#heroism

A friend once asked me why it was that stories about animals and their heroism...are so compelling. ...we love them because they're the closest thing we have to material evidence of an objective moral order--or, to put it another way, they're the closest thing we have to proof of the existence of God. They seem to prove that the things that matter to and move us the most--things like love, courage, loyalty, altruism--aren't just ideas we made up from nothing. To see them demonstrated in other animals proves they're real things, that they exist in the world independently of what humans invent and tell each other in the form of myth or fable. ↗

— Gwen Cooper

#courage

I do not believe that I am made of the stuff which constitutes heroes, because, in all of the hundreds of instances that my voluntary acts have placed me face to face with death, I cannot recall a single one where any alternative step to that I took occurred to me until many hours later. ↗

— Edgar Rice Burroughs

#death

Vanye: You're asking me to kill you. Luthiel: I'm asking you to save her. ↗

— Robert Fanney

#heroism #luthiel #vanye #death

War is hell, but sometimes in the midst of that hell men do things that heaven itself must be proud of. A hand grenade is hurled into a group of men. One of the men throws himself on top of it, making his body a living shield. In the burst of wild fire he dies, and the others live. Heroism is only a word, often a phony one. This is an action for which there is no good word because we can hardly even imagine it, let alone give it its proper name. Very literally, one man takes death into his bowels, takes fire into his own sweet flesh, so that the other men can take life, some of them men he hardly knows. ↗

— Frederick Buechner

#heroism #life #sacrifice #war #death

There is an electric fire in human nature tending to purify - so that among these human creatures there is continually some birth of heroism. The pity is that we must wonder at it, as we should at finding a pearl in the rubbish. ↗

— John Keats

#wisdom #nature

Even if only one person’s respect for animals increases, then writing Talon would have been worthwhile. ↗

— Christopher Gerard

#animal-welfare #animals #animals-stories-heroism #respect

I wanted the world to know that my country Ethiopia has always won with determination and heroism. ↗

— Abebe Bikila

#country #determination #ethiopia #heroism #i

A country grows in history not only because of the heroism of its troops on the field of battle, it grows also when it turns to justice and to right for the conservation of its interests. ↗

— Aristide Briand

#battle #because #conservation #country #field

There is an electric fire in human nature tending to purify - so that among these human creatures there is continually some birth of new heroism. The pity is that we must wonder at it, as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish. ↗

— John Keats

#birth #continually #creatures #electric #finding

Rosa Parks was the queen mother of a movement whose single act of heroism sparked the movement for freedom, justice and equality. Her greatest contribution is that she told us a regular person can make a difference. ↗

— Marc Morial

#contribution #difference #equality #freedom #greatest