Top 100 The Hero Quotes
#1. Comic book fans have loved Wolverine, and all the 'X-Men' characters, for more than the action. I think that's what set it apart from many of the other comic books. In the case of Wolverine, when he appeared, he was a revolution really. He was the first anti-hero.
Hugh Jackman
#2. We aren't heroes out there in the military. We're just Patriots.
Marcus Luttrell
#3. Repose and cheerfulness are the badge of the gentleman - repose in energy. The Greek battle pieces are calm; the heroes, in whatever violent actions engaged, retain a serene aspect.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#4. And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero.
Walt Whitman
#5. The recent death of Gene McCarthy reminded me of a lesson I spent a long, long time unlearning, so now I have to re-learn it. It's about political courage and heroes, and when a country is desperate for leadership. There are times when regular politics will not do, and this is one of those times.
Molly Ivins
#6. I guess that's the thing about a hero's journey. You might not start out a hero, and you might not even come back that way. But you change, which is the same as everything changing. The journey changes you, whether or not you know it, and whether or not you want it to. I had changed.
Kami Garcia
#7. We do not want to be told what we know. We do not want to call things by their names, although we're willing to call one another bad ones. We call meanness nobility and hatred honor. The way to make yourself a hero is to make me out a scoundrel. You won't admit that either, but it's true.
Thomas Wolfe
#8. It is a thing forever changing, this of Hero-worship: different in each age, difficult to do well in any age. Indeed, the heart of the whole business of the age, one may say, is to do it well.
Thomas Carlyle
#9. I like stories where people have to face some big demons internally. It always seems to be an element of horror, because it's pretty scary to have to face yourself and the things you're most worried about: your own abilities and your own capabilities and your own level of competence in being a hero.
Scott Snyder
#10. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom- war on terror and so on-falsifies freedom.
Slavoj Zizek
#11. I started on the opening page of my own book.
'I am a cheating, weak-spined, women-fearing coward, and i am the hero of your story. Because the woman I cheated on - my wife, Amy Elliott Dunne - is a sociopath and a murderer.'
Yes. I'd read that.
Gillian Flynn
#12. He who wins a thousand common hearts is entitled to some renown; but he who keeps undisputed sway over the heart of a coquette is indeed a hero.
Washington Irving
#13. History is not just a tale of men's making, but is a thing tied to the land. We call a hill by the name of a hero who died there, or name a river after a princess who fled beside its banks, and when the old names vanish, the stories go with them and the new names carry no reminder of the past.
Bernard Cornwell
#14. There's a new children's book that's coming out that features Sarah Palin as a hero. I don't want to give away the ending, but we finally find out who shot Bambi's mother.
Conan O'Brien
#15. To this military attitude of the soul we give the name of Heroism ... It is a self-trust which slights the restraints of prudence, in the plenitude of its energy and power to repair the harms it may suffer. The hero is a mind of such balance that no disturbances can shake his will ...
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#16. I would ask: Given the nature of free-market capitalism - where the rule is to rise to the top at all costs - is it possible to have a financial industry hero? And by the way, this is not a pop-culture trend we're talking about. There aren't many financial heroes in literature, theater or cinema.
Martin Scorsese
#17. We have these rules, the 'hero rules.' Like, a hero doesn't slouch. A hero walks proudly with his head up. A hero walks with a purpose. A hero's always a gentleman.
John Singleton
#18. But when I call for a hero, out comes my lazy old self; so I never know who I am, nor how many I am or will be. I'd love to be able to touch a bell and summon the real me, because if I really need myself, I mustn't disappear.
Pablo Neruda
#19. And there, among the ruined splendor of Skyline Palace, Adamat saw a god weep for the hero of Adro.
Brian McClellan
#20. The heroes of literary history have been no less remarkable for what they have suffered than for what they have achieved.
Samuel Johnson
#21. Why ruin my sister's birthday simply because the entire planet was going to hell in a hand basket?
T.C. Boyle
#22. Within the microcosm of a film you get drawn to people. There are certain projects you care enormously about, and 'The Edge Of Love' was one because I was portraying a great hero of mine, Dylan Thomas.
Matthew Rhys
#23. I cherish the memories of a question my grandson asked me the other day when he said, 'Grandpa, were you a hero in the war?' Grandpa said 'No ... but I served in a company of heroes.'
Richard Winters
#24. No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa, I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a tedious way of saying that I do not exist.
Jorge Luis Borges
#25. Love is being willing to become the villain so that the one you love can stay a hero.
Josephine Angelini
#26. The ideal of the military hero is clearly echoed in other contexts, and it includes those who routinely risk their health and lives in the line of duty, such as police officers, firefighters, and paramedics.
Philip G. Zimbardo
#27. My point is there will always be vile men, just as there will always be men of kindness and compassion ... This world is a troubled, savage, place. It would, however, even be more ghastly if only evil men took time to master weapons. - Waylander from the book Hero in the Shadows by David Gemmell
David Gemmell
#28. I firmly believed we should not march into Baghdad ... To occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab
world against us and make a broken tyrant, into a latter-day Arab hero.
George H. W. Bush
#29. Aside from comic book heroes, the only real life heroes I had were musicians.
Andy Biersack
#30. If we think of the novel and the epic ... The difference lies in the fact that the important thing about the epic is a hero
a man who is a pattern for all men. While, as Mencken pointed out, the essence of most novels lies in the breaking down of a man, in the degeneration of character.
Jorge Luis Borges
#31. 'Heroism' is not the same as coping. A man who does his job properly and succeeds through his own efforts is definitely to be commended, but he is not a hero in the classic sense until he deliberately lays his life on the line for a cause he deems to be greater than himself.
Jeff Cooper
#32. If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath,I'd live with scarlet Majors at the Base,And speed glum heroes up the line of death.
Siegfried Sassoon
#33. "You're my hero," we both say at the same time. I don't hear Kent move, but all of a sudden his voice is closer, and he's found my hands in the dark, and he's cupping them in his.
Lauren Oliver
#34. I've always felt a kinship with Willy Wonka. Even at that age, I could tell that he was a flawed hero, an icon for the forbidden. The forbidden in this case was chocolate, a metaphor for indulgence and anything you're not supposed to have, be it sex, drugs, alcohol or pornography.
Marilyn Manson
#35. I prefer to doubt everything. Such a disposition does not preclude a resolute character. On the contrary, as far as I am concerned, I always advance more boldly when I don't know what is waiting me for me. After all, nothing worse than death can happen-and death you can't escape!
Mikhail Lermontov
#36. The practice of perseverance is the discipline of the noblest virtues. To run well, we must run to the end. It is not the fighting but the' conquering that gives a hero his title to renown.
Elias Lyman Magoon
#37. Mubarak came to power as a hero who fought bravely in Egypt's wars and headed the nation's air force.
Ahmed Zewail
#38. It is a strange, repetitive feature of action movies that the infuriating go-by-the-rules boss of the maverick hero is almost invariably Black.)
David Graeber
#39. A hero is somebody who voluntarily walks into the unknown.
Tom Hanks
Tom Hanks
#41. Nelson's famous signal before the Battle of Trafalgar was not: "England expects that every man will be a hero." It said: "Englandexpects that every man will do his duty." In 1805 that was enough. It should still be.
Johan Huizinga
#42. [Eddie] wondered if every criminal saw himself as the hero of his own story and if every thankless son was convinced he'd been mistreated by his father.
Alice Hoffman
#43. This relative freedom of a hero does not violate the strict specificity of the construction, just as the specificity of a mathematical formula is not violated by the presence of irrational or transfinite quantities.
Mikhail Bakhtin
#44. I'm the guy in the crowd making fun of the hero's shirt.
Seth MacFarlane
#45. Dagwood Bumstead was a great unrecognized hero of American literature. He showed up every day, he got knocked down every day, he never got to eat his sandwich every day, the dog jumped on him every day, his wife was giving him a hard time and he showed up every day.
James L. Brooks
#46. By the age of 11, I was no longer going to Sunday Mass, and going on birdwatching walks with my father. So early on, I heard of Charles Darwin. I guess, you know, he was the big hero. And, you know, you understand life as it now exists through evolution.
James D. Watson
#47. There's a hero in every heart waiting for the dragon to come out.
Rick Yancey
#48. But I was not good enough. You should understand this about me - I am not a hero; not one to tap unknown reserves of courage; not one to rise to circumstance. I am the understudy who chokes on his lines when he is forced onto the stage. I am never, ever good enough.
Dexter Palmer
#49. What difference does it make if the Gospel is mostly a lie? It's an engrossing story and the words of its hero are excellent words to live by, even today.
Tom Robbins
#50. When you're eleven you think every idea is born with you, that no one ever tried it the right way before. Your example, your own honesty, will make you a hero to everyone who knows you - and better, it will make people come to their senses and stop telling vicious lies about each other.
Elana Dykewomon
#51. I don't consider myself an action hero, at all. My domestic life is the same as anyone else's.
Chris Vance
#52. Would you believe in a story without the heroes? There are stories without heroes.
Pushpa Rana
#53. When you are a hero you are always running to save someone, sweating, worried and guilty. When you are a villain you are just lurking in the shadows waiting for the hero to pass by. Then you pop them in the head and go home ... piece of cake.
James Marsters
#54. The government says Rant's alive because they need a villain. The kids say he's alive because they need a hero.
Chuck Palahniuk
#55. We've all heard about space and landing on the moon, but somehow it's a very tom-boyish adventure. It's planting the flag on the moon by Neil Armstrong, and it has this very male-hero edge to it.
Lily Koppel
#56. I think if I were a superhero saving the world, I'd expect at least not to have to pay income taxes. I mean there should be something in it for a hero who risks his life to save mankind every day.
Stan Lee
#57. If your Olympic Hero were to use the Worm in the 1996 Olympic Games, it would be so embarassing to all the other atheletes - and our country, mind you- that the USA would have finished behind Guam.
Kurt Angle
#58. Think: the hero prolongs himself, even his falling
was only a pretext for being, his latest rebirth.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#59. At that moment his soul is fuller of the tomb and him who lies there than of the altar and Him of whom it speaks. Such stages have to be gone through, I believe, by all young and brave souls, who must win their way through hero-worship to the worship of Him who is the King and Lord of heroes.
Thomas Hughes
#60. My defenses were so great. The cocky rock and roll hero who knows all the answers was actually a terrified guy who didn't know how to cry. Simple.
John Lennon
#61. If youth is the period of hero-worship, so also is it true that hero-worship, more than anything else, perhaps, gives one the sense of youth. To admire, to expand one's self, to forget the rut, to have a sense of newness and life and hope, is to feel young at any time of life.
Charles Horton Cooley
#62. He has been named as the heir apparent of the great Argentine hero, Diego Maradona, by journalists, players, and Maradona himself, alike. I'd personally put him in a drawer of my bedside table.
Franz Beckenbauer
#63. It is a common failing of childhood to think that if one makes a hero out of a demon the demon will be satisfied.
Yukio Mishima
#64. People hide the truth to protect those they love!
Craig Mercier
#65. The real hero is the man who fights even though he is scared.
George S. Patton
#66. Nothing lasts forever, not even the best machines. And everything can be reused.
- Hephaestus
Rick Riordan
#67. CALVIN:
Our hero regains consciousness at the feet of a sarcastic alien.
Bill Watterson
#69. You have to be brave and not always play likeable people. It's difficult, because there's a demand for the hero or heroine to be very likeable.
Felicity Jones
#70. 'Nowhere Man' embodies one of my favorite themes - the hero completely out of his element. It's really near and dear to my heart.
Ruth Glick
#71. This film 'Hero' talks about the peace of Chinese people.
Jet Li
#72. I was aggressively nonpolitical. I believed that people who make a fuss about politics do so because their heads are too empty to think about more important things. So I felt nothing but impatient contempt for Osborne's Jimmy Porter and the rest of the heroes of social protest.
Colin Wilson
#73. No phallic hero, no matter what he does to himself or to another to prove his courage, ever matches the solitary, existential courage of the woman who gives birth.
Andrea Dworkin
#74. A lot of characters now on TV have moved into being anti-heroes, but I wanted to be the hero.
Kieran Bew
#75. Be the hero of your children's story. Never let them believe for a minute that honor, courage and doing what is right is only reserved for other fathers and mothers.
Shannon L. Alder
#76. The kiss wove between gentle and frenzied, liquid and greedy, silken and primal, and he sucked every second of bliss he could from the forbidden pleasure.
Jami Gold
#77. After the murder of the duc there was one martyr more in heaven and one hero less on earth
Leo Tolstoy
#78. I was taught coming up in the Phillies organization to be seen and not heard by people like Pete Rose, my hero growing up, and players like Mike Schmidt and Steve Carlton and Manny Trillo.
Ryne Sandberg
#79. It's very difficult to talk about the war dead and the fallen without invoking valor, without invoking the words 'heroes.' I feel ... uncomfortable about the word hero because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war.
Chris Hayes
#80. The problem of the hero is to pierce himself (and therewith his world) precisely through that point; to shatter and annihilate that key knot of his limited existence.
Joseph Campbell
#81. The thing to remember about a kick is you go for his twigs and berries" ~Declan~
Ilsa Madden-Mills
#82. Evil is a matter of choice. Those people who have been victimized and refuse to imitate their oppressors are in my mind the greatest heroes we have.
Andrew Vachss
#83. I can suck the chrome off a bumper and leave the car still standing. In other words, I am sexually gifted, a hero among gay men.
J.P. Barnaby
#84. I loved Debussy, Stravinsky, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, anything with romantic melodies, especially the nocturnes. Nietzsche was a hero, especially with 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra.' He gets a bad rap; he's very misunderstood. He's a maker of individuals, and he was a teacher of teachers.
Joni Mitchell
#85. Take action. You can either be a passive victim of circumstance or you can be the active hero of your own life. Action is the antidote to apathy and cynicism and despair. You will inevitably make mistakes but at the end of your days, you will be remembered for your gallop, not for your stumble.
Bradley Whitford
#86. I love to watch those old movies on late-night television, particularly when a couple get up from a champagne dinner in a posh restaurant and the hero hands the waiter $3. But the best part is when he says, "Keep the change."
Robert Orben
#87. And so Galahad decided that it would be a disgrace to set off on a quest with the other knights. Alone he would enter the dark forest where there was no path. This is the myth of The Hero's Journey.
Joseph Campbell
#88. I do what he says and I close my eyes and open my mouth and the next thing I know he's got his twenty-eight-year-old tongue in my thirteen-year-old mouth and all I can think is that I don't think the hero is supposed to be doing this.
Andrea Portes
#89. The absurd hero's refusal to hope becomes his singular ability to live in the present with passion.
Albert Camus
#90. I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.
Bob Dylan
#91. The destroyer Cork, like the useful hero for whom it is named, will be game to the last.
Josephus Daniels
#92. Have you ever lost someone close to you? Someone who is at the core of your universe, the hero of all your stories...when that happens, it isn't just the loss of one life, it's the loss of two lives - one who found another world, perhaps...and one who is left behind.
Faraaz Kazi
#93. Skywalker is a direct translation of the word shaman out of the Tungusic, which is where Siberian shamanism comes from. So these heroes that are being instilled in the heart of the culture are shamanic heroes. They control a force which is bigger than everybody and holds the galaxy together.
Terence McKenna
#94. The hero of yesterday becomes the tyrant of tomorrow, unless he crucifies himself today.
Joseph Campbell
#95. As I see it, part of the art of being a hero is knowing when you don't need to be one anymore.
Alan Moore
#96. Perhaps some of the appeal of the dangerous-but-yummy paranormal anti-hero lies in his scorn for societal expectations. Yes, women have come a long way, but there are still some cultural stigmas more associated with women than men.
Jeaniene Frost
#97. One thing that most comic artists avoid is showing decisions. They show action, sure, and they show results, but they don't show (because it's difficult to show) the hero or the villain making a choice.
Seth Godin
#98. She'd declined to attend parties and balls, citing her devotion to the Highland hero of her dreams - but really because she'd preferred to stay home with a book.
Tessa Dare
#99. Maybe I'm not the hero to her I've always tried so hard to be, because right now, I feel as if she doesn't even need a hero. Why would she? She has someone so much stronger than I'll ever be for her. She has herself.
Colleen Hoover
#100. I grew up in the North of England at a time when Stirling Moss was a hero. Everyone wanted to be a racing driver.
Ridley Scott
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