Hi dear, do you have any good words on emotional courage?
hi my love, you can check out this post and this post; here are a few more:
“I know a lot about pain… and I know it is bad for people, eats away the spirit, but how about courage, what is it for if not to use when needed?”
Martha Gellhorn, Selected Letters
“This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us.”
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
“You don’t realize it, perhaps, but you are turning these delusions and illusions of the past into criminal things. Relinquish everything. Stay in bed until you feel so shock full of energy, hope, courage that you bounce out of abed. You can only aid the world–if you still believe the world needs our individual aid–by retaining your faith in life. Your body may be weak, but I know you still have wings.”
Henry Miller, A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller
“I… want to inherit the witch in my women ancestors—the willfulness, the passion, ay, the passion where all good art comes from as women, the perseverance, the survivor skills, the courage, the strength of las mujeres bravas, peleoneras, necias, berrrinchudas. I want to be una brava, una peleonera, necia, nerrinchuda. I want to be bad if bad means I must go against society—el Papá, el Pápa, the boyfriend, lover, husband, girlfriend, comadres—and listen to my own heart, that incredible witch’s broom that will take me where I need to go.”
Sandra Cisneros, A House of My Own
“I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
“Many people seem to think it foolish, even superstitious, to believe that the world could still change for the better. And it is true that in winter it is sometimes so bitingly cold that one is tempted to say, ‘What do I care if there is a summer; its warmth is no help to me now.’ Yes, evil often seems to surpass good. But then, in spite of us, and without our permission, there comes at last an end to the bitter frosts. One morning the wind turns, and there is a thaw. And so I must still have hope.”
Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh
“In the winter I am writing about, there was much darkness. Darkness of nature, darkness of event, darkness of the spirit. The sprawling darkness of not knowing. We speak of the light of reason. I would speak here of the darkness of the world, and the light of———. But I don’t know what to call it. Maybe hope. Maybe faith, but not a shaped faith—only, say, a gesture, or a continuum of gestures. But probably it is closer to hope, that is more active, and far messier than faith must be. Faith, as I imagine it, is tensile, and cool, and has no need of words. Hope, I know is a fighter and a screamer.”
Mary Oliver, Winter Hours: Prose, Poems, and Prose Poems
“There is always some miracle left; and though miracles do not happen, they might happen. Who knows? Perhaps our intelligence, our instinct, our senses, in spite of their daylight clearness, are leading us astray. Perhaps the one thing needful is just that unreasoning courage which follows hope’s will-o’-the-wisp as it burns…”
Jens Peter Jacobsen, Niels Lyhne
“But if the deepest loss, […] / can be, not just survived, but made into the matter / of hope, made into song, not into a hatchet / to cut off the offending parts, made into poems / then blessed be the end of things, the loss of whatever / secures us blindly and mutely to our lives.”
Julia Alvarez, The Other Side/El Otro Lado
“I run / stumbling, expectant. / Impatience is hopelessly / desperate. Hope / takes time.”
Marie Ponsot, Springing: New and Selected Poems
“How lightly we learn to hold hope, / as if it were an animal that could turn around / and bite your hand. And still we carry it / the way a mother would, carefully, / from one day to the next.”
Danusha Laméris, The Moons of August
“Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.”
Representative John Lewis
“Where does such a force come from? What does it mean? A voice very faint, and inside me, offers a possibility: how shall there be redemption and resurrection unless there has been a great sorrow? And isn’t struggle and rising the real work of our lives?”
Mary Oliver, Winter Hours: Prose, Poems, and Prose Poems
“Don’t forget that apparent impossibility of something is the first sign of its naturalness—in a different world, obviously.
Marina Tsvetaeva, from a letter to Anatoly Steiger
John Berryman, “The Heart is Strange”
“Skin had hope, that what’s skin does. / Heals over the scarred place, makes a road.”
Naomi Shihab Nye, “Two Countries”
“I am quite troubled in the depths of my soul. But that will pass,”
George Sand, in a letter to Gustave Flaubert
“Let’s dance a little before we go home to hell.”
Muriel Rukeyser, A Muriel Rukeyser Reader
Hélène Cixous, Hyperdream (tr. Beverly Bie Brahic)
“That most moments were substantially the same did not detract at all from the possibility that the next moment might be utterly different.”
Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
“Listen, everyone has a chance. Is it spring, is it morning? Are there trees near you, and does your own soul need comforting? Quick, then — open the door and fly on your heavy feet…”
Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems
“Get to the bottom of this intensity and have faith in what is most horrible, instead of fighting it off—it reveals itself for those who can trust it, in spite of its overwhelming and dire appearance, as a kind of initiation. By way of loss, by way of such vast and immeasurable experiences of loss, we are quite powerfully introduced to the whole.”
Rainer Maria Rilke, from a letter to Countess Alexandrine Schwerin, June 16, 1922
“…only one thing is urgently needed: to attach oneself with unconditional purpose somewhere to nature, to what is strong, striving and bright, and to move forward without guile, even if that means in the least important, daily matters. Each time we tackle something with joy, each time we open our eyes toward a yet untouched distance we transform not only this and the next moment, but we also rearrange and gradually assimilate the past inside of us.”
Rainer Maria Rilke, from a letter to Adelheid von der Marwitz, September 11, 1919
“Continue to believe that with your feeling and with your work you take part in what is the greatest. The more strongly you cultivate this belief inside of you, the more it will give rise to reality and world.”
Rainer Maria Rilke, from a letter to Elisabeth Freiin Schenk zu Schweinsberg, September 23, 1908
“…I have known with certainty that the worst things, and even despair, are only a kind of abundance and an onslaught of existence that one decision of the heart could turn into its opposite. Where things become truly difficult and unbearable, we find ourselves in a place already very close to its transformation.”
Rainer Maria Rilke, from a letter to Anita Forrer, February 14, 1920
“…he says, it will be all right.
“It is not the saying of an oracle or a prophet. They are words you might speak to a child ... and somehow I am comforted. He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.”
“Right then she knows herself even less than she knows the sea. Her courage comes from not knowing herself, but going ahead nevertheless. Not knowing yourself is inevitable, and not knowing yourself demands courage.
Clarice Lispector, Complete Stories; “The Waters of the World”
“Recovery (which includes return and renewal of health) is a re-gaining—regaining of a clear view. I do not say “seeing things as they are” and involve myself with the philosophers, though I might venture to say “seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them”—as things apart from ourselves. We need, in any case, to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity—from possessiveness. Of all faces those of our familiares are the ones both most difficult to play fantastic tricks with, and most difficult really to see with fresh attention, perceiving their likeness and unlikeness: that they are faces, and yet unique faces.”
J.R.R. Tolkien, from his essay On Fairy-Stories
Camille Norton, Corruption: Poems
“Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.”
May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude
“I have the fervour of myself for a presence / and my own spirit for light; / and my spirit with its loss / knows this; though small against the black, / small against the formless rocks, / hell must break before I am lost;”
H.D. from Collected Poems; “Eurydice”
Denise Levertov, “Epilogue”
“The days go numb, the wind / sucks the world from your senses like withered leaves. // Through the empty branches the sky remains. / It is what you have. / Be earth now, and evensong. / Be the ground lying under that sky. / Be modest now, like a thing / ripened until it is real…”
Rainer Maria Rilke, from Rilke’s Book of Hours (tr. Anita Barrows, Joanna Macy)
“I know your sorrow and I know that for the likes of us there is not ease for the heart to be had from words of reason and that in the very assurance of sorrow’s fading there is more sorrow. So I offer you only my deeply affectionate and compassionate thoughts and wish for you only that the strange thing may never fail you, whatever it is, that gives us the strength to live on and on with our wounds.”
Samuel Beckett’s words of consolation to his friend, Alan Schneider
“What matters is not to allow my whole life to be dominated by what is going on inside me. That has to be kept subordinate one way or another. What I mean is: one must not let oneself be completely disabled by just one thing, however bad; don’t let it impede the great stream of life that flows through you. I have the feeling of something secret deep inside me that no one knows about.”
Etty Hillesum, from a diary entry featured in An Interrupted Life
“You have been told that, even like a chain, you are as weak as your weakest link. / This is but half the truth. You are also as strong as your strongest link. / To measure you by your smallest deed is to reckon the power of the ocean by the frailty of its foam. / To judge you by your failures is to cast blame upon the seasons for their inconstancy.”
Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
“Try to keep what is beautiful to you and what you can use for today and now — You must not let things you cannot help destroy you —”
Georgia O’Keeffe, from Georgia O’Keeffe: Art and Letters
“What we love, shapely and pure, / is not to be held, / but to be believed in.”
Mary Oliver, from Evidence; “Swans”
“In time of the crises of the spirit, we are aware of all our need, our need for each other and our need for ourselves. We call up, with all the strength of summoning we have, our fullness. And then we turn; for it is a turning that we have prepared; and act. The time of turning may be very long. It may hardly exist.”
Muriel Rukeyser, from A Muriel Rukeyser Reader, “The Life of Poetry”
“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
Howard Zinn, A Power Governments Cannot Suppress
“But don’t lose heart, dear ones—don’t lose heart. Don’t let it make you bitter. Try to understand. Try to understand. The world’s already bitter enough, we got to try to be better than the world.”
James Baldwin, from Another Country
“You do not have to be good. / You do not have to walk on your knees / for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. / You only have to let the soft animal of your body / love what it loves. / Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. / Meanwhile, the world goes on.”
Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese”
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