Courage Under Fire Quotes & Sayings

The wide world is full of people wanting help, Jon. Would that some could find the courage to help themselves.
- Lord Commander Mormont — George R R Martin

Here is the lesson: Don't retreat in the face of opposition. Too much is at stake. Be the kind of soldier who instills respect in others because of your courage under fire. Make your case in the presence of hostile witnesses. Throw your gauntlet into the arena and see what the other side has to say. It's one of the most effective ways to establish your case and to help you cultivate a bullet-proof faith over time. — Gregory Koukl

You don't have to be brilliant at everything. You just have to have the courage to put yourself in the line of fire. — Emily Mortimer

When I'm there, Rube's eyes fire into mine. Make sure you get up, they tell me, and I nod, then jump up. The jacket's off. My skin's warm. My wolfish hair sticks up as always, nice and thick. I'm ready now. I'm ready to keep standing up, no matter what, I'm ready to believe that I welcome the pain and that I want it so much that I will look for it. I will seek it out. I'll run to it and throw myself into it. I'll stand in front of it in blind terror and let it beat me down and down till my courage hangs off me in rags. Then it will dismantle me and stand me up naked, beat me some more and my slaughter-blood will fly from my mouth and the pain will drink it, feel it, steal it and conceal it in the pockets of its guts and it will taste me. It will just keep standing me up, and I won't let it know. I won't tell it that I feel it. I won't give it the satisfaction. No, the pain will have to kill me. — Markus Zusak

I was acquainted once with a gallant soldier who assured me that his only measure of courage was this: upon the first fire, in an engagement, he immediately looked upon himself as a dead man. He then bravely fought out the remainder of the day, perfectly regardless of all manner of danger, as becomes a dead man to be. So that all the life or limbs he carried back again to his tent he reckoned as clear gains, or, as he himself expressed it, so much out of the fire. — Laurence Sterne

I feel very small. I don't understand. I have so much courage, fire, energy, for many things, yet I get so hurt, so wounded by small things. — Anais Nin

There were so many things going on inside me and on the outside - many beyond my control. However, one thing I could control was to pray and commit myself every day to trust God so He could guide me." - Yilda B. Rivera, Courage Under Fire — Yilda B. Rivera

Today the man who has the courage to build himself a house constructs a meeting place for the people who will descend upon him on foot, by car, or by telephone. Employees of the gas, the electric, and the water- works will arrive; agents from life and fire insurance companies; building inspectors, collectors of radio tax; mortgage creditors and rent assessors who tax you for living in your own home. — Ernst Junger

Passion is the fire, enthusiasm and courage that an individual feels when she is doing something she loves while accomplishing worthy ends, something that satisfies her deepest needs. — Stephen Covey

Still there was so much to say. How the rain never stopped. How the cold worked into your bones. Sometimes the bravest thing on earth was to sit through the night and feel the cold in your bones. Courage was not always a matter of yes or no. Sometimes it came in degrees, like the cold; sometimes you were very brave up to a point and then beyond that point you were not so brave. In certain situations you could do incredible things, you could advance toward enemy fire, but in other situations, which were not nearly so bad, you had trouble keeping your eyes open. Sometimes, like that night in the shit field, the difference between courage and cowardice was something small and stupid. — Tim O'Brien

She broke the seal to find the flowing, masculine script that had come to mean the world to her.
Courage, my love. I need you to possess the same fire that led you from Scotland to Normandy that first day when we met. Whatever the day brings, know that I will always love you. You carry with you, my heart, my soul, my very being. Be strong for me, Kenna.
Ever your knight,
S
Postscriptum
S doesn't stand for Stryder.
She laughed at that, even though her eyes were filled with tears.
-Simon in a letter to Kenna — Kinley MacGregor

Spottedleaf isn't with StarClan anymore." Grief thickened her mew. "But she gave Firestar a life for love." A sob shook Sandstorm's shoulders. Bluestar went on. "I gave him a life for nobility, though he was born with more nobility than any warrior I ever knew." Her blue eyes glazed with sorrow. "I knew that Firestar would save the Clan many moons ago. As fire, and then as the fourth cat in the oldest prophecy, he succeeded. He leaves ThunderClan in the paws of a new leader." She looked at Brambleclaw. "If you have half the courage and loyalty of Firestar, you will be a fine leader for ThunderClan." As she spoke the StarClan cats drew closer around Firestar's body. Touching pelts, they gazed down. A shadow stirred over the orange shape. — Erin Hunter

For as long as this nation has known war, we have embraced the heroes it has produced. Americans have rightfully noted the honor and nobility of courage under hostile fire and thanked those who perished in their defense. — James T. Walsh

I have lived through war, and lost much. I know what's worth the fight, and what is not. Honor and courage are matters of the bone, and what a man will kill for, he will sometimes die for, too. And that, O kinsman, is why a woman has broad hips; that bony basin will harbor a man and his child alike. A man's life springs from his woman's bones, and in her blood is his honor christened. For the sake of love alone, I would walk through fire again. — Diana Gabaldon

You see, women have been essential to every great move of God. Yes, Moses led the Isaelites out of Egypt, but only after his mother risked her life to save him! Closer to our time, Clara Barton was instrumental in starting the Red Cross. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin put fire into people's heart to end slavery in the United States. Rosa Parks kicked the Civil Rights movement into gear with her quiet act of courage. Eunice Kennedy Shriver created the Special Olympics. Mother Teresa inspired the world by bringing love to countless thought unlovable. And millions of other women quietly change the world every day by bringing the love of God to those around them. — Stasi Eldredge

The general commanding congratulates his troops on their brilliant and successful occupation of Roanoke Island. The courage and steadiness they have shown under fire is what he expected from them, and he accepts it as a token of future victory. — Ambrose Burnside

The real Tradition is this: the teacher never tells the disciple what he or she should do. They are merely travelling companions, sharing the same uncomfortable
feeling of 'estrangement' when confronted by ever-changing perceptions, broadening horizons, closing doors, rivers that sometimes seem to block their path and which, in fact, should never be crossed, but followed.
There is only one difference between teacher and disciple: the former is slightly less afraid than the latter. Then, when they sit down at a table or in front of a fire to talk, the more experienced person might say: 'Why don't you do that?' But he or she never says: 'Go there and you'll arrive where I did', because every path and every destination are unique to the individual. The true teacher gives the disciple the courage to throw his or her world off balance, even though the disciple is afraid of things already encountered and more afraid still of what might be around the next corner. — Paulo Coelho

The faithful man perceives nothing less than opportunity in difficulties. Flowing through his spine, faith and courage work together: Such a man does not fear losing his life, thus he will risk losing it at times in order to empower it. By this he actually values his life more than the man who fears losing his life. It is much like leaping from a window in order to avoid a fire yet in that most crucial moment knowing that God will appear to catch you. — Criss Jami

You have a rare fire within you. The power to change things. The courage to act in the service of something greater than yourself. — Moira Young

Courage under fire is the only way true legends are born. — Matshona Dhliwayo

The spiritual warrior hides from nothing. We jump into the fire, we dive into the ocean. We become the sea. — Charlotte Sophia Kasl

Courage to strengthen, fire to blind, music to daze, iron to bind. — Robert Jordan

I catch fire and find the reserves of courage and assertiveness to speak up. When that happens I get quite carried away. My blood gets hot my brow wet I become unbearably and unconscionably sarcastic and bellicose I am girded for a total showdown. — William F. Buckley Jr.

Have a dream in your head and a fire in your heart. — Fennel Hudson

Why tell me to be reasonable when you should be telling me to be courageous? [Arlana to Dave in The Battle for Halcyon] — Peter Kazmaier

If you muster that courage to stand under fire and not go down, you will amass an inner strength that no one can touch. You won't be another faceless, nameless, forgotten human in a long historical line of the defeated. You will be a steeled warrior, and a force to be forever reckoned with. And beneath the pain that lingers, you will have the comfort of knowing that you are strongest of all. That when others caved and broke, you kept fighting even against hopeless odds. - Caleb — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Gallantry," he often told his men, "is an act of great courage under fire, of bravery beyond the call of duty. But if it kills your comrades as well or puts the battle in jeopardy, then it is arrant pride and foolishness. Learn to know the difference. — Charles Todd

How much evil throughout history could have been avoided had people exercised their moral acuity with convictional courage and said to the powers that be, 'No, I will not. This is wrong, and I don't care if you fire me, shoot me, pass me over for promotion, or call my mother, I will not participate in this unsavory activity.' Wouldn't world history be rewritten if just a few people had actually acted like individual free agents rather than mindless lemmings? — Joel Salatin

How much courage does it take to fire up your tractor and plow under a crop you spent six or seven years growing? How much courage to go on and do that after you've spent all that time finding out how to prepare the soil and when to plant and how much to water and when to reap? How much to just say, I have to quit these peas. Peas are no good for me, I better try corn or beans. — Stephen King

And for adults, the world of fantasy books returns to us the great words of power which, in order to be tamed, we have excised from our adult vocabularies. These words are the pornography of innocence, words which adults no longer use with other adults, and so we laugh at them and consign them to the nursery, fear masking as cynicism. These are the words that were forged in the earth, air, fire, and water of human existence, and the words are:
Love. Hate. Good. Evil. Courage. Honor. Truth. — Jane Yolen

My heart's made of gold
My soul is pure steel
Loved ones shall rise
Enemies will kneel
I soothe with water, attack with fire
For I am the master of my own empire. — Sarah Brownlee

We are the planet, fully as much as water, earth, fire and air are the planet, and if the planet survives, it will only be through heroism. Not occasional heroism, a remarkable instance of it here and there, but constant heroism, systematic heroism, heroism as governing principle. — Russell Banks

Walk with the dreamers, the believers, the courageous, the cheerful, the planners, the doers, the successful people with their heads in the clouds and their feet on the ground. Let their spirit ignite a fire within you to leave this world better than when you found it ... — Wilferd Peterson

I sit beside my lonely fire and pray for wisdom yet for calmness to remember or courage to forget. — Charles Hamilton Aide

They say the only way you can truly kill a Celestra is by fire. I would gladly lend myself to the flames to peer down eternally over this sinful disgrace of a planet that houses cowards such as these. — Addison Moore

They've moved out of the society that would have protected them, and into the dark forest, into the world of fire, of original experience. Original experience has not been interpreted for you, and so you've got to work out your life for yourself. Either you can take it or you can't. You don't have to go far off the interpreted path to find yourself in very difficult situations. The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience - that is the hero's deed. — Joseph Campbell

Brigan was saying her name, and he was sending her a feeling. It was courage and strength, and something else too, as if he were standing with her, as if he'd taken her within himself, letting her rest her entire body for a moment on his backbone, her mind in his mind, her heart in the fire of his.
The fire of Brigan's heart was astounding. Fire understood, and almost could not believe, that the feeling he was sending her was love. — Kristin Cashore

Nothing moves me more than courage: so total a sacrifice deserved complete trust from me. But she never believed that I trusted her, since she did not suspect how much I distrusted others. In spite of appearances to the contrary, I do not regret having yielded to Sophie as much as it lay in my nature to do; at the first glance I had caught sight of something in her incorruptible, with which one could make a compact as sure, and as dangerous, as with an element itself. Fire may be trusted, provided one knows that its law is to burn, or die. — Marguerite Yourcenar

Hope is what led a band of colonists to rise up against an empire; what led the greatest of generations to free a continent and heal a nation; what led young women and young men to sit at lunch counters and brave fire hoses and march through Selma and Montgomery for freedom's cause. Hope is what led me here today
with a father from Kenya, a mother from Kansas; and a story that could only happen in the United States of America. Hope is the bedrock of this nation; the belief that our destiny will not be written for us, but by us; by all those men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is; who have courage to remake the world as it should be. [January 3, 2008] — Barack Obama

Genius is talent set on fire by courage. — Henry Van Dyke

When Abbess Ebba received tidings of the near approach of the pagan hordes, who had already wrecked vengeance upon ecclesiastics, monks, and consecrated virgins, she summoned her nuns to Chapter, and in a moving discourse exhorted them to preserve at any cost the treasure of their chastity. Then seizing a razor, and calling upon her daughters to follow her heroic example, she mutilated her face in order to inspire the barbarian invaders with horror at the sight. The nuns without exception courageously followed the example of their abbess. When the Danes broke into the cloister and saw the nuns with faces thus disfigured, they fled in panic. Their leaders, burning with rage, sent back some of their number to set fire to the monastery, and thus the heroic martyrs perished in the common ruin of their house. — Michael Barrett

But this was not all, for she soon found that the thread, after going straight down for a little way, turned first sideways in one direction, then sideways in another, and then shot, at various angles, hither and thither inside the heap, so that she began to be afraid that to clear the thread she must remove the whole huge gathering. She was dismayed at the very idea, but, losing no time, set to work with a will; and with aching back, and bleeding fingers and hands, she worked on, sustained by the pleasure of seeing the heap slowly diminish and begin to show itself on the opposite side of the fire. Another thing which helped to keep up her courage was that, as often as she uncovered a turn of the thread, instead of lying loose upon the stone, it tightened up; this made her sure that her grandmother was at the end of it somewhere. — George MacDonald

There was once a poor shoemaker who had three fine strong sons and two pretty daughters and a third who could do nothing well, who shivered plates and tangled her spinning, who curdled milk, could not get butter to come, nor set a fire so that smoke did not pour into the room, a useless, hopeless, dreaming daughter, to whom her mother would often say that she should try to fend for herself in the wild wood, and then she would know the value of listening to advice, and of doing things properly. And this filled the perverse daughter with a great desire to go even a little way into the wild wood, where there were no plates and no stitching, but might well be a need of such things as she knew she had it in herself to perform ... — A.S. Byatt

Stand like a beaten anvil, when thy dream
Is laid upon thee, golden from the fire.
Flinch not, though heavily through that furnace-gleam
The black forge-hammers fall on thy desire.

Demoniac giants round thee seem to loom.
'Tis but the world-smiths heaving to and fro.
Stand like a beaten anvil. Take the doom
Their ponderous weapons deal thee, blow on blow.

Needful to truth as dew-fall to the flower
Is this wild wrath and this implacable scorn.
For every pang, new beauty, and new power,
Burning blood-red shall on thy heart be born.

Stand like a beaten anvil. Let earth's wrong
Beat on that iron and ring back in song. — Alfred Noyes

That man, the unsubmissive and first, stands in the opening chapter of every legend mankind has recorded about its beginning. Prometheus was chained to a rock and torn by vultures - because he had stolen the fire of the gods. Adam was condemned to suffer - because he had eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Whatever the legend, somewhere in the shadows of its memory mankind knew that its glory began with one and that that one paid for his courage. — Ayn Rand

Yes, Melanie had been there that day with a sword in her small hand, ready to do battle for her. And now, as Scarlett looked sadly back, she realized that Melanie had always been there beside her with a sword in her hand, unobtrusive as her own shadow, loving her, fighting for her with blind passionate loyalty, fighting Yankees, fire, hunger, poverty, public opinion and even her beloved blood kin. Scarlett felt her courage and self-confidence ooze from her as she realized that the sword which had flashed between her and the world was sheathed forever. — Margaret Mitchell

I was never afraid of getting killed and I was never afraid of losing my nerve. My kind of courage holds up best under fire; it's different dangers, more refined and insidious ones, that shake me. — Tana French

Once you find your own sound, you find the strength and courage to stay true to that. Keep going even in moments when you're not blazing on fire and relevant with everyone around you. It's because you love to make music. It's making sure that the music isn't about the technology and tools, but truly about the music. Because that's how humanity and the soul are communicated. The soul is the true tool. — Richie Hawtin

Courage is the most important thing ... Wake up yourselves and others. Control your mind and have firm determination ... Be firm like a rock, deep and serious like the sea. Think of the earth as a mother. Have great courage and patience - and be not afraid of water, fire or great storms - face them bravely. Face the fire and it will turn to ice. This requires control of mind and a firm determination. — Haidakhan Babaji

The Dead and Those About to Die is a gripping, first-hand account of the desperate battle for Omaha Beach on D-Day by the legendary 1st Infantry Division, the Big Red One. On the 70th anniversary of that momentous event, John C. McManus's tale of courage under fire is a vivid reminder that freedom isn't free and that when the chips are down stalwart American soldiers will always answer the call of duty. — Carlo D'Este

Better to sink with tempests raging o'er
Masts all dismantled and hull gaping wide
Than rest and rot on some unclouded shore
The idle plaything of the listless tide.

Better the grime of battle on the brow,
With grim defeat to crush thy dying hand
Than through long years of peace to tyrant bow
Or dwell captive in a strangers land.

Better the castle with beleaguered gate,
By battle's lightning shivered in a day
Than peaceful walls in pomp of sullen state,
Through centuries sinking to a dull decay.

Better resolve to win thy heart's desire,
And striving bravely, die in the endeavor
Than have the embers of some smothered fire
Lie smouldering in thy saddened soul forever. — Sam Davis

It takes courage to love, but pain through love is the purifying fire which those who love generously know. We all know people who are so much afraid of pain that they shut themselves up like clams in a shell and, giving out nothing, receive nothing and therefore shrink until life is a mere living death. — Eleanor Roosevelt