Natan Sharansky Quotes

Fear is the opportunity for courage, not proof of cowardice.

The whole point of courage, to overcome your fear. That's the interesting thing, when courage bleeds through the fear.

A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid.

They say you never know who's the real hero and who's the real coward until you're looking death in the face. I've always been afraid of plenty of things, but fear isn't what makes you a coward. It's how depraved your heart becomes when fear gets pumped through it.

Do the thing you fear most and the death of fear is certain.

Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.

I went through a long period where I was afraid of doing things I wanted to do, and you get your courage back, which is what's important.

Being brave isn't the absence of fear. Being brave is having that fear but finding a way through it.

When you look fear in the face, you are able to say to yourself, 'I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.'

Who would condescend to strike down the mere things that he does not fear? Who would debase himself to be merely brave, like any common prizefighter? Who would stoop to be fearless--like a tree? Fight the thing that you fear. You remember the old tale of the English clergyman who gave the last rites to the brigand of Sicily, and how on his death-bed the great robber said, 'I can give you no money, but I can give you advice for a lifetime: your thumb on the blade, and strike upwards.' So I say to you, strike upwards, if you strike at the stars.

Fearlessness is not the absence of fear. It's the mastery of fear. It's about getting up one more time than we fall down.

Fear is a reaction. Courage is a decision.

There's no shame in fear. But understand this - the coward is ruled by fear, while the hero rides it like a wild stallion.

Though I walk through the valley of death I will fear no evil, for I am the evilest motherfucker in the valley

Bravery does not mean being fearless. It means to be full of fear but still not being dominated by it.

Bravery is feeling fear but doing the thing anyway.

You want to be a hero? Learn to create certainty in the face of fear.

Somehow or another, my mother taught me to push through my fear, always. Feel the fear and do it anyway.

He who says, "I know no fear," is no hero. No man knows courage unless he does know fear, and has that in him which is superior to fear, and conquers it.

I'd never allow myself to let myself call myself a coward.

We must be afraid of neither poverty nor exile nor imprisonment; of fear itself only should we be afraid.

It is not a matter of being fearless. The fear is sometimes constant, but it's about moving forward regardless of the fear. Courage means feeling the fear and doing it anyway.

Courage is more important than confidence

It is bad for the soul to know itself a coward, it is apt to take refuge in mere wordy violence.

Courage is not the absence of fear but the ability to carry on with dignity in spite of it.