Courage Is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave
by Ryan Holiday
30 popular highlights from this book
Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from Courage Is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave:
To each,” Winston Churchill would say, “there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.
Courage is honest commitment to noble ideals. The opposite of courage is not, as some argue, being afraid. It’s apathy. It’s disenchantment. It’s despair. It’s throwing up your hands and saying, “What’s the point anyway?
One man with courage makes a majority.
Man is pushed by drives. But he is pulled by values. Viktor Frankl
There is nothing worth doing that is not scary. There is no one who has achieved greatness without wrestling with their own doubts, anxieties, limitations, and demons.
For Hercules, the choice was between vice and virtue, the easy way and the hard way, the well-trod path and the road less traveled. We all face this choice.
It has been said that a Stoic is someone who says “Fuck you” to fate. That’s right. They resist. They fight. They will not be made to do the wrong thing. Especially under pressure.
There is no better than adversity,” Malcolm X would say. “Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve your performance the next time.
It is almost offensively clichéd now to use the phrase “Freedom isn’t free.” Nonetheless, it is true.
The belief that an individual can make a difference is the first step. The next is understanding that you can be that person.
Longfellow wrote: Lives of great men all remind us We can make our lives sublime, And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time.
It doesn’t matter who or how many come at you, you have to be you. Confidently. Authentically. Bravely.
One way to remember who you are,” he said, “is to remember who your heroes are.
The willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life,” Joan Didion observed, “is the source from which self-respect springs.
That’s what de Gaulle realized about Hitler. That his force was entirely dependent on the “cowardice of others.” No one was willing to call the bully a bully. No one in Germany was willing to see that the emperor had no clothes, and was in fact a raving, murderous lunatic. They definitely weren’t willing to say so. Because no one said anything, no one did anything except tell Hitler what he wanted to hear. And so they all became complicit. Still,
Every prophet has to come from civilization,” Churchill would explain, “but every prophet has to go into the wilderness. He must have a strong impression of a complex society . . . and he must serve periods of isolation and meditation. This is the process by which psychic dynamite is made.
Be scared. You can’t help that,” William Faulkner put it. “But don’t be afraid.
You just learn to stop thinking about what they think. You’ll never do original work if you can’t.
Don’t worry about whether things will be hard. Because they will be.
Courage is risk. It is sacrifice . . . . . . commitment . . . perseverance . . . truth . . . determination.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds and shall find me unafraid. William Ernest Henley
If it wasn’t scary, everyone would do it. If it was easy, there wouldn’t be any growth in it.
History is written with blood, sweat, and tears, and it is etched into eternity by the quiet endurance of courageous people.
Start small...on something big.
Sun Tzu would say that it is best to win without fighting—to have maneuvered in such a way that the enemy has lost before it has even begun.
Today, each of us receives our own call. To service. To take a risk. To challenge the status quo. To run toward while others run away. To rise above our station. To do what people say is impossible.
Don’t worry about whether things will be hard. Because they will be. Instead, focus on the fact that these things will help you. This is why you needn’t fear them.
Character,” de Gaulle reflected at the end of his life, “is above all the ability to disregard insults or abandonment by one’s own people. One must be willing to lose everything. There is no such thing as half a risk.
To each,” Winston Churchill would say, “there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.” It’s more accurate to say that life has many of these moments, many such taps on the shoulder.
As Pressfield concludes, the opposite of fear—the true virtue contrasted with that vice—was not fearlessness. The opposite of fear is love. Love for one another. Love for ideas. Love for your country. Love for the vulnerable and the weak. Love for the next generation. Love for all.
