heroic ideals Quotes

Language is the dress of thought; and as the noblest mien or most graceful action would be degraded and obscured by a garb appropriated to the gross employments of rusticks or mechanics, so the most heroick sentiments will lose their efficacy

All Presidents start out to run a crusade but after a couple of years they find they are running something less heroic and much more intractable: namely the presidency.

When I was a boy, I always saw myself as a hero in comic books and in movies. I grew up believing this dream.

In our age, self-indulgence and self-destruction, rather than self-sacrifice, are the foundations for new heroic myths.

Why I love the ancients so much? Aside from everything else, when I read them, the entire past between them and me unfolds at thesame time. The hearts of how many heroes and poets may have been set on fire by Plutarch's biographies which now inspire me with their own and with borrowed flames!

We live in an age in which there is no heroic death.

The student may read Homer or Æschylus in the Greek without danger of dissipation or luxuriousness, for it implies that hein some measure emulate their heroes, and consecrate morning hours to their pages.

...America has enjoyed the doubtful blessing of a single-track mind. We are able to accommodate, at a time, only one national hero; and we demand that that hero shall be uniform and invincible. As a literate people we are preoccupied, neither with the race nor the individual, but with the type. Yesterday, we romanticized the "tough guy;" today, we are romanticizing the underprivileged, tough or tender; tomorrow, we shall begin to romanticize the pure primitive.

Friendship, in the old heroic sense of that term, no longer exists. It is in reality no longer expected or recognized as a virtue among men.

At that moment his soul is fuller of the tomb and him who lies there than of the altar and Him of whom it speaks. Such stages have to be gone through, I believe, by all young and brave souls, who must win their way through hero-worship to the worship of Him who is the King and Lord of heroes.

Enflamed with the study of learning and the admiration of virtue; stirred up with high hopes of living to be brave men and worthy patriots, dear to God, and famous to all ages.

This we must say, that everything is economics and economic interest as mere satisfaction of physical needs had, have and always will have a subordinate role in a normal human, that beyond this sphere must be differentiated from an order of higher values, political , spiritual and heroic.

Being in this fine mood, I spoke to a little boy, whom I saw playing alone in the road, asking him what he was going to be when he grew up. Of course I expected to hear him say a sailor, a soldier, a hunter, or something else that seems heroic to childhood, and I was very much surprised when he answered innocently, 'A man.'

I think that we want to believe in Superman.

I wish my life was a John Grisham novel. His heroes always seem to be one step away from death but come up with a brilliant plan. Unfortunately, real life can’t be wrapped up with a nice little bow

The closest modern equivalent to the Homeric hero is the ace fighter pilot.

See, heroes never die. John Wayne isn't dead, Elvis isn't dead. Otherwise you don't have a hero. You can't kill a hero. That's why I never let him get older.

Heroes, notwithstanding the high ideas which, by the means of flatterers, they may entertain of themselves, or the world may conceive of them, have certainly more of mortal than divine about them.

I wanted to be like the heroes of the books I read. That's why I wanted to go to the jungle. I wasn't interested in danger from the adrenaline aspect, I was more interested in the romance.

Nobility and self-sacrifice sound wonderful in theory, but now he’s seen how it feels. A dead hero is still dead at the end of the day, and you’re still alone.

I teethed on books of heroes such as Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln and King David.

September 11th has produced only miniature heroes because our culture has freed itself from many of the old, dangerous, elitist fantasies of heroism... But in so doing, we have not only tamed and diminished heroes. We have risked taming and diminishing ourselves.

Heroes always make the right decision; I find that seldom happens in my life.

But a voice inside her whispered, There are no heroes, and she remembered what Lord Petyr had said to her, here in this very hall. 'Life is not a song, sweetling,' he'd told her, 'You may learn that one day to your sorrow.' In life, the monsters win, she told herself.