2 posts tagged “courage”
"Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. "He that will lose his life, the same shall save it" is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers... This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. Christian courage; which is a disdain of death."
- G.K. Chesterton
Last night as Jeanie and I were driving home we saw an odd sight - a man being attacked by a bird. The small sparrow-sized bird made numerous swooping dives at this large middle-aged man, like a kamikaze pilot dive-bombing on an aircraft carrier many times its size. The man defended himself by swinging his arms and the bag he was carrying wildly into the air. However, the flailing arms didn't seem to deter the little bird's relentlous onslaughts. Although we didn't stick around to see the outcome of this encounter, I suspect the bird was victorious at chasing the man out of the area, and at the very least winning some respect. I thought to myself, either that bird was courageously protecting its territory, or was just plain psycho (like the birds from that Alfred Hitchcock movie). Whatever the case, that little bird had some serious chutzpah to take on that man-giant. If one of those large flailing arms had made contact it would've been lights out for that bird. One wrong swoop at the wrong angle or at the wrong velocity would've meant the difference between life and death. Yet like the young shepherd boy David facing the warrior-giant Goliath, the little bird didn't fly away but turned to face his foe. Whatever it was that he was after or protecting, it must've been important enough to be worth dying for. "To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself." – Soren Kierkegaard
"Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die."
– G.K. Chesterton
