Courage is a muscle, not a gift
Almost every voice in this room agrees on one correction: brave people are not fearless. Twain, Mandela and John Wayne all define courage as acting despite fear, not without it. That reframing matters — it means courage is available to the anxious, which is all of us. Roosevelt adds the method: you build courage by facing small fears repeatedly. Each time you look fear in the face and act, the next time gets easier. Courage compounds.
The oldest one here is two thousand years old
“Fortune favours the bold” is the senior line in this room by some distance — Virgil wrote it into the Aeneid around 19 BC, and people have been repeating it ever since without knowing whose it is. Twain’s is the next most traceable, set down in Pudd’nhead Wilson in 1894. The rest are modern, and the fact that four different people across two centuries arrived at the same idea is the interesting part: courage is something you do while afraid, not instead of being afraid. If you want to know which famous lines are misattributed outright — the ones nobody actually said — that is what the Forgery Wing is for.
What is the best quote about courage?
Mark Twain’s — “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear”, from Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894). It is sourced, and it carries the idea the whole room agrees on: brave people are not fearless, they act while afraid. The most famous line here is the one to distrust — Hemingway wrote “grace under pressure” and never put the word courage in front of it.
Did Eleanor Roosevelt say "do one thing every day that scares you"?
It is widely credited to her, but no primary source has been confirmed in her published writing, so it is labelled attributed rather than sourced.
Is "fortune favours the bold" a Latin proverb?
It is usually printed as an anonymous Latin proverb, but it has an author and a location: Virgil, Aeneid X.284, "Audentis Fortuna iuvat".
Did Hemingway say “courage is grace under pressure”?
No. He wrote the phrase “grace under pressure” in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald on 20 April 1926, and in the same letter said he was not referring to guts but to something else. The “Courage is” was added by someone else later, and it reverses his meaning.
What is the full version of “Courage is grace under pressure.”?
Hemingway wrote three words, not five: grace under pressure. The opening “Courage is” was added later by someone else — and it contradicts him, because in the same letter he said he was “not referring to guts but to something else.” The collection cites it to Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, 20 April 1926.
What is the full version of “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”?
Two wordings circulate — “in proportion to” and “according to.” The second is the one that appears in quotation collections; the first is the one everybody repeats. The collection cites it to Diary, 1931.
What is the full version of “Courage is not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.”?
Mandela wrote it as something he found out rather than something he declared: “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.” The collection cites it to Long Walk to Freedom, 1995.
Did E. E. Cummings say “It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.”?
Credited to Cummings everywhere and located in none of his published work. No poem, essay, letter or lecture has ever been produced for it. It is filed here as attributed to E. E. Cummings, which means widely credited and not traced to a primary source.