We believe in ordinary acts of bravery, in the courage that drives one person to stand up for another.
Man is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes and pompous in the Grave. Solemnizing Nativities and Deaths with equal lustre. Nor ommiting Ceremonies of Bravery in the infamy of his nature. Life is a pure flame and we live by an invisible Sun within us.
But who is this, what thing of sea or land,-- Female of sex it seems,-- That so bedeck'd, ornate, and gay, Comes this way sailing Like a stately ship Of Tarsus, bound for th' isles Of Javan or Gadire, With all her bravery on, and tackle trim, Sails fill'd, and streamers waving, Courted by all the winds that hold them play, An amber scent of odorous perfume Her harbinger?
It must require bravery to be honest all the time.
True bravery proposes a just end, measures the dangers, and, if necessary, the affront, with coldness.
First assay / To stuff thy mind with solid bravery; / Then march on gallant: get substantial worth: / Boldness gilds finely, and will set it forth.
Think not thy fame at every twitch will break; / By great deeds show that thou canst little do; / And do them not; that shall thy wisdom be; / And change thy temperance into bravery.
Fortitudini=--For bravery.
The bravery of his grief did put me Into a towering passion.
You don't get very far in life without having to be brave an awful lot. Because we all have our frightening moments and difficult trials and we don't have much of a choice but to get through them, and it takes a lot of bravery to do that. The most important thing about bravery is this — It's not about not being scared — it's about being scared and doing it anyway — that's bravery.
Good and evil will grow up in this world together; and they who complain in peace of the insolence of the populace must remember that their insolence in peace is bravery in war.
I don’t think that combat has ever been written about truthfully; it has always been described in terms of bravery and cowardice. I won’t even accept these words as terms of human reference any more. And anyway, hell, they don’t even apply to what, in actual fact, modern warfare has become.
Et facere et pati fortiter Romanum est=--Bravery and endurance make a man a Roman.
No bravery in war can withstand overwhelming numbers.
Cruelty does not make a person dishonest, the same way bravery does not make a person kind.
Only those who dare to fail greatly, can ever achieve greatly. … Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality of those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change.
It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.
Curiosity is one of the forms of feminine bravery.
No man should ever display his bravery who is unprepared for battle; nor bear the marks of defiance, until he hath experienced the abilities of his enemy.
When the quality of bravery is near, a great man's terrors are at a distance. In the hour of misfortune such a great man overcometh bravery.
"The English," says Bishop Sprat, "have too much bravery to be derided, and too much virtue and honour to mock others."
~Cowardice.~--At the bottom of a good deal of the bravery that appears in the world there lurks a miserable cowardice. Men will face powder and steel because they cannot face public opinion.--_Chapin._
~Bravery.~--True bravery is shown by performing without witnesses what one might be capable of doing before all the world.--_Rochefoucauld._
I have a theory that selflessness and bravery aren't all that different.
People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbors.--_George Eliot._
The sun was striking in at the great windows of the court, through the glittering drops of rain upon the glass, and it made a broad shaft of light between the two-and-thirty and the Judge, linking both together, and perhaps reminding some among the audience how both were passing on, with absolute equality, to the greater Judgment that knoweth all things, and cannot err. Rising for a moment, a distinct speck of face in this way of light, the prisoner said, "My Lord, I have received my sentence of Death from the Almighty, but I bow to yours," and sat down again. There was some hushing, and the Judge went on with what he had to say to the rest. Then they were all formally doomed, and some of them were supported out, and some of them sauntered out with a haggard look of bravery, and a few nodded to the gallery, and two or three shook hands, and others went out chewing the fragments of herb they had taken from the sweet herbs lying about. He went last of all, because of having to be helped from his chair, and to go very slowly; and he held my hand while all the others were removed, and while the audience got up (putting their dresses right, as they might at church or elsewhere), and pointed down at this criminal or at that, and most of all at him and me.
The Rostovs knew everybody in Moscow. The old count had money enough that year, as all his estates had been remortgaged, and so Nicholas, acquiring a trotter of his own, very stylish riding breeches of the latest cut, such as no one else yet had in Moscow, and boots of the latest fashion, with extremely pointed toes and small silver spurs, passed his time very gaily. After a short period of adapting himself to the old conditions of life, Nicholas found it very pleasant to be at home again. He felt that he had grown up and matured very much. His despair at failing in a Scripture examination, his borrowing money from Gavril to pay a sleigh driver, his kissing Sonya on the sly--he now recalled all this as childishness he had left immeasurably behind. Now he was a lieutenant of hussars, in a jacket laced with silver, and wearing the Cross of St. George, awarded to soldiers for bravery in action, and in the company of well-known, elderly, and respected racing men was training a trotter of his own for a race. He knew a lady on one of the boulevards whom he visited of an evening. He led the mazurka at the Arkharovs' ball, talked about the war with Field Marshal Kamenski, visited the English Club, and was on intimate terms with a colonel of forty to whom Denisov had introduced him.
Those who have preserved some memory of this already distant epoch know that the National Guard from the suburbs was valiant against insurrections. It was particularly zealous and intrepid in the days of June, 1832. A certain good dram-shop keeper of Pantin des Vertus or la Cunette, whose "establishment" had been closed by the riots, became leonine at the sight of his deserted dance-hall, and got himself killed to preserve the order represented by a tea-garden. In that bourgeois and heroic time, in the presence of ideas which had their knights, interests had their paladins. The prosiness of the originators detracted nothing from the bravery of the movement. The diminution of a pile of crowns made bankers sing the Marseillaise. They shed their blood lyrically for the counting-house; and they defended the shop, that immense diminutive of the fatherland, with Lacedaemonian enthusiasm.
“You are foreigners?” he rapidly asked in Franch. “It is very dangerous....” Then he turned to the mob, holding up our documents. “Comrades!” he cried. “These people are foreign comrades--from America. They have come here to be able to tell their countrymen about the bravery and the revolutionary discipline of the proletarian army!”
With memories like these in him, and, moreover, given to a certain superstitiousness, as has been said; the courage of this Starbuck which could, nevertheless, still flourish, must indeed have been extreme. But it was not in reasonable nature that a man so organized, and with such terrible experiences and remembrances as he had; it was not in nature that these things should fail in latently engendering an element in him, which, under suitable circumstances, would break out from its confinement, and burn all his courage up. And brave as he might be, it was that sort of bravery chiefly, visible in some intrepid men, which, while generally abiding firm in the conflict with seas, or winds, or whales, or any of the ordinary irrational horrors of the world, yet cannot withstand those more terrific, because more spiritual terrors, which sometimes menace you from the concentrating brow of an enraged and mighty man.
"He waxes brave, but nevertheless obeys; most careful bravery that!" murmured Ahab, as Starbuck disappeared. "What's that he said--Ahab beware of Ahab--there's something there!" Then unconsciously using the musket for a staff, with an iron brow he paced to and fro in the little cabin; but presently the thick plaits of his forehead relaxed, and returning the gun to the rack, he went to the deck.
In the chaos of sentiments and passions which defend a barricade, there is a little of everything; there is bravery, there is youth, honor, enthusiasm, the ideal, conviction, the rage of the gambler, and, above all, intermittences of hope.
The arrival of Dolokhov diverted Petya's attention from the drummer boy, to whom Denisov had had some mutton and vodka given, and whom he had had dressed in a Russian coat so that he might be kept with their band and not sent away with the other prisoners. Petya had heard in the army many stories of Dolokhov's extraordinary bravery and of his cruelty to the French, so from the moment he entered the hut Petya did not take his eyes from him, but braced himself up more and more and held his head high, that he might not be unworthy even of such company.
He was fond of saying, "There is a bravery of the priest as well as the bravery of a colonel of dragoons,--only," he added, "ours must be tranquil."
Moreover, Cosette was not very timid by nature. There flowed in her veins some of the blood of the bohemian and the adventuress who runs barefoot. It will be remembered that she was more of a lark than a dove. There was a foundation of wildness and bravery in her.
On both sides, the resolution was equal. The bravery exhibited there was almost barbarous and was complicated with a sort of heroic ferocity which began by the sacrifice of self.
Cannon, muskets, fire and smoke; but, still the deep ditch, the single drawbridge, the massive stone walls, and the eight great towers. Slight displacements of the raging sea, made by the falling wounded. Flashing weapons, blazing torches, smoking waggonloads of wet straw, hard work at neighbouring barricades in all directions, shrieks, volleys, execrations, bravery without stint, boom smash and rattle, and the furious sounding of the living sea; but, still the deep ditch, and the single drawbridge, and the massive stone walls, and the eight great towers, and still Defarge of the wine-shop at his gun, grown doubly hot by the service of Four fierce hours.
This vertigo, this terror, this downfall into ruin of the loftiest bravery which ever astounded history,--is that causeless? No. The shadow of an enormous right is projected athwart Waterloo. It is the day of destiny. The force which is mightier than man produced that day. Hence the terrified wrinkle of those brows; hence all those great souls surrendering their swords. Those who had conquered Europe have fallen prone on the earth, with nothing left to say nor to do, feeling the present shadow of a terrible presence. Hoc erat in fatis. That day the perspective of the human race underwent a change. Waterloo is the hinge of the nineteenth century. The disappearance of the great man was necessary to the advent of the great century. Some one, a person to whom one replies not, took the responsibility on himself. The panic of heroes can be explained. In the battle of Waterloo there is something more than a cloud, there is something of the meteor. God has passed by.
"One day we see a brilliant young officer of high society, at the very outset of his career, in a cowardly underhand way, without a pang of conscience, murdering an official who had once been his benefactor, and the servant girl, to steal his own I.O.U. and what ready money he could find on him; 'it will come in handy for my pleasures in the fashionable world and for my career in the future.' After murdering them, he puts pillows under the head of each of his victims; he goes away. Next, a young hero 'decorated for bravery' kills the mother of his chief and benefactor, like a highwayman, and to urge his companions to join him he asserts that 'she loves him like a son, and so will follow all his directions and take no precautions.' Granted that he is a monster, yet I dare not say in these days that he is unique. Another man will not commit the murder, but will feel and think like him, and is as dishonorable in soul. In silence, alone with his conscience, he asks himself perhaps, 'What is honor, and isn't the condemnation of bloodshed a prejudice?'
"No doubt, historically, uprisings have their beauty; the war of the pavements is no less grandiose, and no less pathetic, than the war of thickets: in the one there is the soul of forests, in the other the heart of cities; the one has Jean Chouan, the other has a Jeanne. Revolts have illuminated with a red glare all the most original points of the Parisian character, generosity, devotion, stormy gayety, students proving that bravery forms part of intelligence, the National Guard invincible, bivouacs of shopkeepers, fortresses of street urchins, contempt of death on the part of passers-by. Schools and legions clashed together. After all, between the combatants, there was only a difference of age; the race is the same; it is the same stoical men who died at the age of twenty for their ideas, at forty for their families. The army, always a sad thing in civil wars, opposed prudence to audacity. Uprisings, while proving popular intrepidity, also educated the courage of the bourgeois.
Lamarque was a man of renown and of action. He had had in succession, under the Empire and under the Restoration, the sorts of bravery requisite for the two epochs, the bravery of the battle-field and the bravery of the tribune. He was as eloquent as he had been valiant; a sword was discernible in his speech. Like Foy, his predecessor, after upholding the command, he upheld liberty; he sat between the left and the extreme left, beloved of the people because he accepted the chances of the future, beloved of the populace because he had served the Emperor well; he was, in company with Comtes Gerard and Drouet, one of Napoleon's marshals in petto. The treaties of 1815 removed him as a personal offence. He hated Wellington with a downright hatred which pleased the multitude; and, for seventeen years, he majestically preserved the sadness of Waterloo, paying hardly any attention to intervening events. In his death agony, at his last hour, he clasped to his breast a sword which had been presented to him by the officers of the Hundred Days. Napoleon had died uttering the word army, Lamarque uttering the word country.
The Trojans being now within the city, excepting Hector, the field is cleared for the most important and decisive action in the poem; that is, the battle between Achilles and Hector, and the death of the latter. This part of the story is managed with singular skill. It seems as if the poet, feeling the importance of the catastrophe, wished to withdraw from view the personages of less consequence, and to concentrate our attention upon those two alone. The poetic action and description are narrowed in extent, but deepened in interest. The fate of Troy is impending; the irreversible decree of Jupiter is about to be executed; the heroes, whose bravery is to be the instrument of bringing about this consummation, are left together on the plain.--FELTON.
Rostov was always thinking about that brilliant exploit of his, which to his amazement had gained him the St. George's Cross and even given him a reputation for bravery, and there was something he could not at all understand. "So others are even more afraid than I am!" he thought. "So that's all there is in what is called heroism! And did I do it for my country's sake? And how was he to blame, with his dimple and blue eyes? And how frightened he was! He thought that I should kill him. Why should I kill him? My hand trembled. And they have given me a St. George's Cross.... I can't make it out at all."
For many great deeds are performed in petty combats. There are instances of bravery ignored and obstinate, which defend themselves step by step in that fatal onslaught of necessities and turpitudes. Noble and mysterious triumphs which no eye beholds, which are requited with no renown, which are saluted with no trumpet blast. Life, misfortune, isolation, abandonment, poverty, are the fields of battle which have their heroes; obscure heroes, who are, sometimes, grander than the heroes who win renown.
My brother has ways of his own. When he talks, he says that a bishop ought to be so. Just imagine! the door of our house is never fastened. Whoever chooses to enter finds himself at once in my brother's room. He fears nothing, even at night. That is his sort of bravery, he says.
Circumstances alone gave a homogeneous character to the foreign policy of Francis. The struggle against the emperor Charles V. filled the greater part of the reign. In reality, the policy of Francis, save for some flashes of sagacity, was irresolute and vacillating. Attracted at first by Italy, dreaming of fair feats of prowess, he led the triumphal Marignano expedition, which gained him reputation as a knightly king and as the most powerful prince in Europe. In 1519, in spite of wise counsels, he stood candidate for the imperial crown. The election of Charles V. caused an inevitable rivalry between the two monarchs which accentuated still further the light and chivalrous temper of the king and the cold and politic character of the emperor. Francis's personal intervention in this struggle was seldom happy. He did not succeed in gaining the support of Henry VIII. of England at the interview of the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520; his want of tact goaded the Constable de Bourbon to extreme measures in 1522-1523; and in the Italian campaign of 1525 he proved himself a mediocre, vacillating and foolhardy leader, and by his blundering led the army to the disaster of Pavia (the 25th of February 1525), where, however, he fought with great bravery. "Of all things," he wrote to his mother after the defeat, "nothing remains to me but honour and life, which is safe"--the authentic version of the legendary phrase "All is lost save honour." He strove to play the part of royal captive heroically, but the prison life galled him. He fell ill at Madrid and was on the point of death. For a moment he thought of abdicating rather than of ceding Burgundy. But this was too great a demand upon his fortitude, and he finally yielded and signed the treaty of Madrid, after having drawn up a secret protest. After Madrid he wavered unceasingly between two courses, either that of continuing hostilities, or the policy favoured by Montmorency of peace and understanding with the emperor. At times he had the sagacity to recognize the utility of alliances, as was shown by those he concluded with the Porte and with the Protestant princes of Germany. But he could never pledge himself frankly in one sense or the other, and this vacillation prevented him from attaining any decisive results. At his death, however, France was in possession of Savoy and Piedmont. Entry: FRANCIS
CURSOR, LUCIUS PAPIRIUS, Roman general, five times consul and twice dictator. In 325 he was appointed dictator to carry on the second Samnite War. His quarrel with Q. Fabius Maximus Rullianus, his _magister equitum_, is well known. The latter had engaged the enemy against the orders of Cursor, by whom he was condemned to death, and only the intercession of his father, the senate and the people, saved his life. Cursor treated his soldiers with such harshness that they allowed themselves to be defeated; but after he had regained their good-will by more lenient treatment and lavish promises of booty, they fought with enthusiasm and gained a complete victory. After the disaster of the Caudine Forks, Cursor to some extent wiped out the disgrace by compelling Luceria (which had revolted) to surrender. He delivered the Roman hostages who were held in captivity in the town, recovered the standards lost at Caudium, and made 7000 of the enemy pass under the yoke. In 309, when the Samnites again rose, Cursor was appointed dictator for the second time, and gained a decisive victory at Longula, in honour of which he celebrated a magnificent triumph. Cursor's strictness was proverbial; he was a man of immense bodily strength, while his bravery was beyond dispute. He was surnamed Cursor from his swiftness of foot. Entry: CURSOR
_The Revolt of 1876._--Under the enlightened administration of Midhat Pasha (1864-1868) Bulgaria enjoyed comparative prosperity, but that remarkable man is not remembered with gratitude by the people owing to the severity with which he repressed insurrectionary movements. In 1861, 12,000 Crimean Tatars, and in 1864 a still larger number of Circassians from the Caucasus, were settled by the Turkish government on lands taken without compensation from the Bulgarian peasants. The Circassians, a lawless race of mountaineers, proved a veritable scourge to the population in their neighbourhood. In 1875 the insurrection in Bosnia and Herzegovina produced immense excitement throughout the Peninsula. The fanaticism of the Moslems was aroused, and the Bulgarians, fearing a general massacre of Christians, endeavoured to anticipate the blow by organizing a general revolt. The rising, which broke out prematurely at Koprivshtitza and Panagurishté in May 1876, was mainly confined to the sanjak of Philippopolis. Bands of bashi-bazouks were let loose throughout the district by the Turkish authorities, the Pomaks, or Moslem Bulgarians, and the Circassian colonists were called to arms, and a succession of horrors followed to which a parallel can scarcely be found in the history of the middle ages. The principal scenes of massacre were Panagurishté, Perushtitza, Bratzigovo and Batak; at the last-named town, according to an official British report, 5000 men, women and children were put to the sword by the Pomaks under Achmet Aga, who was decorated by the sultan for this exploit. Altogether some 15,000 persons were massacred in the [v.04 p.0782] district of Philippopolis, and fifty-eight villages and five monasteries were destroyed. Isolated risings which took place on the northern side of the Balkans were crushed with similar barbarity. These atrocities, which were first made known by an English journalist and an American consular official, were denounced by Gladstone in a celebrated pamphlet which aroused the indignation of Europe. The great powers remained inactive, but Servia declared war in the following month, and her army was joined by 2000 Bulgarian volunteers. A conference of the representatives of the powers, held at Constantinople towards the end of the year, proposed, among other reforms, the organization of the Bulgarian provinces, including the greater part of Macedonia, in two vilayets under Christian governors, with popular representation. These recommendations were practically set aside by the Porte, and in April 1877 Russia declared war (see RUSSO-TURKISH WARS, and PLEVNA). In the campaign which followed the Bulgarian volunteer contingent in the Russian army played an honourable part; it accompanied Gourko's advance over the Balkans, behaved with great bravery at Stara Zagora, where it lost heavily, and rendered valuable services in the defence of Shipka. Entry: POLITICAL
KEARNY, PHILIP (1815-1862), American soldier, was born in New York on the 2nd of June 1815, and was originally intended for the legal profession. He graduated at Columbia University (1833), but his bent was decidedly towards soldiering, and in 1837 he obtained a commission in the cavalry regiment of which his uncle, (General) Stephen Watts Kearny (1794-1848), was colonel and Lieutenant Jefferson Davis adjutant. Two years later he was sent to France to study the methods of cavalry training in vogue there. Before his return to the United States in 1840 he had served, on leave, in Algeria. He had inherited a large fortune, but he remained in the service, and his wide experience of cavalry work caused him to be employed on the headquarters staff of the army. After six more years' service Kearny left the army, but almost immediately afterwards he rejoined, bringing with him a company of cavalry, which he had raised and equipped chiefly at his own expense, to take part in the Mexican war. In December 1846 he was promoted captain. In leading a brilliant cavalry charge at Churubusco he lost his left arm, but he remained at the front, and won the brevet of major for his gallantry at Contreras and Churubusco. In 1851 he again resigned, to travel round the world. He saw further active service with his old comrades of the French cavalry in the Italian war of 1859, and received the cross of the Legion of Honour for his conduct at Solferino. Up to the outbreak of the American Civil War he lived in Paris, but early in 1861 he hastened home to join the Federal army. At first as a brigade commander and later as a divisional commander of infantry in the Army of the Potomac, he infused into his men his own cavalry spirit of dash and bravery. At Williamsburg, Seven Pines, and Second Bull Run, he displayed his usual romantic courage, but at Chantilly (Sept. 1, 1862), after repulsing an attack of the enemy, he rode out in the dark too far to the front, and mistaking the Confederates for his own men was shot dead. His body was sent to the Federal lines with a message from General Lee, and was buried in Trinity Churchyard, New York. His commission as major-general of volunteers was dated July 4, 1862, but he never received it. Entry: KEARNY