200 Hero Quotes

Time for another break from the “All About You!” for some Hero Quotes.

I also want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has signed up for the RSS feed or for emailed posts. If any of you have not done so yet, please go ahead and sign up by clicking on the big RSS 3-D image above my ebook cover from any page.

Speaking of the ebook, I’ve also been getting a lot of requests for a free copy, so that’s exciting, too! (If you want one, just use the Contact Form on the Home Page; but, make sure you provide your correct email and to answer the anti-spam question.) This means that many of you are taking the steps necessary to make your dreams come true, one step at a time—two steps forward and one step back if necessary! That gives me tremendous hope! As far as I’m concerned, anybody who works on themselves so they can reach for their dreams is a hero. So, thanks, everybody!!

200 QUOTES ABOUT HEROES

1. The hero is one who kindles a great light in the world, who sets up blazing torches in the dark streets of life for men to see by.
- Felix Adler

2. The whole country was tied together by radio. We all experienced the same heroes and comedians and singers. They were giants.
- Woody Allen

3. Heroism is the brilliant triumph of the soul over the flesh, that is to say over fear: fear of poverty, of suffering, of calumny, of illness, of loneliness and of death. There is no real piety without heroism. Heroism is the dazzling and glorious con.
- Henri Frederic Amiel

4. How important it is for us to recognize and celebrate our heroes and she-roes!
- Maya Angelou

5. All of childhood’s unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood.
- Maya Angelou

6. What instances must pass before them of ardent, disinterested, self-denying attachment, of heroism, fortitude, patience, resignation—of all the conflicts and the sacrifices that ennoble us most. A sick room may often furnish the worth of volumes.
- Jane Austen

7. I believe it is the nature of people to be heroes, given the chance.
- James A. Autrey

8. Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.
- John Barth

9. Our flag honors those who have fought to protect it, and is a reminder of the sacrifice of our nation’s founders and heroes. As the ultimate icon of America’s storied history, the Stars and Stripes represents the very best of this nation.
- Joe Barton

10. Heroes know that things must happen when it is time for them to happen. A quest may not simply be abandoned; unicorns may go unrescued for a long time, but not forever. A happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story.
- Peter S. Beagle

11. I want to be a hero, a small and good kind of hero, even though I know heroes have very short lives.
- Boris Becker

12. It’s silly to say it about a tennis player, but I’m an unbelievable hero in Germany. And Germany needs heroes more than any place.
- Boris Becker

13. The world’s battlefields have been in the heart chiefly; more heroism has been displayed in the household and the closet, than on the most memorable battlefields in history.
- Henry Ward Beecher

14. The function of the hero in art is to inspire the reader or spectator to continue in the same spirit from where he, the hero, leaves off. He must release the spectator’s potentiality, for potentiality is the historic force behind nobility. And to do this the hero must be typical of the characters and class who at that time only need to be made aware of their heroic potentiality in order to be able to make their society juster and nobler. Bourgeois culture is no longer capable of producing heroes. On the highbrow level it only produces characters who are embodied consolations for defeat, and on the lowbrow level it produces idols—stars, TV “personalities,” pin-ups. The function of the idol is the exact opposite to that of the hero. The idol is self-sufficient; the hero never is. The idol is so superficially desirable, spectacular, witty, happy that he or she merely supplies a context for fantasy and therefore, instead of inspiring, lulls. The idol is based on the appearance of perfection; but never on the striving towards it.
- John Berger

15. A hero has faced it all: he need not be undefeated, but he must be undaunted.
- Andrew Bernstein

16. Nothing is given to man on earth—struggle is built into the nature of life, and conflict is possible—the hero is the man who lets no obstacle prevent him from pursuing the values he has chosen.
- Andrew Bernstein

17. The hero is valorous because he stands up to every threat directed against his values. Heroism requires value conflict.
- Andrew Bernstein

18. A hero holds purposes appropriate to man and is, therefore, a thinker.
- Andrew Bernstein

19. The hero is the man dedicated to the creation and/or defense of reality-conforming, life-promoting values.
- Andrew Bernstein

20. I got my heroes secondhand, from television and movies, to a certain extent.
- Brad Bird

21. True heroism consists in being superior to the ills of life, in whatever shape they may challenge us to combat.
- Napoleon Bonaparte

22. My heroes are the ones who survived doing it wrong, who made mistakes, but recovered from them.
- Bono

23. Time makes heroes but dissolves celebrities.
- Daniel J. Boorstin

24. The hero was distinguished by his achievement; the celebrity by his image or trademark. The hero created himself; the celebrity is created by the media. The hero was a big man; the celebrity is a big name.
- Daniel J. Boorstin

25. And each man stands with his face in the light. Of his own drawn sword, ready to do what a hero can.
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning

26. Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes.
- Bertolt Brecht

27. If you have a crisis, whether on a ship or wherever, there are heroes who rise above it.
- Jerry Bruckheimer

28. A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.
- Joseph Campbell

29. If Hero means sincere man, why may not every one of us be a Hero?
- Thomas Carlyle

30. You should never meet your heroes. Paul Newman … I was so excited about meeting him, but he turned up in shell suit bottoms, slippers, and a jumper. He was just so worn out and old, he wanted to go home.
- Allan Carr

31. At the Carter Center we work with victims of oppression, and we give support to human rights heroes.
- Jimmy Carter

32. Those who kept their sanity and humanity intact in the face of awful adversity. Heroes named and unnamed, some known only to God.
- Silvia Cartwright

33. To remain young, one must change. The perpetual campus hero is not a young man, but an old boy.
- Alexander Chase

34. I am convinced that a light supper, a good night’s sleep, and a fine morning, have sometimes made a hero of the same man, who, by an indigestion, a restless night, and rainy morning, would have proved a coward.
- Lord Chesterfield

35. We shouldn’t be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas.
- Noam Chomsky

36. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ”This was their finest hour.”
- Winston Churchill

37. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.
- Winston Churchill

38. To have no heroes is to have no aspiration, to live on the momentum of the past, to be thrown back upon routine, sensuality, and the narrow self.
- Charles Horton Cooley

39. The great, the fundamental need of any nation, any race, is for heroism, devotion, sacrifice; and there cannot be heroism, devotion, or sacrifice in a primarily skeptical spirit.
- Anna Julia Cooper

40. I think there are good men and women in all decades. We’ve grown cynical. And look at what we do to all our heroes: Churchill, FDR, Kennedy, they all had affairs. But heroic things happen every day.
- Kevin Costner

41. Steve McQueen was from a time when you didn’t know every little dirty thing about our public figures. He and James Dean were very mysterious, archetypal American heroes.
- Cheryl Crow

42. Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.
- Rebecca Harding Davis

43. But the West did not last long enough. Its folk myths and heroes became stage properties of Hollywood before the poets had begun to get to work on them.
- Christopher Dawson

44. I find it strange the way human nature wants heroes and yet wants to destroy their heroes. It’s a kind of mass insecurity people want something to look up to and get a buzz off but, at the same time, want to destroy it because it makes them feel insecure.
- Danielle Dax

45. The most heroic word in all languages is revolution.
- Eugene Debs

46. There’s something so accessible about heroes who have faults.
- Laura Dern

47. We like our archetypes and heroes to be what they are at face value. And life doesn’t work out like that.
- Laura Dern

48. This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance.
- Philip K. Dick

49. Nurture your mind with great thoughts. To believe in the heroic makes heroes.
- Benjamin Disraeli

50. The legacy of heroes is the memory of a great name and the inheritance of a great example.
- Benjamin Disraeli

51. A man can be a hero if he is a scientist, or a soldier, or a drug addict, or a disc jockey, or a crummy mediocre politician. A man can be a hero because he suffers and despairs; or because he thinks logically and analytically; or because he is “sensitive”; or because he is cruel. Wealth establishes a man as a hero, and so does poverty. Virtually any circumstance in a man’s life will make him a hero to some group of people and has a mythic rendering in the culture—in literature, art, theater, or the daily newspapers.
- Andrea Dworkin

52. A hero is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with his freedom.
- Bob Dylan

53. I think I’m a fan of people who were brave, my aunt, my grandmother, those are my heroes.
- George Eads

54. The real hero is always a hero by mistake. He dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.
- Umberto Eco

55. We invoke the sacrifices of our fallen heroes in the abstract, but we seldom take time to thank them individually.
- Rahm Emanuel

56. A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

57. The youth, intoxicated with his admiration of a hero, fails to see that it is only a projection of his own soul which he admires.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

58. Every hero becomes a bore at last.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

59. The characteristic of genuine heroism is its persistency. All men have wandering impulses, fits and starts of generosity. But when you have resolved to be great, abide by yourself, and do not weakly try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

60. Heroism feels and never reasons, and therefore is always right.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

61. Self-trust is the essence of heroism.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

62. Hero worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

63. Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald

64. It really doesn’t matter whether it’s the villain or the hero. Sometimes the villain is the most colorful. But I prefer a part where you don’t know what he is until the end.
- Glenn Ford

65. A hero is someone right who doesn’t change.
- George Foreman

66. I don’t know if I see myself as really an action hero; but, I like doing physical movies, and I like doing movies where the writing is very lean.
- Jodie Foster

67. Dr. Martin Luther King is not a black hero. He is an American hero.
- Morgan Freeman

68. I think we’re all heroes, if you catch us at the right time.
- Andy Garcia

69. The fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them.
- Jean Genet

70. Books are those faithful mirrors that reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes.
- Edward Gibbon

71. It is said, that no one is a hero to their butler. The reason is, that it requires a hero to recognize a hero. The butler, however, will probably know well how to estimate his equals.
- Goethe

72. The hero draws inspiration from the virtue of his ancestors.
- Goethe

73. One cannot always be a hero, but one can always be a human.
- Goethe

74. Aspire rather to be a hero than merely appear one.
- Baltasar Gracian

75. The world doesn’t make any heroes anymore.
- Graham Greene

76. If you’re an underdog, mentally disabled, physically disabled, if you don’t fit in, if you’re not as pretty as the others, you can still be a hero.
- Steve Guttenberg

77. The difference between a hero and a coward is one step sideways.
- Gene Hackman

78. Life is not simple, and people can’t be boxed into being either heroes or villains.
- Jessica Hagedorn

79. I’m not an American hero. I’m a person that loves children.
- Clara McBride Hale

80. That’s what it takes to be a hero, a little gem of innocence inside you that makes you want to believe that there still exists a right and wrong—that decency will somehow triumph in the end.
- Lisa Hand

81. “Good guy” or “bad guy,” hero or anti-hero; doesn’t matter to me what role I play—only [that] the character have something magical.
- Rutger Hauer

82. A hero cannot be a hero unless in a heroic world.
- Nathaniel Hawthorne

83. We relish news of our heroes, forgetting that we are extraordinary to somebody, too.
- Helen Hayes

84. My belt holds my pants up, but the belt loops hold my belt up. So which one’s the real hero?
- Mitch Hedberg

85. No man is a hero to his valet. This is not because the hero is no hero, but because the valet is a valet.
- Georg Hegel

86. Once the state has been founded, there can no longer be any heroes. They come on the scene only in uncivilized conditions.
- George Hegel

87. When the heroes go off the stage, the clowns come on.
- Heinrich Heine

88. As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.
- Ernest Hemingway

89. Luck is everything … My good luck in life was to be a really frightened person. I’m fortunate to be a coward, to have a low threshold of fear, because a hero couldn’t make a good suspense film.
- Alfred Hitchcock

90. To think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes

91. Be your own hero; it’s cheaper than a movie ticket.
- Doug Horton

92. A boy doesn’t have to go to war to be a hero; he can say he doesn’t like pie when he sees there isn’t enough to go around.
- Edgar Watson Howe

93. Our admiration is so given to dead martyrs that we have little time for living heroes.
- Elbert Hubbard

94. My heroes were Dylan, John Lennon and Picasso, because they each moved their particular medium forward, and when they got to the point where they were comfortable, they always moved on.
- John Hughes

95. It is impossible to strive for the heroic life. The title of hero is bestowed by the survivors upon the fallen, who themselves know nothing of heroism.
- Johan Huizinga

96. Heroism, or military glory, is much admired by the generality of mankind. They consider it as the most sublime kind of merit. Men of cool reflection are not so sanguine in their praises of it.
- David Hume

97. Heroes to me are guys that sit in libraries. They absorb knowledge and then the risks they take are calculated on the basis of the courage it took to become replete with knowledge.
- William Hurt

98. These heroes of finance are like beads on a string; when one slips off, all the rest follow.
- Henrik Ibsen

99. The idol of today pushes the hero of yesterday out of our recollection and will, in turn, be supplanted by his successor of tomorrow.
- Washington Irving

100. My friends and I took songwriting very, very seriously. My hero was and still is Bob Dylan, but also people like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell and that whole generation.
- Kazuo Ishiguro

101. My heroes, my dreams, and my future lie in Yankee Stadium; and, they can’t take that from me.
- Derek Jeter

102. What has made this nation great? Not its heroes but its households.
- Sarah Orne Jewett

103. Heroes are created by popular demand, sometimes out of the scantiest materials.
- Gerald W. Johnson

104. My father was very intense, passionate and over-the-top. He was my hero and my tyrant.
- June Jordan

105. My heroes are, and were, my parents. I can’t see having anyone else as my heroes.
- Michael Jordan

106. I was the hero of the young insurgent working class art movement.
- Elia Kazan

107. I long to accomplish a great and noble task; but, it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble. The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.
- Helen Keller

108. A hero is someone we can admire without apology.
- Kitty Kelley

109. A man who kills on his own is a murderer. A man who kills at his government’s request is a national hero.
- Ramman Kenoun

110. People fantasize about being a hero and helping someone in trouble. Batman is
that fantasy realized—not just for Bruce Wayne, but for the audience.
- Val Kilmer

111. Old myths, old gods, old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our mind, waiting for our call. We have need for them. They represent the wisdom of our race.
- Stanley Kuniz

112. Just by luck, I picked good heroes to worship.
- Charles Kuralt

113. Freud was a hero. He descended to the Underworld and met there stark terrors. He carried with him his theory as a Medusa’s head which turned these terrors to stone.
- R. D. Laing

114. Poets and heroes are of the same race, the latter do what the former conceive.
- Alphonse de Lamartine

115. In 1979, Alien came out and Sigourney was in it with a bunch a guys. Nobody at that time expected the woman to be the hero, so that was a tradition that started.
- Sanaa Lathan

116. You would never expect a black woman to be the hero.
- Sanaa Lathan

117. The prudent see only the difficulties, the bold only the advantages of a great enterprise; the hero sees both; diminishes the former and makes the latter preponderate, and so conquers.
- Johann Kaspar Lavater

118. He who seldom speaks, and with one calm well-timed word, can strike dumb the loquacious is a genius or a hero.
- Johann Kaspar Lavater

119. The law has no power over heroes.
- Charlotte Lennox

120. What is a hero without love for mankind.
- Doris Lessing

121. There are no heroes in most of my stories. I look at our society with a critical eye and find nothing extraordinary in the people I see.
- Naguib Mahfouz

122. Ultimately, a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation.
- Norman Mailer

123. Without heroes, we are all plain people and don’t know how far we can go.
- Bernard Malamud

124. Heroes are people who are all good with no bad in them. That’s the way I always saw Joe DiMaggio. He was beyond question one of the greatest players of the century.
- Mickey Mantle

125. In every age poets and social reformers have tried to stimulate the people of their own time to a nobler life by enchanting stories of the virtues of the heroes of old.
- Alfred Marshall

126. We all live in suspense from day to day; in other words, you are the hero of your own story.
- Mary McCarthy

127. Muhammad Ali is a combination of personality and athlete who is probably better known around the world than any other. He became a great hero.
- Will McDonough

128. Michael Moore became an industry hero and the most visible symbol of the Hollywood left.
- Michael Medved

129. I could easily be a hero, were it not for the physical and mental pain involved.
- Jason Merchey

130. Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.
- Thomas Merton

131. The noir hero is a knight in blood-caked armor. He’s dirty, and he does his best to deny the fact that he’s a hero the whole time.
- Frank Miller

132. The ordinary man is involved in action, the hero acts. An immense difference.
- Henry Miller

133. You only need to make one big score in finance to be a hero forever.
- Merton Miller

134. Our heroes are people and people are flawed. Don’t let that taint the thing you love.
- Randy K. Millholland

135. I’m a hero with coward’s legs.
- Spike Milligan

136. Fighting is like champagne. It goes to the heads of cowards as quickly as of heroes. Any fool can be brave on a battlefield when it’s be brave or else be killed.
- Margaret Mitchell

137. The world’s made up of individuals who don’t want to be heroes.
- Brian Moore

138. Nothing is more depressing than the conviction that one is not a hero.
- George Moore

139. Of course I do not regret the Bond days, I regret that sadly heroes in general are depicted with guns in their hands, and to tell the truth I have always hated guns and what they represent.
- Roger Moore

140. Lance Armstrong is the guy that I would put up there as one of my heroes. He’s done something that no one else has done and when you put into it what he overcame, it’s absolutely unbelievable.
- Craig T. Nelson

141. Calculation never made a hero.
- John Henry Newman

142. In this world no one rules by love; if you are but amiable, you are no hero; to be powerful, you must be strong, and to have dominion you must have a genius for organizing.
- John Henry Newman

143. Heroism—that is the disposition of a man who aspires to a goal compared to which he himself is wholly insignificant. Heroism is the good will to self-destruction.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

144. If a man wishes to become a hero, then the serpent must first become a dragon; otherwise, he lacks his proper enemy.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

145. What makes us heroic?—Confronting simultaneously our supreme suffering and our supreme hope.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

146. A hero is one who knows how to hang on one minute longer.
- Novalis

147. I grew up never seeing myself on-screen, and it’s really important to me to give people who look like me a chance to see themselves. I want to see myself as the hero of any story. I want to see myself save the world from the bomb.
- Sandra Oh

148. We all want heroes and we all want somebody to look up to.
- Stacie Orrico

149. Heroes, whatever high ideas we may have of them, are mortal and not divine. We are all as God made us and many of us much worse.
- John Osborne

150. It is surmounting difficulties that makes heroes.
- Louis Pasteur

151. Heroes take journeys, confront dragons, and discover the treasure of their true selves.
- Carol Lynn Pearson

152. The reason progress is slow is that we always expect other men to be the heroes and to live the heroic lives. But we all have hero stuff in us. In our sphere of life we can always live more heroically and triumphantly and grow in heroic stature.
- Wilferd A. Peterson

153. If one is determined to die for the truth, even a common man can create history.
- Velupillai Pirapakaran

154. A hero is born among a hundred, a wise man is found among a thousand, but an accomplished one might not be found even among a hundred thousand men.
- Plato

155. By that I mean, I think that it is true that politics and political heroes have to satisfy our need to be greater than mortal in some way, and that’s led them into creating illusions, sound bites, focus groups that tell you what to do.
- Sydney Pollack

156. Women can’t be afraid to look like action heroes. It’s not always pretty, but when it’s on the screen, it translates well to the audience.
- Victoria Pratt

157. In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man’s proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it’s yours.
- Ayn Rand

158. We have every right to dream heroic dreams. Those who say that we’re in a time when there are no heroes, they just don’t know where to look.
- Ronald Reagan

159. A hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles.
- Christopher Reeve

160. Hard times don’t create heroes. It is during the hard times when the “hero” within us is revealed.
- Bob Riley

161. We’re our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.
- Tom Robbins

162. A hero is a man who does what he can.
- Romain Rolland

163. The average is the borderline that keeps mere men in their place. Those who step over the line are heroes by the very act.
- Henry Rollins

164. Courage is more exhilarating than fear and in the long run it is easier. We do not have to become heroes over night. Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it is not as dreadful as it appeared, discovering we have the strength to stare it down.
- Eleanor Roosevelt

165. Heroes are not known by the loftiness of their carriage; the greatest braggarts are generally the merest cowards.
- Jean Jacques Rousseau

166. We have lots of heroes today—sportsmen, supermodels, media personalities. They come, they have their 15 minutes of fame, and they go. But the influence of good teachers stays with us. They are the people who really shape our life.
- Jonathan Sacks

167. This character feels so much like my brother. He has two children. He has a wife. He works with me. He chooses to stay in New Hampshire because he wants his kids to grow up in the school they started with. He doesn’t want them to lose friends. He is his family’s hero.
- Adam Sandler

168. One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.
- May Sarton

169. Our young people look up to us. Let us not let them down. Our young people need us. Saving them will make heroes of us all.
- Gale Sayers

170. My father was absent and he was a hero to me.
- Greta Scacchi

171. You don’t raise heroes, you raise sons. And if you treat them like sons, they’ll turn out to be heroes, even if it’s just in your own eyes.
- Walter M. Schirra, Jr.

172. Success and failure. We think of them as opposites, but they’re really not. They’re companions—the hero and the sidekick.
- Laurence Shames

173. You cannot have power for good without having power for evil, too. Even mother’s milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.
- George Bernard Shaw

174. You cannot be a hero without being a coward.
- George Bernard Shaw

175. The key element in tragedy is that heroes and heroines are destroyed by that which appears to be their greatest strength.
- Robert Shea

176. I’m quite influenced in this by one of my heroes, Montaigne, who thought a man’s real task was to render as honest an account of himself as he could.
- Robert Sheckley

177. Nature abhors a hero. For one thing, he violates the law of conservation of energy. For another, how can it be the survival of the fittest when the fittest keeps putting himself in situations where he is most likely to be creamed?
- Solomon Short

178. If you do it right, 51 percent of the time you will end up a hero.
- Alfred P. Sloan

179. I believe that interest in heroes is universal and eternal.
- Norman Spinrad

180. Love of glory can only create a great hero; contempt of glory creates a great man.
- Charles Maurice de Talleyrand

181. When it comes time to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with the fear of death, so when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home.
- Tecumseh

182. Rebellion per se is not a virtue. If it were, we would have some heroes on very low levels.
- Norman Thomas

183. Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men’s reality. Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of ”the rat race” is not yet final.
- Hunter S. Thompson

184. Cowards suffer; heroes enjoy.
- Henry David Thoreau

185. I am less affected by their heroism who stood up for half an hour in the front line at Buena Vista, than by the steady and cheerful valor of the men who inhabit the snow-plow for their winter quarters; who have not merely the three-o’-clock-in-the-morning courage, which Bonaparte thought was the rarest, but whose courage does not go to rest so early, who go to sleep only when the storm sleeps or the sinews of their iron steed are frozen.
- Henry David Thoreau

186. It was not the hero I admired, but the reflection from his epaulet or helmet. It is nothing (for us) permanently inherent in another, but his attitude or relation to what we prize, that we admire.
- Henry David Thoreau

187. Marching is when the pulse of the hero beats in unison with the pulse of Nature, and he steps to the measure of the universe; then there is true courage and invincible strength.
- Henry David Thoreau

188. The hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men.
- Henry David Thoreau

189. We are independent of the change we detect. The longer the lever, the less perceptible its motion. It is the slowest pulsation which is the most vital. The hero then will know how to wait, as well as to make haste. All good abides with him who waiteth wisely; we shall sooner overtake the dawn by remaining here than by hurrying over the hills of the west.
- Henry David Thoreau

190. If everybody was satisfied with himself there would be no heroes.
- Mark Twain

191. To be human is to have one’s little modicum of romance secreted away in one’s composition. One never ceases to make a hero of one’s self, (in private) during life, but only alters the style of heroism from time to time as the drifting years belittle certain gods of his admiration and raise up others in their stead.
- Mark Twain

192. The greatest height of heroism to which an individual, like a people, can attain is to know how to face ridicule.
- Miguel de Unamuno

193. Journalism is the protection between people and any sort of totalitarian rule. That’s why my hero, admittedly a flawed one, is a journalist.
- Andrew Vachss

194. To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order to oneself.
- Simone Weil

195. Great occasions do not make heroes or cowards; they simply unveil them to the eyes of men. Silently and imperceptibly, as we wake or sleep, we grow strong or weak; and at last some crisis shows what we have become.
- Brooke Foss Westcott

196. And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero.
- Walt Whitman

197. One brave deed makes no hero.
- John Greenleaf Whittier

198. Receiving far less attention are the working class heroes, who go about their solitary work routines with quiet dignity, come home from another grueling day, yet still find time to interact with their children.
- Armstrong Williams

199. You know, heroes are ordinary people that have achieved extraordinary things in life.
- Dave Winfield

200. My heroes are people like Picasso and Miro and people who at last really reach something in their old age, which they absolutely couldn’t ever have done in their youth.
- Robert Wyatt

CONCLUSION

Some poets/writers/philosophers such as Henry David Thoreau take the the word “hero” and turn it on its head. It looks like one had to give one’s life in order to be considered a bona fide hero in the olden days. Far from it now. We are heroes to anyone we inspire; and, anyone who inspires us is our hero. Plain and simple. : )

[Post Script: See more hero quotes in the comments below! Rather than changing the title of this post—which would require changing all the links, too—I simply added all the new relevant quotes that I found while making other subsequent quotes lists to the comments section. Hope you enjoy!]

Be sure to get the latest articles as soon as they’re posted by signing up here!

[For “200 Rich Quotes,” click here.]

[For “200 Poor Quotes,” click here.]

[For “100 Money Quotes,” click here.]

[For “100 Health Quotes,” click here.]

[For “100 Blessings Quotes,” click here.]

[For “200 Happiness Quotes,” click here.]

[For “300 Friendship Quotes,” click here.]

[For “200 Existence Quotes,” click here.]

[For “25 Statements to Happiness,” click here.]

[For “30 Statements for Great Relationships,” click here.]

[For all posts about different QUOTES, click here.]

[For more “Easy Steps to Success with People,” click here.]