Dr. Mardy's Quotes of the Week ("Courage")

August 3 - 9, 2025 | THIS WEEK'S THEME: “Courage"

Opening Line of the Week

I wasn’t old enough to read Profiles in Courage when it first came out, but I devoured it when, as a college freshman at the University of North Dakota, I volunteered to work in the 1960 presidential campaign. JFK never made a campaign appearance at the school, but I was thrilled to be in attendance when he delivered a presidential address at the UND Field House on September 25, 1963. A little less than two months later, he was assassinated in Dallas, Texas on Nov. 22, 1963.

After reading Profiles in Courage, I never looked at the book again, but after launching my Great Opening Lines website a few years ago, I decided to take another peek. I’m so glad I did, for I had completely forgotten about the spectacular opening words of the book. After succinctly, yet poetically, describing the essence of the book, Kennedy wisely included one of history’s most famous observations on the subject.

Kennedy was a sitting U.S. Senator when the book was released on Jan. 1, 1956, and it nicely positioned him for a presidential run a few years later. The book became an immediate best-seller, with more than two million copies sold in the first year alone. It also won the 1957 Pulitzer Prize in Biography, even though it had not originally been nominated. It is believed that JFK’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy, was so incensed that his son’s book was not nominated that he used his considerable influence to get members of the Pulitzer Prize board to select it.

When the book came out, many people believed Theodore Sorenson, a noted historian and close friend of the Kennedy family, had actually ghostwritten the work. JFK didn’t say much about the matter, but in 1957 his father famously threatened to sue political commentator Drew Pearson for fifty million dollars for asserting that Sorenson was the real author. The controversy even resulted in a popular story—almost certainly apocryphal—about a colleague in the Senate saying to Kennedy, “I wish you had a little less profile and a lot more courage.”

For many years, Sorenson steadfastly asserted that JFK was the author of the book—and that he was primarily a researcher. However, in his 2008 autobiography Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History, he admitted for the first time that he “did a first draft of most chapters.” He also acknowledged that he might have even “privately boasted or indirectly hinted” that he had written most of the book.

For more than 2,000 memorable opening lines from every genre of world literature, go to www.GreatOpeningLines.com.

This Week’s Puzzler

On August 9, 1962, this recipient of the 1946 Nobel Prize for Literature died at age 85 of a cerebral hemorrhage. At his death, he was living in a Swiss village overlooking Lake Lugano (on the border between Switzerland and Italy).

Born in 1877 to German missionary parents who had recently returned from India, he was a precocious child who, like his mother, showed early signs of depression. As a teenager, he attended a theological seminary to please his parents, but after a failed suicide attempt at age fifteen, he dropped out. He bounced around for several years before taking a job at a bookstore and deciding to formally pursue his original dreams of becoming a poet and writer.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, he began to publish poetry and prose works, but nothing significant emerged until his 1904 novel Peter Camenzind became popular throughout Europe (Sigmund Freud called it one of his favorite novels). Over the next several years, he continued to churn out novels, short stories, and poems, but he struggled to find his voice as a writer (he even described his 1910 novel Gertrude as “a miscarriage”).

In 1911, he took an extended trip to India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and other destinations to study Hinduism, Buddhism, and Eastern culture. The trip didn’t provide the philosophical relief he was seeking, but it went on to significantly influence his later work.

When WWI started, he volunteered to serve in Germany’s Imperial Army, but was judged unfit for combat duty. While serving as a military guard at a POW camp, he began to have serious misgivings about what he regarded as the madness of German nationalism. He ultimately renounced his German citizenship, moved to Switzerland, and formally became a Swiss citizen in 1923.

In the 1920s, he became enormously popular in Europe for two novels: Siddhartha (1922) and Steppenwolf (1929). With the rise of Hitler in the 1930s, he was blacklisted by the Nazis for his political views and his support of such famous German political refugees as Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann. With the publication of his last major work—The Glass Bead Game—in 1943, he was one of Europe’s most influential writers. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946.

For much of his life, this week’s Mystery Man had to summon deep personal courage to oppose political leaders who were unfit and governmental policies that were objectionable. In his 1974 memoir Reflections, he offered one of history’s most original thoughts on this week’s theme:

Who is this person? (Answer below)

What Role Has Courage Played in Your Life?

Courage and fear are deeply intertwined in human life, and it’s impossible to fully understand one without considering the other. Fear is regarded as a primary human emotion, alongside joy, anger, sadness, surprise, and disgust. It comes into play whenever someone senses the presence of a predator or some other kind of danger.

Fear triggers the fight-or-flight response, an instinctual reaction designed to increase the chances of survival by enabling the person to either face the danger or escape by fleeing or hiding. Fear is almost always accompanied by a subjective feeling of alarm or anxiousness, a quickened heartbeat as blood rushes from the extremities to protect vital organs, and rapid breathing to supply the lungs with oxygen.

Courage is not considered an emotion, but a response to fear. It arises not from instinct but from what we can only regard as an intention—no matter how primitive that intention might be—to fight rather than flee. Courage is not about being fearless or foolhardy, but about doing something to combat fear. Mark Twain summed it up nicely:

Courage is not some abstract heroic ideal, but something we need almost every day of our lives, and it is absolutely essential when we’re:

— grieving the loss of a loved one;

— standing up to bullies and other toxic people;

— coming to the defense of victims of injustice;

— trying to regain our footing after a major failure or personal setback;

— challenging someone who’s said or done something offensive or inappropriate;

— trying to be principled while working with people who’d prefer that we abandon our beliefs;

— trying to be honest and forthright with a friend who’s engaging in self-destructive or self-sabotaging behavior.

Courage is what we need when we want to do the right thing, but discover that doing what’s right is much easier said than done. Courage, to reiterate, isn’t the absence of fear, it’s the presence of something far more powerful.

Courage is the Manifestation of a Brave Heart

The English word courage derives from the Latin cor, meaning “heart.” In ancient times, cor referred not just to the physical organ that pumps blood throughout the body, but to the symbolic seat of emotion, spirit, and moral strength. In her book The Gifts of Imperfection (2010), Brené Brown recalled this original meaning when she wrote that the earliest definition of courage was “to speak one’s mind by telling all one’s heart.” In Brown’s view, long before the word courage referred to acts of bravery, it meant the willingness to, as the modern saying goes, speak from the heart.

Over the centuries, cor entered Old French as corage, and ultimately into coeur. Both words meant “heart,” but they also conveyed the idea of the heart as the source of a person’s innermost feelings. In The Courage to Create (1975), Rollo May wrote:

“The word courage comes from the same stem as the French word coeur, meaning ‘heart.’ Thus just as one’s heart, by pumping blood to one’s arms, legs, and brain enables all the other physical organs to function, so courage makes possible all the psychological virtues. Without courage other values wither away into mere facsimiles of virtue.”

When corage entered Middle English in the 12th century, the spelling was changed to courage, and the meaning shifted to a kind of inner mental strength. From there it was only a matter of time before it took on the modern sense of not shirking in the face of fear or danger.

Another important thing to know about courage is that it is a virtue—and regarded by many as the prime virtue.

The dictionary defines virtue as “moral excellence and righteousness,” and for more than two millennia in the Judeo-Christian tradition, a whole panoply of virtues—like faith, hope, charity, patience, perseverance, and gratitude—have been regarded as not simply admirable or praiseworthy, but essential to living a full and meaningful life.

The three quotations above suggest that courage is a kind of foundational virtue. Without courage, according to Dr. Johnson, the other virtues might not even exist. Clare Booth Luce’s lovely ladder metaphor makes a similar point. And C. S. Lewis substantially deepened our understanding of courage by suggesting that it becomes stronger when tested by adversity. Just think about it for a moment. It’s easy to be kind when kindness is easy, and generous when our pockets are overflowing. Similarly, it’s easy to be brave in theory and forgiving when we’ve only been wronged in minor ways. Mark Twain was clearly thinking along these lines when he wrote:

By celebrating the role of courage, the great sages and thinkers have also reminded us of one of life’s eternal truths—that a world without courage is a world of diminishment, stagnation, retreat, and even worse. History’s darkest chapters were not written solely by the boldness of autocrats, but by the complicity of the timid. This is why moral courage is so essential. Throughout history, we’ve seen time and time again that the courage of ordinary human beings has yielded extraordinary results. We saw it happen with our Founding Fathers, and we see clear signs that the courage they exhibited nearly 250 years ago is needed today, when lies and falsehoods are routinely presented as truth, and when rights and liberties we’ve long taken for granted are threatened.

In addition to being an essential public virtue, courage is also an extremely important personal one, as we see in this lovely piece of verse from one of history’s most courageous figures.

Courage is not just about bold and dramatic acts of bravery, but about how courageous—or cowardly—we are in the quietest and most personal moments of our lives. When fear makes us unable to say no to our friends, unwilling to speak up when we feel hurt, or incapable of making small but needed changes in our lives, we often rationalize our behavior by saying that these are just “little things.”

But when these little things—and countless others like them—accumulate over time, they wear us down, constrict our lives, and never allow us to find the peace of mind we desire. Courage, when it becomes a part of our daily lives, can become a kind of spiritual housecleaning, clearing away the emotional debris before we become prisoners in a world that fear has created.

Faye Dunaway perfectly captured this reality when she said in a 2004 Esquire magazine interview:

“Fear is a pair of handcuffs on your soul.”

What she didn’t say, but might have, is that courage is the key than can set you free.

This week, think about the times in your life when your courage was tested, and how you responded. When you do, don’t just celebrate your moral victories, but some of your defeats as well—and the price you paid for them. As you approach the subject, let this week’s selection of quotations stimulate your thinking:

• Courage is the thing. All goes if courage goes. — J. M. Barrie

• How cool, how quiet is true courage. — Fanny Burney

• What a new face courage puts on everything! — Ralph Waldo Emerson

• Always do the things you fear the most; courage is an acquired taste, like caviar. — Erica Jong

• It isn’t for the moment you are struck that you need courage, but for the long uphill climb back to sanity and faith and security. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

• Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage. — Anais Nis

• You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. — Eleanor Roosevelt

Mrs. Roosevelt went on to write: “The danger lies in refusing to face the fear, in not daring to come to grips with it. If you fail anywhere along the line it will take away your confidence. You must make yourself succeed every time. You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”

• Why are we inspired by another person's courage? Maybe because it gives us the sweet and genuine surprise of discovering some trace, at least, of the same courage in ourselves. — Laurence Shames

• Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence. — Thomas Szasz

• It is curious—curious that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare. — Mark Twain

For source information on these quotations, and more observations on the theme of COURAGE, go here.

Cartoon of the Week:

Answer to This Week’s Puzzler:

Hermann Hesse (1877-1962)

Dr. Mardy’s Observation of the Week:

Thanks for joining me again this week. See you next Sunday morning, when the theme will be “Marriage.”

Mardy Grothe

Websites: www.drmardy.com and www.GreatOpeningLines.com

Regarding My Lifelong Love of Quotations: A Personal Note