Source: The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are
“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.”
p 192, describing his swim across the North Pole (2007)
21 Yaks And A Speedo (2013)
Part III: Nice Meeting You, and Goodbye
The Courage to Stand Alone (2001)
Context: You can have the courage to climb the mountain, swim the lakes, go on a raft to the other side of the Atlantic or Pacific. That any fool can do, but the courage to be on your own, to stand on your two solid feet, is something which cannot be given by somebody. You cannot free yourself of that burden by trying to develop that courage. If you are freed from the entire burden of the entire past of mankind, then what is left there is the courage.
“If you see what is right and fail to act on it, you lack courage.”
The Analects, Chapter I, Chapter II
Context: To worship to other than one's own ancestral spirits is brown-nosing. If you see what is right and fail to act on it, you lack courage.
Variant To see what is right, and not to do it, is want of courage or of principle.
“It is not by recognizing the want of courage in someone else that you acquire courage yourself..”
Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 44e
“You get in life what you have the courage to ask for.”
“Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless.”
"Water", p. 113; this is often quoted as simply: Without courage, all other virtues are useless. <!-- Confessions of a Barbarian: Selections from the Journals of Edward Abbey, 1951-1989 (1994) p. 207 -->
Source: Desert Solitaire (1968)
Context: Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless.
