Gilbert K. Chesterton Courage Quotations

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.

The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.

There should be a burnished tablet let into the ground on the spot where some courageous man first ate Stilton cheese, and survived.

I would rather a boy learnt in the roughest school the courage to hit a politician, or gained in the hardest school the learning to refute him - rather than that he should gain in the most enlightened school the cunning to copy him.

There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one's grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past.

It is the first law of practical courage. To be in the weakest camp is to be in the strongest school.

The professional soldier gains more and more power as the general courage of a community declines.

The new school of art and thought does indeed wear an air of audacity, and breaks out everywhere into blasphemies, as if it required any courage to say a blasphemy. There is only one thing that it requires real courage to say, and that is a truism.

Courage is getting away from death by continually coming within an inch of it.