70+ Quotes About Heroes And Being A Hero

Every generation has their own collection of heroes. These heroes can come in all kinds.

Some of these heroes are famous around the world for their great acts. Some are unsung, quietly working from the shadows to make their world a better place. Some are tragic heroes whose good intentions go awry and sadly end up leading to their own destruction.

Regardless of whatever kind of hero it is, there have been quotes from all over the world to inspire and encourage. The quotes presented here are to inspire your own hero's journey.

Great heroes need great sorrows and burdens, or half their greatness goes unnoticed. It is all part of the fairy tale.

That is why embittered people find heroes and madmen a perennial source of fascination, for they have no fear of life or death. Both heroes and madmen are indifferent to danger and will forge ahead regardless of what other people say.

Heroes don’t have the need to be known as heroes, they just do what heroes do because it is right and it must be done.

Dead people can be our heroes because they can’t disappoint us later; they only improve over time, as we forget more and more about them.

You cannot be a hero without being a coward.

A hero. You want to be one of those rare human beings who make history, rather than merely watch it flow around them like water around a rock.

Nothing is given to man on earth – struggle is built into the nature of life, and conflict is possible – the hero is the man who lets no obstacle prevent him from pursuing the values he has chosen.

No, what he didn’t like about heroes was that they were usually suicidally gloomy when sober and homicidally insane when drunk.

You learn eventually that, while there are no villains, there are no heroes either. And until you make the final discovery that there are only human beings, who are therefore all the more fascinating, you are liable to miss something.

The hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men.

Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation.

Heroes may not be braver than anyone else. They’re just braver 5 minutes longer.

Heroism is not only in the man, but in the occasion.

Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, stuffed our wallets but starved our wonder. It has fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery. It produces “nice” people, not heroes.

To be heroic is to be courageous enough to die for something; to be inspirational is to be crazy enough to live a little.

The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.

The heroic cannot be the common, nor the common the heroic.

Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.

All the heroes of tomorrow are the heretics of today.

You don’t raise heroes, you raise sons. And if you treat them like sons, they’ll turn out to be heroes, even if it’s just in your own eyes.

To have no heroes is to have no aspiration, to live on the momentum of the past, to be thrown back upon routine, sensuality, and the narrow self.

Real heroes are men who fall and fail and are flawed, but win out in the end because they’ve stayed true to their ideals and beliefs and commitments.

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable.

What makes a hero? Courage, strength, morality, withstanding adversity? Are these the traits that truly show and create a hero? Is the light truly the source of darkness or vice versa? Is the soul a source of hope or despair? Who are these so called heroes and where do they come from? Are their origins in obscurity or in plain sight?

To be heroic may mean nothing more than this then, to stand in the face of the status quo, in the face of an easy collapse into the madness of an increasingly chaotic world and represent another way.

I am of certain convinced that the greatest heroes are those who do their duty in the daily grind of domestic affairs whilst the world whirls as a maddening dreidel.

The hero draws inspiration from the virtue of his ancestors.

We do not have to become heroes overnight. Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up … discovering we have the strength to stare it down.

The prudent see only the difficulties, the bold only the advantages, of a great enterprise; the hero sees both; diminishes the former and makes the latter preponderate, and so conquers.

The women of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran who risk their lives and their beauty to defy the foulness of theocracy. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Azar Nafisi as their ideal feminine model.

Friends are the real superheroes. They battle our worst enemies—loneliness, grief, anxiety, depression, fear, and doubt—every time they come around.

The legacy of heroes is the memory of a great name and the inheritance of a great example.

But heroes, at times, had to be fools.

A hero is someone who rebels or seems to rebel against the facts of existence and seems to conquer them. Obviously that can only work at moments. It can’t be a lasting thing. That’s not saying that people shouldn’t keep trying to rebel against the facts of existence. Someday, who knows, we might conquer death, disease and war.

I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

Unconsciously we all have a standard by which we measure other men, and if we examine closely we find that this standard is a very simple one, and is this: we admire them, we envy them, for great qualities we ourselves lack. Hero worship consists in just that. Our heroes are men who do things which we recognize, with regret, and sometimes with a secret shame, that we cannot do. We find not much in ourselves to admire, we are always privately wanting to be like somebody else. If everybody was satisfied with himself, there would be no heroes.

Men have to have heroes, but no man can ever be as big as the need, and so a legend grows around a grain of truth, like a pearl.

Heroes are those who can somehow resist the power of the situation and act out of noble motives, or behave in ways that do not demean others when they easily can.

The world’s battlefields have been in the heart chiefly; more heroism has been displayed in the household and the closet, than on the most memorable battlefields in history.

Most have been forgotten. Most deserve to be forgotten. The heroes will always be remembered. The best. The best and the worst. And a few who were a bit of both.

A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.

We are all ordinary. We are all boring. We are all spectacular. We are all shy. We are all bold. We are all heroes. We are all helpless. It just depends on the day.

People are not born heroes or villains; they’re created by the people around them.

To be heroic does not have to mean possessing the ability to stand against the evils of the world, either well or successfully, but just that one is willing to stand.

What I wanted to express very clearly and intensely was that the reason these people had to invent or imagine heroes and gods is pure fear. Fear of life and fear of death.

True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others, at whatever cost.

Heroes became extinct when saving the world became more important to rescue a damsel in distress.

I think a hero is any person really intent on making this a better place for all people.

That’s why you can’t give up. Heroes don’t give up.

Heroes are made in the hour of defeat. Success is, therefore, well described as a series of glorious defeats.

The hero sees values beyond what’s possible. That’s the nature of a hero. It kills him, of course, ultimately. But it makes the whole struggle of humanity worthwhile.

You were the one who taught me,” he said. “I never looked at you without seeing the sweetness of the way the world goes together, or without sorrow for its spoiling. I became a hero to serve you, and all that is like you.

As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.

My own heroes are the dreamers, those men and women who tried to make the world a better place than when they found it, whether in small ways or great ones. Some succeeded, some failed, most had mixed results… but it is the effort that’s heroic, as I see it. Win or lose, I admire those who fight the good fight.

Heroes are made by the paths they choose, not the powers they are graced with.

The noir hero is a knight in blood caked armor. He’s dirty and he does his best to deny the fact that he’s a hero the whole time.

What we need now are heroes and heroines, about a million of them, one brave deed is worth a thousand books. Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.

Anyway, if you need your heroes to be perfect, you won’t have very many. Even Superman had his Kryptonite. I’d rather have my heroes be more like me: trying to do the right thing, sometimes messing up. Making mistakes. Saying you’re sorry. And forgiving other people when they mess up, too.

When you’re truly awesome, you know that it’s actually a burden and wish day after day to be relieved of such a curse. Think of about 95% of the superheroes.

Anyone who does anything to help a child in his life is a hero to me.

Heroes aren’t heroes because they worship the light, but because they know the darkness all to well to stand down and live with it.

Being a hero is about the shortest lived profession on earth.

Someone needs to fight, someone needs to sacrifice, someone needs to inspire, someone needs to be a hero.

There are no heroes…in life, the monsters win.

I think—the hero observes that nothing is so frightening as a labyrinth with no center.

But no man’s a hero to himself.