindoll
41. Never let the fear of striking out get in your way. – Babe Ruth
42. No captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of the enemy. – Admiral Horatio Nelson
43. Trust the still, small voice that says, “this might work and I’ll try it.” – Diane Mariechild
44. Never forget that no military leader has ever become great without audacity. – Karl von Clausewitz
45. The opposite of bravery is not cowardice but conformity. – Robert Anthony
46. Bravery has no place where it can avail nothing. – Samuel Johnson
47. Fear can keep a man out of danger but courage only can support him in it. – Thomas Fuller
48. Brave men go forward not expecting to return. – Bona
49. Great crisis produce great men and great deeds of courage. – John F Kennedy
50. If it scares you, it might be a good thing to try. – Seth Godin
51. Bravery is not a quality of the body. It is of the soul. – Mahatma Gandhi
52. Be brave enough to start a conversation that matters. – Dau Voire
53. Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. – T.S. Eliot
54. Valor is stability, not of legs and arms, but of courage and the soul. – Michel de Montaigne
55. To live with fear and not be afraid is the final test of maturity. – Edward Weeks
56. There is no such thing as bravery, only degrees of fear. – John Wainwright
57. A brave man acknowledges the strength of others. – Veronica Roth
58. 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.
59. 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
60. It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog. – Mark Twain
61. 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
62. It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends. – J. K. Rowling
63. Bravery is the capacity to perform properly even when scared half to death. – Omar N. Bradley
64. In battle it is the cowards who run the most risk; bravery is a rampart of defense. – Sallust
65. A true knight is fuller of bravery in the midst, than in the beginning of danger. – Philip Sidney
66. Physical bravery is an animal instinct; moral bravery is much higher and truer courage. – Wendell Phillips
67. Fight till the last gasp. – William Shakespeare
68. The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it. – Thucydides
69. Bravery is believing in yourself, and that thing nobody can teach you. – El Cordobes
70. True bravery is shown by performing without witness what one might be capable of doing before all the world. – Franois de la Rochefoucauld
71. Don’t be afraid to challenge the pros, even in their own backyard. – General Colin Powell
72. As you move outside of your comfort zone, what was once the unknown and frightening becomes your new normal. – Robin Sharma
73. Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts. – Aristotle
74. 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
75. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. – Bill George
76. The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain. – Dolly Parton
77. Self-reflection encourages great bravery. Rationalization is your greatest enemy. – Awa Kenzo
78. 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
79. If people are doubting how far you can go, go so far that you can’t hear them anymore. – Michele Ruiz
80. My mother always taught us that, if people don’t agree with you, the important thing is to listen to them. But if you’ve listened to them carefully and you still think that you’re right, then you must have the courage of your convictions. – Jane Goodall
81. A lot of people are afraid to say what they want. That’s why they don’t get what they want. – Madonna
82. Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear. – Mark Twain
83. If you are committed to creating value and if you aren’t afraid of hard times, obstacles become utterly unimportant. A nuisance, perhaps, but with no real power. The world respects creation; people will get out of your way. – Candice Carpenter
84. Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than one’s fear. – Ambrose Redmoon
85. Men make history and not the other way around. In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better. – Harry S. Truman
86. Courage is contagious. When a brave man takes a stand, the spines of others are often stiffened. – Billy Graham
87. See things in the present, even if they are in the future. – Larry Ellison
88. You get in life what you have the courage to ask for. – Oprah Winfrey
89. If you can’t fly, then run. If you can’t run, then walk. And, if you can’t walk, then crawl, but whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward. – Martin Luther King, Jr.
90. The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won’t. It’s whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it; whether you choose to persevere. – Barack Obama
91. The stars will never align, and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. The universe doesn’t conspire against you, but it doesn’t go out of its way to line up the pins, either. Conditions are never perfect. ‘Someday’ is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and con lists are just as bad. If it’s important to you and you want to do it ‘eventually,’ just do it and correct course along the way. – Tim Ferriss
92. Often the difference between a successful man and a failure is not one’s better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on his ideas, to take a calculated risk, and to act. – Maxwell Maltz
93. Success is not measured by what you accomplish, but by the opposition you have encountered, and the courage to which you have maintained the struggle against overwhelming odds. – Orison Swett Marden
94. Tough times never last, but tough people do. – Robert H. Schuller
95. Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time. – Thomas Edison
96. One man with courage is a majority. – Thomas Jefferson
97. The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one. – Elbert Hubbard
98. What you have outside you counts less than what you have inside you. – B.C. Forbes
99. When you cannot make up your mind which of two evenly balanced courses of action you should take–choose the bolder. – W.J. Slim
100. Never give up on a dream because of the time it will take to accomplish it. The time will pass anyway. – Earl Nightingale
101. To escape fear, you have to go through it, not around. – Richie Norton
102. Don’t be afraid to give up the good to go for the great. – John D. Rockefeller
103. Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago. – Warren Buffett
104. Wherever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision. – Peter Drucker
105. Don’t set your goals by what other people deem important. – Jaachynma N.E. Agu
106. Obstacles don’t have to stop you. If you run into a wall, don’t turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it. – Michael Jordan
107. A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for. – William G.T. Shedd
108. When we tackle obstacles, we find hidden reserves of courage and resilience we did not know we had. And it is only when we are faced with failure do we realize that these resources are always there within us. We only need to find them and move on with our lives. – A.P.J. Abdul Kalam
109. I knew that if I failed I wouldn’t regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not trying. – Jeff Bezos
110. You shouldn’t focus on why you can’t do something, which is what most people do. You should focus on why perhaps you can, and be one of the exceptions. – Steve Case
111. Bran thought about it. ‘Can a man still be brave if he’s afraid?’ ‘That is the only time a man can be brave,’ his father told him. – George R.R. Martin
112. 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.
113. There are so many ways to be brave in this world. Sometimes bravery involves laying down your life for something bigger than yourself, or for someone else. Sometimes it involves giving up everything you have ever known, or everyone you have ever loved, for the sake of something greater. But sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it is nothing more than gritting your teeth through pain, and the work of every day, the slow walk toward a better life. That is the sort of bravery I must have now. – Veronica Roth, Allegiant
114. Yet each man kills the thing he loves. By each let this be heard. Some do it with a bitter look. Some with a flattering word. The coward does it with a kiss, the brave man with a sword. – Oscar Wilde
115. Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don’t believe it. Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave; be strong; take your pills. Exercise because it’s good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds. Eat when food itself disgusts you. Reason with yourself when you have lost your reason. – Andrew Solomon
116. It was times like these when I thought my father, who hated guns and had never been to any wars, was the bravest man who ever lived. – Harper Lee
117. The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls. – Elizabeth Cady Stanton
118. 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
119. I am my own biggest critic. Before anyone else has criticized me, I have already criticized myself. But for the rest of my life, I am going to be with me and I don’t want to spend my life with someone who is always critical. So I am going to stop being my own critic. It’s high time that I accept all the great things about me. – C. JoyBell C.
120. If I am to be fallen into love, I will. And if as a result I will appear to be stupid, disillusioned, and of poor judgment, I will. And I would be damned if I cared what other people think. For I would rather be thought of as all of these things, than not love. If in loving, I become the naked woman on the horse, I will ride that horse with my head held high. This is my spirit. I am unbreakable. – C. JoyBell C.
121. It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare. – Mark Twain
122. It is not the strength of the body that counts, but the strength of the spirit. – J.R.R. Tolkien
123. Before I knew you, I thought brave was not being afraid. You’ve taught me that bravery is being terrified and doing it anyway. – Laurell K. Hamilton
124. I love those who can smile in trouble, who can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink, but they whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves their conduct, will pursue their principles unto death. – Leonardo da Vinci
125. 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
126. The only use of an obstacle is to be overcome. All that an obstacle does with brave men is, not to frighten them, but to challenge them. – Woodrow Wilson
127. Build me a son, O Lord, who will be strong enough to know when he is weak, and brave enough to face himself when he is afraid, one who will be proud and unbending in honest defeat, and humble and gentle in victory. – Douglas MacArthur
128. Dream, struggle, create, prevail. Be daring. Be brave. Be loving. Be compassionate. Be strong. Be brilliant. Be beautiful. – Caterina Fake
129. The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. – Ronald Reagan
130. Being brave enough to just be unapologetic for who you are, that’s a goddess. – Banks