C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Heroism
Self-trust is the essence of heroism.
In a truly heroic life there is no peradventure. It is always either doing or dying.
Heroism—the divine relation which in all times unites a great man to other men.
The grandest of heroic deeds are those which are performed within four walls and in domestic privacy.
There is more heroism in self-denial than in deeds of arms.
Take away ambition and vanity, and where will be your heroes or patriots?
Heroes did not make our liberties: they but reflected and illustrated them.
Mankind is not disposed to look narrowly into the conduct of great victors when their victory is on the right side.
The world’s battlefields have been in the heart chiefly, and there the greatest heroism has been secretly exercised.
The true epic of our times is not “Arms and the Man,” but “Tools and the Man”—an infinitely wider kind of epic.
Heroism is active genius; genius, contemplative heroism. Heroism is the self-devotion of genius manifesting itself in action.
A noble life, crowned with heroic death, rises above and outlives the pride and pomp and glory of the mightiest empire of the earth.
Every heroic act measures itself by its contempt of some external good. But it finds its own success at last, and then the prudent also extol.
Those whom the world has delighted to honor have oftener been influenced in their doings by ambition and vanity than by patriotism.
The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one’s self a fool; the truest heroism is to resist the doubt, and the profoundest wisdom to know when it ought to be resisted, and when to be obeyed.
Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind, and in contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and good. Heroism is an obedience to a secret impulse of an individual’s character.
Heroism, self-denial, and magnanimity, in all instances where they do not spring from a principle of religion, are but splendid altars on which we sacrifice one kind of self-love to another.
A light supper, a good night’s sleep, and a fine morning have often made a hero of the same man who, by indigestion, a restless night, and a rainy morning, would have proved a coward.
If we must have heroes and wars wherein to make them, there is no war so brilliant as a war with wrong; no hero so fit to be sung as he who has gained the bloodless victory of truth and mercy.
True heroism is alike positive and progressive. It sees in right the duty which should dominate, and in truth the principle which should prevail. And hence it never falters in the faith that always and everywhere sin must be repressed, and righteousness exalted.
Enthusiasm springs from the imagination, and self-sacrifice from the heart. Women are, therefore, more naturally heroic than men. All nations have in their annals some of these miracles of patriotism, of which woman is the instrument in the hands of God.
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 sickness, of isolation, and of death. There is no serious piety without heroism. Heroism is the dazzling and glorious concentration of courage.
Don’t aim at any impossible heroisms. Strive rather to be quiet in your own sphere. Don’t live in the cloudland of some transcendental heaven; do your best to bring the glory of a real heaven down, and ray it out upon your fellows in this work-day world. Seek to make trade bright with a spotless integrity, and business lustrous with the beauty of holiness.
There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion. This makes nothing in their favor, but is a proud compliment to man’s nature. Whatever he is or does, he cannot entirely efface the stamp of the divinity on him. Let him strive ever so, he cannot divest himself of his natural sublimity of thought and affection, however he may pervert or deprave it to ill.
There is an army of memorable sufferers who suffer inwardly and not outwardly. The world’s battlefields have been in the heart chiefly. More heroism has there been displayed in the household and in the closet, I think, than on the most memorable military battlefields of history.
Heroism is no extempore work of transient impulse—a rocket rushing fretfully up to disturb the darkness by which, after a moment’s insulting radiance, it is ruthlessly swallowed up,—but a steady fire, which darts forth tongues of flame. It is no sparkling epigram of action, but a luminous epic of character.
We cannot think too highly of our nature, nor too humbly of ourselves. When we see the martyr to virtue, subject as he is to the infirmities of a man, yet suffering the tortures of a demon, and bearing them with the magnanimity of a God, do we not behold a heroism that angels may indeed surpass, but which they cannot imitate, and must admire.
Never was there a time, in the history of the world, when moral heroes were more needed. The world waits for such, the providence of God has commanded science to labor and prepare the way for such. For them she is laying her iron tracks, and stretching her wires, and bridging the oceans. But where are they? Who shall breathe into our civil and political relations the breath of a higher life? Who shall touch the eyes of a paganized science, and of a pantheistic philosophy, that they may see God? Who shall consecrate to the glory of God the triumphs of science? Who, shall bear the life-boat to the stranded and perishing nations.