Quotes about dare (1137 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Literature is the emotional biography of a human being who has dared to write it.”

José Baroja (1983) Chilean author and editor

Source: Interview. Portal.ucm.cl

Literature

“When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.”

Audre Lorde book The Cancer Journals

The Cancer Journals, Special Edition, Aunt Lute Books, San Francisco, CA, 1997, p. 13.

Success , Motivational , For Team , For women

“Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don't dare express themselves as we did.”

Sophie Scholl (1921–1943) White Rose member

Statement to the Volksgerichtshof [People's Court] of Judge Roland Freisler (21 February 1943).

“A theatre is the most important sort of house in the world, because that's where people are shown what they could be if they wanted, and what they'd like to be if they dared to and what they really are”

Tove Jansson book Moominsummer Madness

Source: Moominsummer Madness

People , World , Housing

“You could spend your whole life imagining ghosts, worrying about the pathway to the future but all there will ever be is what's happening here and the decisions we make in this moments which are based in either love or fear. So many of us choose our path out of fear disguised as practicality. What we really want seems impossibly out of reach and ridiculous to expect so we never dared the universe for it. I'm saying I'm the proof that you can ask the universe for it. My father could have been a great comedian, but he didn't believe that that was possible for him and so he made a conservative choice instead, he got a safe job as an accountant and when I was 12 years old he was let go from that safe job and our family had to do whatever we could do to survive. I learned many great lessons from my father, not the least of which was that you could fail at what you don't want, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.”

Jim Carrey (1962) Canadian-American actor, comedian, and producer

Love , Life , Fear , Family

“It's dangerous & humiliating. The whalers killed whales while green peace watched. Now, you don't walk by a child that is being abused, you don't walk by a kitten that is being kicked to death and do nothing. So I find it abhorrent to sit there and watch a whale being slaughtered and do nothing but "bear witness" as they call it. I think it was best illustrated a few years ago, the contradictions that we have, when a ranger in Zimbabwe shot and killed a poacher that was about to kill a black rhinoceros and uh human rights groups around the world said "how dare you? Take a human life to protect an animal". I think the rangers' answer to that really illustrated a hypocrisy. He said "Ya know, if I lived in, If I was a police officer in Herrari and a man ran out of Bark Place Bank with a bag of money and I shot him in the head in front of everybody and killed him, you'd pin a medal on me and call me a national hero. Why is that bag of paper more valued than the future heritage of this nation?" This is our values. WE fight, WE kill, WE risk our lives for things we believe in… Imagine going into Mecca, walk up to the black stone and spit on it. See how far you get. You’re not going to get very far. You’re going to be torn to pieces. Walk into Jerusalem, walk up to that wailing wall with a pick axe, start whacking away. See how far you’re going to get, somebody is going to put a bullet in your back. And everybody will say you deserved it. Walk into the Vatican with a hammer, start smashing a few statues. See how far you’re going to get. Not very far. But each and every day, ya know, people go into the most beautiful, most profoundly sacred cathedrals of this planet, the rainforests of the Amazonia, the redwood forests of California, the rainforests of Indonesia, and totally desecrate & destroy these cathedrals with bulldozers, chainsaws and how do we respond to that? Oh, we write a few letters and protest; we dress up in animal costumes with picket signs and jump up and down; but if the rainforests of Amazonia and redwoods of California, were as, or had as much value to us as a chunk of old meteorite in Mecca, a decrepit old wall in Jerusalem or a piece of old marble in the Vatican, we would literally rip those pieces limb from limb for the act of blasphemy that we’re committing but we won’t do that because nature is an abstraction, wilderness is an abstraction. It has no value in our anthropocentric world where the only thing we value is that which is created by humans.”

Paul Watson (1950) Canadian environmental activist

Life , Death , Money , People

“One must dare to be happy.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

Happiness

“As a teenager I was so insecure. I was the type of guy that never fitted in because he never dared to choose. I was convinced I had absolutely no talent at all. For nothing. And that thought took away all my ambition too.”

Johnny Depp (1963) American actor, film producer, and musician

Guy

“In a world filled with hate, we must still dare to hope. In a world filled with anger, we must still dare to comfort. In a world filled with despair, we must still dare to dream. And in a world filled with distrust, we must still dare to believe.”

Michael Jackson (1958–2009) American singer, songwriter and dancer

Also used at his funeral (3 Sep. 2009) invitation. Quoted in "Dead stars and classic art will surround Michael Jackson " in CNN.com/entertainment (03 July 2009) http://edition.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/Music/09/03/michael.jackson.funeral/index.html#cnnSTCOther1

Hope , Hate , World , Dreams

“Every instigator or madman, who will dare to raise his hand against the government, let him be sure that the government will chop it off.”

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (1954) 12th President of Turkey from 2014

Speech delivered after the military coup, 2016

“Ignore the critics… Only mediocrity is safe from ridicule. Dare to be different!”

Dita Von Teese (1972) American burlesque dancer, model and actress

“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

Source: The Open Door (1957) This quotation is often contracted into: Security is mostly a superstition... Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing. or paraphrased: Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.

Motivational , Life

“A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

volume I, chapter VI: "The Voyage", page 266 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=284&itemID=F1452.1&viewtype=image; letter to sister Susan Elizabeth Darwin (4 August 1836)
The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin (1887)
Source: The Life & Letters of Charles Darwin

Deep , Life , Business , Back To Work

“What men and women need is encouragement. Their natural resisting powers should be strengthened, not weakened…. Instead of always harping on a man's faults, tell him of his virtues. Try to pull him out of his rut of bad habits. Hold up to him his better self, his REAL self that can dare and do and win out!… The influence of a beautiful, helpful, hopeful character is contagious, and may revolutionize a whole town…. People radiate what is in their minds and in their hearts. If a man feels kindly and obliging, his neighbors will feel that way, too, before long. But if he scolds and scowls and criticizes — his neighbors will return scowl for scowl, and add interest!… When you look for the bad, expecting it, you will get it. When you know you will find the good — you will get that…. Tell your son Tom you KNOW he'll be glad to fill that woodbox — then watch him start, alert and interested!”

Eleanor H. Porter (1868–1920) American novelist

Works, Pollyanna (1913)

Women , Men , People , Beauty

“Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they've been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It's an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It's a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”

Muhammad Ali (1942–2016) African American boxer, philanthropist and activist

Written by copywriter Aimee Lehto for a series of Adidas ads in which this was superimposed over stills of various figures, including Muhammad Ali. Documented by Quote Investigator https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/28/impossible-is/.
Misattributed

Men , World , Change

“If I dare to hear you
I will feel you like the sun
And grow in your direction.”

Mark Nepo (1951) American writer

Feeling , Sun

“We who are immortal, we are chained to this life by a chain of gold, and we dare not sever it for fear of what lies beyond the drop.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Prince

Source: Clockwork Prince

Life , Fear

“There are cases in which the greatest daring is the greatest wisdom.”

Carl von Clausewitz book On War

Variant: There are times when the utmost daring is the height of wisdom.
Source: On War (1832), Book 2

Wisdom

“Everything is possible to him who wills only what is true! Rest in Nature, study, know, then dare; dare to will, dare to act and be silent!”

Eliphas Levi (1810–1875) French writer

Source: Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual

Nature , Study

“He who dares not offend cannot be honest.”

Thomas Paine (1737–1809) English and American political activist

The Forester's Letters http://www.bartleby.com/184/117.html, Letter III—'To Cato', Pennsylvania Journal (24 April 1776)
1770s

“they had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes.”

George Orwell book Animal Farm

Source: Animal Farm

Dogs , Time

“God himself helps those who dare.”

Ovid Metamorphoses

Source: Metamorphoses

God , Help

“Damn it… Don't you dare ask God to help me.”

Joan Crawford (1904–1977) American actress

God , Help

“Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers — such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a façade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) Russian writer

Open letter to the Fourth Soviet Writers’ Congress (16 May 1967) “The Struggle Intensifies,” Solzhenitsyn: A Documentary Record, ed. Leopold Labedz (1970).

Pain , People , Fear , Confidence

“The 20th century has been a badly written drama, from the beginning. The opposite of a Greek drama. Act one: Greed and hypocrisy leading to a genocidal world war, a boom, a crash, totalitarianism. Act two: Greed and hypocrisy leading to a genocidal world war, a boom, a crash, totalitarianism. Act three: Greed and hypocrisy … I don't dare continue.”

Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990) American composer, conductor, author, music lecturer, and pianist

Leonard Bernstein: The Gift Of Music

War , World

“The Word of God can take care of itself, and will do so if we preach it, and cease defending it. See you that lion. They have caged him for his preservation; shut him up behind iron bars to secure him from his foes! See how a band of armed men have gathered together to protect the lion. What a clatter they make with their swords and spears! These mighty men are intent upon defending a lion. O fools, and slow of heart! Open that door! Let the lord of the forest come forth free. Who will dare to encounter him? What does he want with your guardian care? Let the pure gospel go forth in all its lion-like majesty, and it will soon clear its own way and ease itself of its adversaries.”

Charles Spurgeon (1834–1892) British preacher, author, pastor and evangelist

The Lover of God's Law Filled with Peace (January 1888) http://www.spurgeongems.org/vols34-36/chs2004.pdf

Men , God , Fools , Way

“The American citizen thus lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than its original. We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories to the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves.”

Daniel J. Boorstin (1914–2004) American historian

Source: The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961), p. 37.

Age , World , Reality

“I would like to leave behind me the conviction that if we maintain a certain amount of caution and organization we deserve victory. … You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. In this case, it comes from nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future. It took the madmen of yesterday for us to be able to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those madmen. … We must dare to invent the future.”

Thomas Sankara (1949–1987) President of Upper Volta

From 1985 interview with Swiss Journalist Jean-Philippe Rapp, translated from Sankara: Un nouveau pouvoir africain by Jean Ziegler. Lausanne, Switzerland: Editions Pierre-Marcel Favre, 1986. In Thomas Sankara Speaks: The Burkina Faso Revolution 1983-87. trans. Samantha Anderson. New York: Pathfinder, 1988. pp. 141-144.

Courage , Change , Future , Victory

“Yesterday, we were a weak and small country trampled upon by big powers. Today, our geopolitical location remains the same, but we are transformed into a proud political and military power and an independent people that no one can dare provoke. The days are gone forever when our enemies could blackmail us with nuclear bombs.”

Kim Jong-un (1984) 3rd Supreme Leader of North Korea

April 15th 2012 speech in Kim Il-Sung Square, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/16/world/asia/kim-jong-un-north-korean-leader-talks-of-military-superiority-in-first-public-speech.html

People , Country

“If a man is endowed with a noble and courageous soul, if he is painstaking, proud, ambitious, without meanness, of a profound a deep-seated intelligence, I dare assert that he lacks nothing to be neglected by the great and men in high office, who fear, more than other men, those whom they cannot dominate.”

Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715–1747) French writer, a moralist

Source: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 188.

Men , Fear , Soul , Intelligence

“You wanna show them that you're really not scared,
You're playing with your life, this ain't no truth or dare,
They'll kick you then they'll beat you then they'll tell you it's fair,
So beat it.”

Michael Jackson (1958–2009) American singer, songwriter and dancer

Beat It
Thriller (1982)

Life , Truth

“Must is not a word to be used to princes! Little man, little man, if your late father were here he would never dare utter such a word.”

Elizabeth I of England (1533–1603) Queen regnant of England and Ireland from 17 November 1558 until 1603

To Robert Cecil when he said, in her final illness (March 1603), that she must go to bed.

“You dare not think that you ever might experience your self differently: free instead of cowed; open instead of tactical; loving openly instead of like a thief in the night.”

Wilhelm Reich book Listen, Little Man!

Listen, Little Man! (1948)
Context: "What right do you have to tell me things?" I can see this question in your apprehensive look. I hear this question from your impertinent mouth, Little Man. You are afraid to look at yourself, you are afraid of criticism, Little Man, just as you are afraid of the power they promise you. You would not know how to use this power. You dare not think that you ever might experience your self differently: free instead of cowed; open instead of tactical; loving openly instead of like a thief in the night. You despise yourself Little Man. You say: "Who am I to have an opinion of my own, to determine my own life and to declare the world to be mine?" You are right: Who are you to make a claim to your life?

Love , Thinking , Night

“A place where nobody dared to go
the love that we came to know
They call it Xanadu”

Jeff Lynne (1947) British rock musician

"Xanadu"
Xanadu (1980)
Context: A place where nobody dared to go
the love that we came to know
They call it Xanadu
And now, open your eyes and see
what we have made is real
We are in Xanadu
A million lights are dancing and there you are, a shooting star
An everlasting world and you're here with me, eternally
Xanadu

Love

“The people were divided into the persecuted and those who persecuted them. That wild beast, which lives in man and does not dare to show itself until the barriers of law and custom have been removed, was now set free. The signal was given, the barriers were down. As has so often happened in the history of man, permission was tacitly granted for acts of violence and plunder, even for murder, if they were carried out in the name of higher interests, according to established rules, and against a limited number of men of a particular type and belief. A man who saw clearly and with open eyes and was then living could see how this miracle took place and how the whole of a society could, in a single day, be transformed. In a few minutes the business quarter, based on centuries of tradition, was wiped out. It is true that there had always been concealed enmities and jealousies and religious intolerance, coarseness and cruelty, but there had also been courage and fellowship and a feeling for measure and order, which restrained all these instincts within the limits of the supportable and, in the end, calmed them down and submitted them to the general interest of life in common. Men who had been leaders in the commercial quarter for forty years vanished overnight as if they had all died suddenly, together with the habits, customs and institutions which they represented.”

Ivo Andrič book The Bridge on the Drina

Source: The Bridge on the Drina (1945), Ch. 22

Courage , Law , History , Business

“The body dies, and the soul remains, I dare to think. Life is short, and it has to be lived, but hell is eternal, and it has to be avoided.”

Angelo Vulpini (2003) Venezuelan recording artist

Source: Posted on instagram @angelovulpini, September 2nd, 2021.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CTVVtsfrRvh/

Hell , Soul , Thinking , Life

“Since you cannot mix wolves with sheep, why would anyone dare to compare a lion with the lamb?”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

“Lets have faith that right makes might; and in that faith let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Cooper Union speech (1860)
Context: Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.
Context: Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government, nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might; and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty, as we understand it.

Faith , Understanding

“It's curious how easy it is to tell a piece of paper what you don't dare say to someone's face.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Angel's Game

Source: The Angel's Game

“It often requires more courage to dare to do right than to fear to do wrong.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

Courageous , Fear , Courage

“Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.”

T.S. Eliot The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)
Context: Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all: —
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.

Decision , Universe , Time

“There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know.”

W.E.B. Du Bois book Dusk of Dawn

The Study of the Negro Problems, paragraph 50, in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. XI (January 1898) http://www.webdubois.org/dbStudyofnprob.html
Source: Dusk of Dawn

“He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

“They dared not peer down into their own natures, down into the feverish confusion that filled their minds with a kind of dense, acrid mist.”

Emile Zola book Thérèse Raquin

Source: Thérèse Raquin

Nature

“All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than the animals that know nothing. A day will come when science will turn upon its error and no longer hesitate to shorten our woes. A day will come when it will dare and act with certainty; when life, grown wiser, will depart silently at its hour, knowing that it has reached its term.”

Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949) Belgian playwright, poet, and essayist

Our Eternity, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Life , Death , Pain , Error

“I can tell you that you will have your hearts broken more by the people you love than by the people you hate. But you must still dare to love. The rewards are worth far more than the risks.”

Margaret Peterson Haddix book Into the Gauntlet

Source: Into the Gauntlet

Love , Hate , People , Heart

“When they finally did dare it, at first with stolen glances and then candid ones, they had to smile. They were uncommonly proud. For the first time they had done something out of Love.”

Patrick Süskind (1949) German writer and screenwriter

Source: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

Love , Smile , Time

“Those who will not reason, are bigots, those who cannot, are fools, and those who dare not, are slaves.”

George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement

Fools

“Who dares think one thing, and another tell,
My heart detests him as the gates of hell.”

Homér Iliad

IX. 312–313 (tr. Alexander Pope).
A. H. Chase and W. G. Perry, Jr.'s translation:
: Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is the man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another.
Iliad (c. 750 BC)
Source: The Iliad

Hell , Thinking , Heart

“It is sound judgment to put on a bold face and play your hand for a hundred times what it is worth; forty-nine times out of fifty nobody dares to call it, and you roll in the chips.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Time

“I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares do more, is none”

William Shakespeare Macbeth

Source: Macbeth

“Greatly he failed, but he had greatly dared.”

Ovid (-43–17 BC) Roman poet

“We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.”

May Sarton (1912–1995) American poet, novelist, and memoirist

Heart Touching

“I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul.”

Bram Stoker book Dracula

Source: Dracula

Fear , Soul , Thinking , Sea

“We can know what love is. It´s adults who have forgotten, so they cling to their poor substitute and yell at kids who dare to live with real love. Pure Love. Love without compromise or distraction.”

Barry Lyga (1971) American writer

Source: Boy Toy

Love

“If you’ll dare to take your mind off your troubles, get your mind off your own needs and, instead, seek to be a blessing to other people, God will do more for you than you could even ask or think.”

Joel Osteen (1963) American televangelist and author

Source: Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential

God , People , Thinking

“You are capable of so much more than we usually dare to imagine”

Sharon Salzberg (1952) American writer

Imagination

“Happy are those who dare courageously to defend what they love.”

Ovid (-43–17 BC) Roman poet

Love , Courage , Happiness

“When did you become a woman?"-Hatori
How dare you ask that after you have seen me naked so many times…"-Yuki
GASP! No it cant be! Yuki-kun, does that mean…" fan club girls
NO! He's my doctor…"Yuki”

Natsuki Takaya (1973) Manga artist

Source: Fruits Basket, Vol. 2

Girl , Time

“How much truth does a spirit endure, how much truth does it dare?”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Ecce homo

Source: Ecce Homo

Truth

“That is such crap. How dare you be so fraudulently flirtatious, cowardly and dysfunctional? I am not interested in emotional fuckwittage. Goodbye.”

Helen Fielding book Bridget Jones's Diary

Source: Bridget Jones's Diary

“It’s a good thing when you don’t dare do something if you don’t think it’s right. But it’s not good when you think something’s not right because you don’t dare do it.”

Sigrid Undset (1882–1949) Norwegian writer

Source: The Wreath

Thinking

“My theory is that all of Scottish cuisine is based on a dare.”

Mike Myers (1963) Canadian- British- American actor, comedian, singer, screenwriter, and film producer

Funny

“Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

Books , Confidence

“How much truth can a spirit bear, how much truth can a spirit dare?… that became for me more and more the real measure of value.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Truth

“How dare you say it's nothing to me?
Baby, you're the only light I ever saw.”

John Mayer (1977) guitarist and singer/songwriter

Source: Continuum: Music by John Mayer

Light , Baby

“Honey, I jes' walked round an' round in a dream. Jesus loved me! I knowed it - I fel it. Jesus was my Jesus. Jesus would love me always. I did n't dare tell nobody; it was a great secret. Everything had been got away from me that I ever had; an' I thought that ef I let white folks know about this, maybe they'd get him away - so I said, 'I'll keep this close. I wont let any one know.”

Sojourner Truth (1797–1883) African-American abolitionist and women's rights activist

Olive Gilbert & Sojourner Truth (1878), Narrative of Sojourner Truth, a Bondswoman of Olden Time, page 159. ( text at sojournertruth.org http://www.sojournertruth.org/Library/Archive/LibyanSibyl.htm)

Love , Secret , Dreams

“The man who dares to live his life with death before his eyes, the man who receives life back bit by bit and lives as though it did not belong to him by right but has been bestowed on him as a gift, the man who has such freedom and peace of mind that he has overcome death in his thoughts — such man believes in eternal life because it is already his, it is a present experience, and he already benefits from its peace and joy. He cannot describe this experience in words. He may not be able to conform his view with the traditional picture of it. But one thing he knows for certain: Something within us does not pass away, something goes on living and working wherever the kingdom of the spirit is present. It is already working and living within us, because in our hearts we have been able to reach life by overcoming death.”

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) French-German physician, theologian, musician and philosopher

Reverence for Life (1969)

Life , Death , Peace , Freedom

“I dare not think of the sun-drenched beaches and the stormy skies, and of the joy of painting them in the sea breezes.”

Eugène Boudin (1824–1898) French painter

Quote in a letter, from Paris 14 June 1869, to family-friend Ferdinand Martin; as cited by Colin B. Bailey in The Annenberg Collection: Masterpieces of Impressionism and Post-impressionism, publisher, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2009, p. 7
Boudin felt himself detained in the big city Paris and longed fort the beach
1850s - 1870s

Thinking , Sun , Joy , Painting

“We dare not do all that our opponents do. We dare not sacrifice everything for advantages. For what is an advantage to our opponents is deadly poison to us. The nobility say of themselves, noblesse oblige; so we may say, socialisme oblige, socialism imposes its obligations.”

Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900) German socialist politician

No Compromise – No Political Trading (1899)

“I am in fact a Hobbit (in all but size). I like gardens, trees, and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking; I like, and even dare to wear in these dull days, ornamental waistcoats. I am fond of mushrooms (out of a field); have a very simple sense of humor (which even my appreciative critics find tiresome); I go to bed late and get up late (when possible). I do not travel much.”

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973) British philologist and author, creator of classic fantasy works

Letter to Deborah Webster (25 October 1958)

Food , Travel , Sense , Tree

“I have been in my bed for five weeks, oppressed with weakness and other infirmities from which my age, seventy four years, permits me not to hope release. Added to this (proh dolor! [O misery! ]) the sight of my right eye — that eye whose labors (dare I say it) have had such glorious results — is for ever lost. That of the left, which was and is imperfect, is rendered null by continual weeping.”

Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) Italian mathematician, physicist, philosopher and astronomer

Letter to Élie Diodati (4 July 1637), as translated in The Private Life of Galileo : Compiled primarily from his correspondence and that of his eldest daughter, Sister Maria Celeste (1870) http://books.google.com/books?id=ixUCAAAAYAAJ by Mary Allan-Olney, p. 278
Other quotes

Age , Hope

“No man is liberated from fear who dare not see his place in the world as it is; no man can achieve the greatness of which he is capable until he has allowed himself to see his own littleness.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Dreams and Facts (1919)
1910s

World , Fear

“In infancy I was afraid of the dark, which I peopled with all sorts of things; but my grandfather cured me of that by daring me to walk through certain dark parts of the house when I was 3 or 4 years old. After that, dark places held a certain fascination for me. But it is in dreams that I have known the real clutch of stark, hideous, maddening, paralysing fear. My infant nightmares were classics, & in them there is not an abyss of agonising cosmic horror that I have not explored. I don't have such dreams now—but the memory of them will never leave me. It is undoubtedly from them that the darkest & most gruesome side of my fictional imagination is derived. At the ages of 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, & 8 I have been whirled through formless abysses of infinite night and adumbrated horrors as black & as seethingly sinister as any of our friend Fafhrd's [a nickname Lovecraft used for Fritz Leiber] "splatter-stencil" triumphs. That's why I appreciate such triumphs so keenly, I have seen these things! Many a time I have awaked in shrieks of panic, & have fought desperately to keep from sinking back into sleep & its unutterable horrors. At the age of six my dreams became peopled with a race of lean, faceless, rubbery, winged things to which I applied the home-made name of night-gaunts. Night after night they would appear in exactly the same form—& the terror they brought was beyond any verbal description. Long decades later I embodied them in one of my Fungi from Yuggoth pseudo-sonnets, which you may have read. Well—after I was 8 all these things abated, perhaps because of the scientific habit of mind which I was acquiring (or trying to acquire). I ceased to believe in religion or any other form of the supernatural, & the new logic gradually reached my subconscious imagination. Still, occasional nightmares brought recurrent touches of the ancient fear—& as late as 1919 I had some that I could use in fiction without much change. The Statement of Randolph Carter is a literal dream transcript. Now, in the sere & yellow leaf (I shall be 47 in August), I seem to be rather deserted by stark horror. I have nightmares only 2 or 3 times a year, & of these none even approaches those of my youth in soul-shattering, phobic monstrousness. It is fully a decade & more since I have known fear in its most stupefying & hideous form. And yet, so strong is the impress of the past, I shall never cease to be fascinated by fear as a subject for aesthetic treatment. Along with the element of cosmic mystery & outsideness, it will always interest me more than anything else. It is, in a way, amusing that one of my chief interests should be an emotion whose poignant extremes I have never known in waking life!”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Harry O. Fischer (late February 1937), in Selected Letters V, 1934-1937 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 416-417
Non-Fiction, Letters

Life , People , Youth , Age

“None but a coward dares to boast that he has never known fear.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Attributed to Russell in M. Kumar Dictionary of Quotations, p. 76, but actually said by Marshal Lannes, according to The London Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences (1824), p. 664
Misattributed

Fear

“Only in the longing for a world of economic and sexual justice together, and not subordinated to one another, can the encounter with the divine take place. But this is an encounter to be found at the crossroads of desire, when one dares to leave the ideological order of the heterosexual pervasive normative. This is an encounter with indecency, and with the indecency of God and Christianity.”

Marcella Althaus-Reid (1952–2009) Argentine theologian

Indecent Theology, (Routledge, 2002) p. 200

God , World , Justice

“I'm very much alone all day, I read a litle but, in the long run, it gives me a headache. I draw and paint as much as I can, indeed till my hand grows tired, and when night begins to fall I hope Jeanne d'Armagnac [his cousin] will come to my bedside. She does sometimes, and cheers me up and plays with me, and I listen to her talk, without daring to look at her. She is so tall and so beautiful! And I am neither tall nor beautiful.”

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901) French painter

The previous Summer, at Barèges, while he lay with his leg in plaster, Lautrec had often been visited in the evening by his cousin, Jeanne d'Armagnac
Source: 1879-1884, T-Lautrec, by Henri Perruchot, p. 53 - written note in Nice, Winter of 1880

Beauty , Hope , Reading , Drawing

“There have been those who magnificently dared. There have been bearers of the truth, men who groped in the world's tumult, trying to make plain order of it. They discover what we did not yet know; chiefly they discover what we no longer knew.”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

Light (1919), Ch. XVI - De Profundis Clamavi

Men , Truth , World

“It is so horrible,
I dare at times imagine to my need
Some future state revealed to us by Zeus”

Robert Browning (1812–1889) English poet and playwright of the Victorian Era

From Cleon; regarding death and afterlife

Imagination , Time , Future

“He who knows how to suffer everything can dare everything.”

Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715–1747) French writer, a moralist

Qui sait tout souffrir peut tout oser.
Variant: He who knows how to suffer everything can dare everything.
Source: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 176.

Suffering

“Lessing, the most honest of theoretical men, dared to say that he took greater delight in the quest for truth than in the truth itself.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Birth of Tragedy

Darum hat Lessing, der ehrlichste theoretische Mensch, es auszusprechen gewagt, dass ihm mehr am Suchen der Wahrheit als an ihr selbst gelegen sei...
Source: The Birth of Tragedy (1872), p. 73

Men , Truth

“On the receipt of this letter, Hijaj obtained the consent of Wuleed, the son of Abdool Mullik, to invade India, for the purpose of propagating the faith and at the same time deputed a chief of the name of Budmeen, with three hundred cavalry, to join Haroon in Mikran, who was directed to reinforce the party with one thousand good soldiers more to attack Deebul. Budmeen failed in his expedition, and lost his life in the first action. Hijaj, not deterred by this defeat, resolved to follow up the enterprise by another. In consequence, in the year AH 93 (AD 711) he deputed his cousin and son-in-law, Imad-ood-Deen Mahomed Kasim, the son of Akil Shukhfy, then only seventeen years of age, with six thousand soldiers, chiefly Assyrians, with the necessary implements for taking forts, to attack Deebul'… 'On reaching this place, he made preparations to besiege it, but the approach was covered by a fortified temple, surrounded by strong wall, built of hewn stone and mortar, one hundred and twenty feet in height. After some time a bramin, belonging to the temple, being taken, and brought before Kasim, stated, that four thousand Rajpoots defended the place, in which were from two to three thousand bramins, with shorn heads, and that all his efforts would be vain; for the standard of the temple was sacred; and while it remained entire no profane foot dared to step beyond the threshold of the holy edifice. Mahomed Kasim having caused the catapults to be directed against the magic flag-staff, succeeded, on the third discharge, in striking the standard, and broke it down… Mahomed Kasim levelled the temple and its walls with the ground and circumcised the brahmins. The infidels highly resented this treatment, by invectives against him and the true faith. On which Mahomed Kasim caused every brahmin, from the age of seventeen and upwards, to be put to death; the young women and children of both sexes were retained in bondage and the old women being released, were permitted to go whithersoever they chose… On reaching Mooltan, Mahomed Kasim also subdued that province; and himself occupying the city, he erected mosques on the site of the Hindoo temples.”

Muhammad bin Qasim (695–715) Umayyad general

Tarikh-i-Firishta, translated into English by John Briggs under the title History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, 4 Volumes, New Delhi Reprint, 1981. p. 234-238

Life , Death , Women , Children

“Then welcome each rebuff
That turns earth's smoothness rough,
Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand, but go!
Be our joys three-parts pain!
Strive, and hold cheap the strain;
Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!”

Robert Browning Rabbi ben Ezra

Rabbi Ben Ezra.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Pain , Learning , Joy , Parting

“Bishops should despise this world and inspire others by their example to seek after heavenly things. But now you are corrupted by ambition beyond all the rest of mankind; and one of them not content with holding the first episcopal see in Germany has dared without my approval to claim my golden sceptre, which I carry to signify my royal will, in order that he might use it as his pastoral staff.”

Charlemagne (748–814) King of the Franks, King of Italy, and Holy Roman Emperor

Quoted in Notker's The Deeds of Charlemagne (translated 2008 by David Ganz)

World

“I thought that as I had failed in the contemplation of true existence, I ought to be careful that I did not lose the eye of my soul; as people may injure their bodily eye by observing and gazing on the sun during an eclipse, unless they take the precaution of looking at the image reflected in the water, or in some similar medium. …I was afraid that my soul might be blinded altogether if I looked at things with my eyes or tried by the help of my senses to apprehend them. And I thought that I had better had recourse to ideas, and seek in them truth in existence. I dare to say that the simile is not perfect—for I am far from admitting that he who contemplates existence through the medium of ideas, sees them only "through a glass darkly," any more than he who sees them in their working and effects.”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Plato, Phaedo

People , Truth , Soul , Idea

“Did Stanton say I was a damned fool? Then I dare say I must be one, for Stanton is generally right and he always says what he means.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

As quoted in Lincoln; An Account of his Personal Life, Especially of its Springs of Action as Revealed and Deepened by the Ordeal of War (1922) by Nathaniel Wright Stephenson.
1860s

Fools

“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”

Kurt Vonnegut book Palm Sunday

"Thoughts of a Free Thinker", commencement address, Hobart and William Smith Colleges (26 May 1974)
Palm Sunday (1981)

People , Disease , Communication , Loneliness

“Some twelve thousand voters in the heretofore slave-state of Louisiana have sworn allegiance to the Union, assumed to be the rightful political power of the State, held elections, organized a State government, adopted a free-state constitution, giving the benefit of public schools equally to black and white, and empowering the Legislature to confer the elective franchise upon the colored man. Their Legislature has already voted to ratify the constitutional amendment recently passed by Congress, abolishing slavery throughout the nation. These twelve thousand persons are thus fully committed to the Union, and to perpetual freedom in the state — committed to the very things, and nearly all the things the nation wants — and they ask the nations recognition and it's assistance to make good their committal. Now, if we reject, and spurn them, we do our utmost to disorganize and disperse them. We in effect say to the white men "You are worthless, or worse — we will neither help you, nor be helped by you." To the blacks we say "This cup of liberty which these, your old masters, hold to your lips, we will dash from you, and leave you to the chances of gathering the spilled and scattered contents in some vague and undefined when, where, and how." If this course, discouraging and paralyzing both white and black, has any tendency to bring Louisiana into proper practical relations with the Union, I have, so far, been unable to perceive it. If, on the contrary, we recognize, and sustain the new government of Louisiana the converse of all this is made true. We encourage the hearts, and nerve the arms of the twelve thousand to adhere to their work, and argue for it, and proselyte for it, and fight for it, and feed it, and grow it, and ripen it to a complete success. The colored man too, in seeing all united for him, is inspired with vigilance, and energy, and daring, to the same end. Grant that he desires the elective franchise, will he not attain it sooner by saving the already advanced steps toward it, than by running backward over them? Concede that the new government of Louisiana is only to what it should be as the egg is to the fowl, we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it? Again, if we reject Louisiana, we also reject one vote in favor of the proposed amendment to the national Constitution. To meet this proposition, it has been argued that no more than three fourths of those States which have not attempted secession are necessary to validly ratify the amendment. I do not commit myself against this, further than to say that such a ratification would be questionable, and sure to be persistently questioned; while a ratification by three-fourths of all the States would be unquestioned and unquestionable.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Last public address (1865)

Men , School , Color , Question

“What are we to do then? Shall we remain supine, while these daring strangers are overrunning our fertile plains, and gradually outnumbering and displacing us? Shall these incursions go on unchecked, until we shall become strangers in our own land?”

Pío Pico (1801–1894) Governor of Alta California

Los Angeles Almanac http://www.laalmanac.com/history/hi05s.htm
Mexican-American War

“"They will say to you," growled a kneeling man who stooped with his two bands in the earth and shook his shoulders like a mastiff, 'My friend, you have been a wonderful hero!' I don't want them to say it!
"Heroes? Some sort of extraordinary being? Idols? Rot! We've been murderers. We have respectably followed the trade of hangmen. We shall do it again with all our might, because it's of great importance to follow that trade, so as to punish war and smother it. The act of slaughter is always ignoble; sometimes necessary, but always ignoble. Yes, hard and persistent murderers, that's what we've been. But don't talk to me about military virtue because I've killed Germans."
"Nor to me," cried another in so loud a voice that no one could have replied to him even had he dared; "nor to me, because I've saved the lives of Frenchmen! Why, we might as well set fire to houses for the sake of the excellence of life-saving!"”

Henri Barbusse book Under Fire

Under Fire (1916), Ch. 24 - The Dawn

Life , War , Housing

““I am pleading for my people, a poor downtrodden race
Who dwell in freedom’s boasted land with no abiding place
I am pleading that my people may have their rights restored,
For they have long been toiling, and yet had no reward
They are forced the crops to culture, but not for them they yield,
Although both late and early, they labor in the field.
While I bear upon my body, the scores of many a gash,
I’m pleading for my people who groan beneath the lash.
I’m pleading for the mothers who gaze in wild despair
Upon the hated auction block, and see their children there.
I feel for those in bondage—well may I feel for them.
I know how fiendish hearts can be that sell their fellow men.
Yet those oppressors steeped in guilt—I still would have them live;
For I have learned of Jesus, to suffer and forgive!
I want no carnal weapons, no machinery of death.
For I love to not hear the sound of war’s tempestuous breath.
I do not ask you to engage in death and bloody strife.
I do not dare insult my God by asking for their life.
But while your kindest sympathies to foreign lands do roam,
I ask you to remember your own oppressed at home.
I plead with you to sympathize with signs and groans and scars,
And note how base the tyranny beneath the stripes and stars.”

Sojourner Truth (1797–1883) African-American abolitionist and women's rights activist

Olive Gilbert & Sojourner Truth (1878), Narrative of Sojourner Truth, a Bondswoman of Olden Time, page 303.

Love , Life , Death , Men

“The Declaration of Independence was formed by the representatives of American liberty from thirteen States of the confederacy; twelve of which were slaveholding communities. We need not discuss the way or the reason of their becoming slaveholding communities. It is sufficient for our purpose that all of them greatly deplored the evil and that they placed a provision in the Constitution which they supposed would gradually remove the disease by cutting off its source. This was the abolition of the slave trade. So general was conviction, the public determination, to abolish the African slave trade, that the provision which I have referred to as being placed in the Constitution, declared that it should not be abolished prior to the year 1808. A constitutional provision was necessary to prevent the people, through Congress, from putting a stop to the traffic immediately at the close of the war. Now, if slavery had been a good thing, would the Fathers of the Republic have taken a step calculated to diminish its beneficent influences among themselves, and snatch the boon wholly from their posterity? These communities, by their representatives in old Independence Hall, said to the whole world of men: "We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." This was their majestic interpretation of the economy of the Universe. This was their lofty, and wise, and noble understanding of the justice of the Creator to His creatures… Yes, gentlemen, to all His creatures, to the whole great family of man. In their enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the Divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on, and degraded, and imbruted by its fellows. They grasped not only the whole race of man then living, but they reached forward and seized upon the farthest posterity. They erected a beacon to guide their children and their children's children, and the countless myriads who should inhabit the earth in other ages. Wise statesmen as they were, they knew the tendency of prosperity to breed tyrants, and so they established these great self-evident truths, that when in the distant future some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, or none but white men, were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, their posterity might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began, so that truth, and justice, and mercy, and all the humane and Christian virtues might not be extinguished from the land; so that no man would hereafter dare to limit and circumscribe the great principles on which the temple of liberty was being built…”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1850s, Speech at Lewistown, Illinois (1858)

Life , Men , War , Children

“He [Sikander] prohibited all types of frugal games. Nobody dared commit acts which were prohibited by the Sharia. The Sultan was constantly busy in annihilating Hindus and destroyed most of the temples.”

Sikandar Butshikan

Haidar Malik Chadurah: Tarikh-i-Kashmir; edited and translated into English by Razia Bano, Delhi, 1991, p. 55.)

Game , Business

“I have never dared to face the disappointments that my true vocal range may bring. I have many fundamentals in my voice that give the appearance of it being very deep or very high, when in fact I believe it's quite narrow and limited.”

Lisa Gerrard (1961) Australian musician, singer and composer

Disappointment , Appearance

“You are outside life, you are above life, you have miseries which the ordinary man does not know, you exceed the normal level, and it is for this that men refuse to forgive you, you poison their peace of mind, you undermine their stability. You have irrepressible pains whose essence is to be inadaptable to any known state, indescribable in words. You have repeated and shifting pains, incurable pains, pains beyond imagining, pains which are neither of the body nor of the soul, but which partake of both. And I share your suffering, and I ask you: who dares to ration our relief?… We are not going to kill ourselves just yet. In the meantime, leave us the hell alone.”

Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) French-Occitanian poet, playwright, actor and theatre director

General Security: The Liquidation of Opium (1925)

Life , Men , Pain , Peace

“Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.”

Edgar Allan Poe The Raven

Stanza 5.
The Raven (1844)

Fear , Dreams

“Are we surprised if a sick man cannot walk, or keep awake, or stand upright? Would it not be more surprising if he was the same man as when he was well? If we have a headache, or have slept badly, we are excused for telling incapable of work, and yet no one suspects us of always being lazy. Shall we deny a dying man the privilege we grant a man with a headache? And dare we assert that the man who lacks courage in his last agony never possessed virtue when he was well.”

Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715–1747) French writer, a moralist

Source: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 172.

Courage

“The United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth. Period. It's not even close. We spend more on our military than the next eight nations combined. Our troops are the finest fighting force in the history of the world. No nation dares to attack us or our allies because they know that's the path to ruin. Surveys show our standing around the world is high… When it comes to every important international issue, people of the world do not look to Beijing or Moscow to lead; they call us.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2016, State of the Union address (January 2016)

People , World , History , Fight

“Dostoyevsky is ahead of his time - a few daring steps. You follow him, dizzying, fearful, incredulous; but you follow. He won't let loose, you have to follow. … You simply have to call him unique. He comes from nowhere and belongs nowhere. And yet he is always a Russian.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

Dostojewski ist seiner Zeit noch um ein paar gewagte Schritte voraus. Man folgt ihm schwindelnd, bange, ungläubig; aber man folgt. Er lässt nicht locker, man muss folgen. … Man muss ihn einfach als Unikum nehmen. Er kommt von nirgendwo und gehört nirgendwo hin. Und dabei bleibt er doch stets Russe.
Michael: a German fate in diary notes (1926)

Fear , Time

“So high above all things that be.
Is God uplifted, man can dare.
No utterance: he prayeth best.
When Silence is his sum of prayer”

Angelus Silesius (1624–1677) German writer

The Cherubinic Wanderer

God , Silence