Inspirational quotes to overcome fear, take a leap of faith and and pursue courageousness. 

Whether we’re starting a new job, prepping for a difficult conversation or just in need of an extra push to get us out of our comfort zone, we all need a little extra courage. No matter what you’re doing, here are 22 inspirational quotes to motivate you and inspire your courageous side.

1. I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear. -Nelson Mandela

2. What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything? -Vincent Van Gogh

3. You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ -Eleanor Roosevelt

4. Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction. -John F. Kennedy

5. From caring comes courage. -Lao Tzu

6. One isn’t necessarily born with courage, but one is born with potential. Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest. -Maya Angelou

7. The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud. -Coco Chanel

8. Faced with what is right, to leave it undone shows a lack of courage. -Confucius

9. I think my mother… made it clear that you have to live life by your own terms and you have to not worry about what other people think and you have to have the courage to do the unexpected. -Caroline Kennedy

10. We must build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear. -Martin Luther King, Jr.

11. Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage. -Anais Nin

12. Sometimes you don’t realize your own strength until you come face to face with your greatest weakness. –Susan Gale

13. Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence. -Thomas Szasz

14. If we’re growing, we’re always going to be out of our comfort zone.-John Maxwell

15. Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear. -Mark Twain

16. To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. To not dare is to lose oneself. -Soren Kierkegaard

17. It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that they are difficult. -Seneca

18. Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. –Mark Twain

19. Optimism is the foundation of courage. -Nicholas Murray Butler

20. Courage is never to let your actions be influenced by your fears. -Arthur Koestler

21. Courage is grace under pressure. -Ernest Hemingway

22. Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen. -Winston Churchill

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Bringing meaning to the joy of eating.

When the “An apple a day keeps the doctor away” proverb is the only adage in your arsenal of food wisdom, it’s time to bulk up on new things to say. From Ireland to China and the likes of Helen Keller to Ronald Reagan, these 20 quotes will bring even more meaning and joy to the act of eating.

When I am eating I am deaf and dumb. –Russia

To eat is human, to digest, divine. –Mark Twain

Life is too short to drink bad wine. –France

Whose bread I eat, his song I sing. –Germany

Too many cooks spoil the broth. –Italy

At the table with good friends and family you do not become old. –Italy

If you can’t feed a hundred people, then just feed one. –Mother Theresa

Fine words do not produce food. –Nigeria

If you are looking for a fly in your food, it means that you are full. –South Africa

Avoid fruits and nuts. You are what you eat. –Jim Davis (Garfield)

Who fasts but does no other good saves his bread but goes to hell. –Italy

There is no sincerer love than the love of food. –Bernard Shaw

He who takes medicine and neglects to diet wastes the skill of his doctors. –China

It is easier to halve the potato when there’s love. –Ireland

A piece of bread in one’s pocket is better than a feather in one’s hat. –Sweden

You can tell a lot about a fellow’s character by his way of eating jelly beans. –Ronald Reagan

Give a man a fish, you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and you have fed him for a lifetime. –China

The good Lord has changed water into wine, so how can drinking beer be a sin? –Belgium

Happiness rarely keeps company with an empty stomach. –Helen Keller

Food tastes best when you eat it with your own spoon. –Denmark

Images: B@ni

Aylin Erman currently resides in Istanbul and is creator of plant-based recipe website GlowKitchen.

Check out our article on 50 pick up lines for foodies

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Untie.

“We are strange beings, we seem to go free, but we go in chains – chains of training, custom, convention, association, environment – in a word, Circumstance – and against these bonds the strongest of us struggle in vain.”

-Mark Twain

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A love letter from Mark Twain to his future wife, Olivia.

Who better to write the world’s most memorable love letters than the world’s most famous writers? And it’s difficult to top the fame of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (described by William Faulkner as “the father of American literature”). This is how Mark Twain goes a-wooing…

Livy dear,

I have already mailed to-day’s letter, but I am so proud of my privilege of writing the dearest girl in the world whenever I please, that I must add a few lines if only to say I love you, Livy. For I do love you, Livy…as the dew loves the flowers; as the birds love the sunshine; as the wavelets love the breeze; as mothers love their first-born; as memory loves old faces; as the yearning tides love the moon; as the angels love the pure in heart…

Take my kiss and my benediction, and try to be reconciled to the fact that I am

Yours forever,

Sam

…..

P.S.– I have read this letter over and it is flippant and foolish and puppyish. I wish I had gone to bed when I got back, without writing. You said I must never tear up a letter after writing it to you and so I send it. Burn it, Livy, I did not think I was writing so clownishly and shabbily. I was in much too good a humor for sensible letter writing.

Self-mocking it may have been, but this courtship was a success. The object of Twain’s affection here is Olivia Langdon – having rejected his first proposal of marriage, she had just accepted his second and would become his wife within the year. Through her, Twain came into contact with a number of American luminaries including Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Their marriage would last 34 years until Olivia’s death in 1904.

Images: Abdullah Frères (Wikimedia Commons) & Wikimedia Commons.

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ColumnConscious life, hear me roar.

When I was 21, I set sail on an old cargo ship for Europe and North Africa.

Two years prior, I’d finished college in Italy, had backpacked Europe and Tunisia by myself, and had finally come back to Cape Cod – as you might imagine, a fully changed woman. It was good to eat home-cooked food again, good to sleep in my childhood bed again and to be loved by family. But that calling to leave again was strong. Defiant. Addictive.

To this day, whenever I do come back home from trips to the city or a long vacation and cross one of the bridges to the island I can’t help but think of Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again. The title comes from the finale of the novel when protagonist George Webber realizes, “You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood…back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame…back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”

At 21, coming home meant failure, old boyfriends, people who knew my rocky past, people who were content to live a life half lived. Not me. Not anymore.

The chance to hop a ship for three months and get paid to travel sounded like a pretty good gig.

Roughly 1000 sailors in training were on that ship – many, not far off from my age – and no matter what I did, I was a curiousity.

Having been raised in a household of men and surrounded by boy cousins growing up, I had no fear of hopping on a ship full to the brim with them for free travel. I had Kerouac’s The Subterraneans and Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, I postured myself as an intense writer, a habitual smoker and a drinker of coffee. My favorite place for reading those books was at the top of the ship on the Flying Bridge, a smoke in hand and hot coffee to warm me from a North Atlantic winter. On the move, channeling Kerouac, life was at an optimum. Oh, to be away.

But life out at sea for a long period of time has its own politics, government and unspoken rules. There are defined pecking orders and social taboos out at sea that would seem completely illogical, or at least not so amplified if you weren’t out there on a big ship. If I talked to a cadet for too long it meant I was having sex with him. If I left my bedroom door open to vent the cigarette smoke, it meant I wanted sex and would result in men doused in cologne congregating outside my door. I finally decided that I would just be a bitch to keep everyone away.

I ran the salad bar for all those men and it was their favorite part of eating because they could put together their own meal. Piss me off? I threatened to spit in it. Question why there was wilted lettuce? I’d give a long stare that would make them never ask again.

The bitch.

Sometimes life in a small place like Cape Cod is much like ship life. Everyone knows you and you can’t escape the politics of a small town, but you can get good at coping. The one thing that stays constant is how you react to what you are surrounded with. I’ve become an “angry” woman living here. I am the “crazy lady” who will battle the local school system so that my kids don’t have to wear uniforms. I am that woman who raises her hand at the town meeting with two others to oppose lazy, local lawmakers. I am that woman who stands up to the neighbor who says my green lawn full of clover would look better fertilized to say: “I don’t believe in poison.”

As we age, do we just become bitter and cynical? Maybe we just become more open to the fact that the world is truly a Confederacy of Dunces and we are but one dunce cap away from being one of them if we don’t fight to stay awake. Thomas Wolfe may have been right about going home: we are who we are on the inside when we go back. Whether we’re ready or not, life is constantly altering and changing us, taking away the blinders, the rose-colored glasses, the smokes and coffee and showing us itself in true form. No matter where we go, there we are, whether it’s nestled safely in our childhood home or riding camels in the Sahara under a full moon.

There are no temporary fixes. No way you can run away when it’s you who is different. When it’s you who is always the stranger in town.

Between the Lines, is a weekly column navigating the sometimes-sharp, sometimes-blurred lines of life and culture between city and country.

Image: whatmegsaid

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Even when the writer isn’t Mark Twain, changing someone’s words is tricky business. I’ve always said the best editors are the ones who are so subtle that you can’t tell what they change in your copy, and yet your piece is better. So, when considering the new version of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” that eliminates the prodigious use of the “n-word” throughout the novel, there are two big problems out of the gate: One, if we can agree that Twain is an American literary treasure, it’s probably no one’s business to give his work what’s referred to as a “heavy edit.” And two, the man’s dead. Game over. If he’s not part of the discussion (and he’d want to be), it’s cheating to have it.

That said, Twain and his work are part of our nation’s living culture (the story was even covered by Entertainment Weekly) and there are bigger issues at play here than simple editing ethics. One is straight-up censorship. The other is laziness regarding our relationship with young adults – the target group for the two options being offered here: The reworking of Twain’s text for “innocent eyes” or kicking the book upstairs to only be taught at the college level (proposed by Lorrie Moore last weekend in her NYT op-ed, “Send Huck Finn to College”).  Both impulses are well-meaning, but are wrongheaded disservices to our youth and ourselves.

Regarding censorship, taking shots at book banning is easy when the would-be banners are reactionary thugs concerned with thought-policing our culture by ensuring that so called subversive reads (from “Catcher in the Rye,” to “Lolita,” to “The Communist Manifesto”) remain unavailable. Taking on attacks by science deniers and bible thumpers that would cut us off access to scientific facts is also a no-brainer bailiwick for anti-censorship types. (A friend who works in publishing recently showed me an excerpt from a faith-based children’s science textbook used for Darwin-free schooling. Oh dear.)

But it’s a lot more difficult when attempts at information control come from those concerned with issues having to do civil rights, be they about race or sex. (I’m recalling now a professor who once hurled a copy of Homer’s “Odyssey” across a college freshman classroom, symbolically excommunicating it from the canon because of its hideous maleness. This same person later refused to be a reader on my thesis on Kerouac. Doing so would be playing a role in legitimizing what she said was his texts’ misogyny.) The “Huck Finn” controversy is a tough one, to be sure. I cringe when I read the n-word in the novel today as an adult, just as I did when I was young. Likewise, as a Jew, Ernest Hemingway’s great “The Sun Also Rises” has always provoked winces at certain ugliness. I do understand the instinct to get the word out of the classroom.  (The term “injun,” it should be noted, is also dispensed with in the new edition.)

But I turn to Katie, the teen liaison at the local library who’s completing her master’s degree in library science with a focus on Young Adults. Katie’s an old-school liberal, feminist, anti-sexism and anti-racism, solid citizen of the best sort. Here’s an excerpt from a paper she recently wrote about a decision she made that she thought was best for young girls:

“I recalled my decision to remove a popular magazine, Seventeen, from [the local library’s] Young Adult collection and replace it with another publication. As I made that decision, I was aware that I was wielding control in an undemocratic way, but I didn’t see my actions as “censorship.”… I was in denial about my act of censorship because I thought I was right. … [But] It didn’t matter that I had a litany of ‘good’ reasons for wanting the magazine removed – I was putting my personal opinion ahead of patrons’ wants and needs. That prioritization is never acceptable and is in direct conflict with my personal philosophy of affording information access. … I saw how, on a practical level, I must be ready to defend access to material I personally find abhorrent. This is my duty as a librarian and a youth advocate.”

This is the type of (sometimes counterintuitive) vigilance we must display to make sure high school students have access to work that, like “Huck Finn,” some of us might find distasteful. I know we’re talking about curriculum here and not a teen magazine – but we’re also not talking about Nazi propaganda. Keep in mind young adults’ access to material is consistently under attack and it is specifically here that we need be on guard to defend our rights to information. Most efforts to ban books are focused on this part of the society’s population under the guise of protecting innocence.

The second option, being floated by Moore and others, is that we suspend teaching the book until college and adulthood. “The remedy,” she says, “is to refuse to teach this novel in high school and to wait until college – or even graduate school – where it can be put in proper context.”

Refuse? This is an example of the laziness of our approach not only to engaging and teaching this age group, but also to understanding and respecting their cognitive sophistication, and to owning up to the sometimes uncomfortable world in which they live and form opinions. Until graduate school? What does that say about ourselves as adults and our ability to think and learn?

No one would advocate handing material on complex subject matter to young students without teaching it. Try this on: Material regarding safe sex has unsettling terms and concepts that teenagers can’t “get” on their own. Best not to teach it. Doing so might create a (gasp!) uncomfortable classroom situation. Come on, people. Our job is to teach our children – to offer them context. This is not always a comfortable task – for them or us. In this case, we’re talking about our nation’s legacy of slavery, racism, judgment and hatred. The notion that high school kids aren’t ready for important subject matter is really an indictment of our own lack of creativity, if not indifference. And for those teachers who are (so unfortunately) intimidated by these ideas, there are myriad aides especially designed to teach this book and the controversies it elicits. Go ahead, type it in: “Twain Finn Teaching Controversy Lesson Plans.” A child can do it.

As parents and teachers, we do have to make some choices about material that is and isn’t appropriate to teach young people. No one’s saying that “Tropic of Cancer” or “Lolita” should be part of standard high-school curriculum. But these books are not “Huck Finn,” and regardless, if kids are reading them, we best should be ready to teach them. Tossing them under the rug and saying “see you in college” is simply irresponsible.

If we want our kids to grow up to be conscious adults, we have to teach consciousness in dynamic and intelligent ways. We can reopen the arguments around what Twain was trying to accomplish in his great work, why he chose the terms he did and his possible motivations (good or bad) behind their use. But I’m going to leave that to the thousands of teachers who have successfully taught the book and the millions of high school students who have read it, were taught it and learned great lessons about our culture and compassion from Twain’s masterpiece.

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