"Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear — not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward, it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word. Consider the flea!-incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage. Whether you are asleep or awake he will attack you, caring nothing for the fact that in bulk and strength you are to him as are the massed armies of the earth to a sucking child; he lives both day and night and all days and nights in the very lap of peril and the immediate presence of death, and yet is no more afraid than is the man who walks the streets of a city that was threatened by an earthquake ten centuries before. When we speak of Clive, Nelson, and Putnam as men who "didn't know what fear was," we ought always to add the flea-and put him at the head of the procession."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Ch. 12.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Pudd'nhead_Wilson
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Pudd'nhead Wilson
37 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Pudd'nhead Wilson →
Related Quotes
"Tell the truth or trump — but get the trick."
"I wish I owned half of that dog." "Why?" somebody asked. "Because I would kill my half." The group searched his face …"
"Adam was but human — this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because …"
"Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first …"
"Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the principal one was, that they escaped teething."
"There is this trouble about special providences-namely, there is so often a doubt as to which party was intended to b…"
"Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education."
"Remark of Dr. Baldwin's, concerning upstarts: We don't care to eat toadstools that think they are truffles."
"Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry."
"There is no character, howsoever good and fine, but it can be destroyed by ridicule, howsoever poor and witless. Obse…"