Courage Is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave (The Stoic Virtues Series)

It would be her ability to do this, persisting in the face of this relentless and intimidating opposition, to wage a patient but indefatigable battle against those who wanted to deter her, that would make her work possible.

Varlam Shalamov was sentenced in 1937 to years of hard labor in a Soviet gulag. What were his crimes? The same crimes that brought most people to those frozen hellholes: Falling on the wrong side of a totalitarian regime. Random bad luck. Daring to criticize the powers that be. For not being communist enough. For not confessing, though that hardly

In the ancient world, virtue was comprised of four key components. Courage. Temperance. Justice. Wisdom.

Of course, just because you think you can do something doesn’t mean you can. But if you don’t believe you can do something, if you’re afraid of it, it’s very unlikely that you will be able to do it. Whether that’s walking again or inventing something—if you decide it can’t be done, it’s not happening. Not by you, anyway.

In the fable “The Golden Key,” the Old Man of the Earth shows a young boy the reality of the world, that there is no progress without risk.

The brave are not without fear—no human is—rather, it’s their ability to rise above it and master it that makes them so remarkable. In

Parents who took her ambition as an indictment of their own lack of ambition.

We can’t forget that all the energy we spend fearing that we’ll make it worse is energy not spent making it better.

If fear is to be a driving force in your life, fear what you’ll miss. Fear what happens if you don’t act. Fear what they’ll think of you down the road, for having dared so little. Think of what you’re leaving on the table. Think of the terrifying costs of playing small.