Nerve Quotes

You will never lose your nerve. Your life, probably, but never your nerve.

The principal difference between an adventurer and a suicide is that the adventurer leaves himself a margin of escape (the narrower the margin the greater the adventure), a margin whose width and length may be determined by unknown factors but whose navigation is determined by the measure of the adventurer's nerve and wits. It is exhilarating to live by one's nerves or toward the summit of one's wits.

Perhaps there is no other knowing than the mere competence of the act. If at the heart of one's being, there is no self to which one ought to be true, then sincerity is simply nerve; it lies in the unabashed vigor of the pretense. But pretense is only pretense when it is assumed that the act is not true to the agent. Find the agent.

Prayer is the slender nerve that moves the muscle of omnipotence.

It takes a lot of guts to get on stage.

It's not enough to be nice in life. You've got to have nerve.

I have a black belt in chutzpah. I was born with it. Some people, like some of the women I know, have a black belt in spending. They were born with that. But what they gave me was a black belt in chutzpah.

I don't have half the nerves there that I have anywhere else.

Whenever people have trouble public speaking, it's because they are just thinking about themselves.

I'm cooler than a polar bear's toenails... bend corners like I was a curve, I struck a nerve.

I've got enough nerve to do anything!

Seeing Pax get extra-nervous about which shirt he is going to wear when he meets Aung San Suu Kyi, I get very moved. He rightfully doesn't get nervous going to a movie premiere; he gets nervous going to meet her.

While a particularly deft sense of irony may be one of the tools of great storytellers, I think it's also true that if irony serves as a retreat from an emotional engagement that you're overly concerned is uncool, that's a failure of nerve.

I got ice in my veins!

I should’ve been very cross with Anubis. Kissing me without permission—the nerve!

I had this desk alongside the most beautiful Australian 18-year-old girl with long brown hair, and I got up enough nerve to ask her for a date.

I'll tell you what bravery really is. Bravery is just determination to do a job that you know has to be done.

Being terrified but going ahead and doing what must be done—that's courage. The one who feels no fear is a fool, and the one who lets fear rule him is a coward.

I've never really been one to get what they call stage fright so much.

Frankly, this is not cojones, this is cowardice.

Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessels are the written mythologies of memory and desire.

I'm not nervous standing with anyone.

A Johns Hopkins doctor says that 'we do not know why it is that the worriers die sooner than the non-worriers, but that is a fact.' But I, who am simple of mind, think I know we are inwardly constructed, in nerve and tissue and brain cell and soul, for faith and not for fear. God made us that way. Therefore, the need of faith is not something imposed on us dogmatically, but it is written in us intrinsically. We cannot live without it. To live by worry is to live against Reality.

If you are going to ask your crush for their phone number, you are one of the small group of women I am so jealous of.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.