Journey's End Heroism Quotes

The poetry of heroism holds an irresistible appeal for people who aren’t involved in a war, especially when they’re making piles of money out of one.

And when the weariness comes and the nights are sleepless, we will tell each other stories of heroism and hope. We will feed on the memories of better times to fill our cold, empty bellies. We will strive to maintain the fiction of the journey without end, even as we see, in the distance, our final destination.

The poetry of heroism holds an irresistible appeal for people who aren’t involved in a war, especially when they’re making piles of money out of one. It’s only natural.

At length Lincoln climbed onto the end platform of a train composed just for this first leg of his journey, a small but cheery “Special” with a locomotive and wood-filled tender, baggage car, and a single bright-yellow passenger car. The locomotive was a tried-and-true 4-4-0—four unpowered small wheels on a guide “bogie” up front, four giant fifty-four-inch-diameter drive wheels under the cab and body—built by the Hinkley Locomotive Works of Boston, and, per custom, given a name: “L. M.Wiley.” Whether Lincoln knew it at the time or not, the engine’s namesake, Leroy M. Wiley, sixty-six, a wealthy director of the Great Western Railroad, was a slaveholder from Alabama with plantations in Eufaula and Macon County. He would soon be declared an “alien enemy.

Preparatory men. I welcome all signs that a more manly, a warlike, age is about to begin, an age which, above all, will give honor to valor once again. For this age shall prepare the way for one yet higher, and it shall gather the strength which this higher age will need one day - this age which is to carry heroism into the pursuit of knowledge and wage wars for the sake of thoughts and their consequences. To this end we now need many preparatory valorous men who cannot leap into being out of nothing - any more than out of the sand and slime of our present civilisation and metropolitanism: men who are bent on seeking for that aspect in all things which must be overcome; men characterised by cheerfulness, patience, unpretentiousness, and contempt for all great vanities, as well as by magnanimity in victory and forbearance regarding the small vanities of the vanquished; men possessed of keen and free judgement concerning all victors and the share of chance in every victory and every fame; men who have their own festivals, their own weekdays, their own periods of mourning, who are accustomed to command with assurance and are no less ready to obey when necessary, in both cases equally proud and serving their own cause; men who are in greater danger, more fruitful, and happier! For, believe me, the secret of the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously! Build your cities under Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors, as long as you cannot be rulers and owners, you lovers of knowledge! Soon the age will be past when you could be satisfied to live like shy deer, hidden in the woods! At long last the pursuit of knowledge will reach out for its due: it will want to rule and own, and you with it!