Thomas De Quincey Quotes

Reason perhaps teaches certain bourgeois virtues, but it does not make either heroes or saints.

Heroism, self-denial, and magnanimity, in all instances where they do not spring from a principle of religion, are but splendid altars on which we sacrifice one kind of self-love to another.

One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.

Heroism in a bad cause.

Heroes represent the best of ourselves, respecting that we are human beings. A hero can be anyone from Gandhi to your classroom teacher, anyone who can show courage when faced with a problem. A hero is someone who is willing to help others in his or her best capacity.

Men who have sacrifice their well-being, and even their lives, for the cause of truth or the public good, are, from an empirical point of view -- which scorns virtue and altruism -- regarded as insane or fools; but, from a moral standpoint, they are heroes who do honor to humanity..

When were the good and the brave ever in a majority?

My whole religion is this: do every duty, and expect no reward for it, either here or hereafter.

Heroism is a matter of choice.

The virtue involved in helping those one loves is not 'selflessness' or 'sacrifice,' but integrity.

He who can at all times sacrifice pleasure to duty approaches sublimity.

For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors - between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it.

I have a theory that selflessness and bravery aren't all that different.

Man is not equally moral at all hours, this is well known. If his morality is judged to be the capability for great self-sacrificing resolutions and self-denial (which, when continuous and grown habitual, are called holiness)

Self-sacrifice, not self-assertion, is the law of the highest universe.

Heroism--that is the disposition of a man who aspires to a goal compared to which he himself is wholly insignificant. Heroism is the good will to self-destruction.

...there is power in self-sacrifice.

That we may give our body and our blood over to suffering and pain, like Christ - not for Self, but to give harvests of peace and justice to our People.

Study men laying down their lives without hurting anyone else in the cause of their country's freedom.

I think service is honorable, and that was always inculcated in me.

To bear with patience wrongs done to oneself is a mark of perfection, but to bear with patience wrongs done to someone else is a mark of imperfection and even of actual sin.

There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion.

Many a man will have the courage to die gallantly, but will not have the courage to say, or even to think, that the cause for which he is asked to die is an unworthy one.

Morality binds people into groups. It gives us tribalism, it gives us genocide, war, and politics. But it also gives us heroism, altruism, and sainthood.

Children must be impressed with the fact that the greatest heroes are those who fight to help others, not those who fight for power or glory. They must be made to understand that victory does not prove that the thing fought for is right, nor that defeat proves that a cause is wrong.