The Hero archetype represents the process of overcoming obstacles to achieve specific goals, like finding treasure or saving a princess. Let’s take a closer look at this archetype.
100 Inspirational Quotes for Heroes
We’ve collected the best quotes about heroes for you to read through.
This selection of quotations are based solely on my personal taste and are in no particular order. You are welcome to browse the entire collection and look for your own favourite quotes.
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Checkout this list of hero quotes:
1. Paulo Coelho
That is why embittered people find heroes and madmen a perennial source of fascination, for they have no fear of life or death. Both heroes and madmen are indifferent to danger and will forge ahead regardless of what other people say.
2. Shannon A. Thompson
Heroes don’t have the need to be known as heroes, they just do what heroes do because it is right and it must be done.
3. Joseph Campbell
A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.
4. Mitch Hedberg
My belt holds my pants up, but the belt loops hold my belt up. I don’t really know what’s happening down there. Who is the real hero?
5. Robert Baden-Powell
The Scoutmaster who is a hero to his boys holds a powerful lever to their development but at the same time brings a great responsibility on himself. They are quick enough to see the smallest characteristic about him, whether it be a virtue or a vice.
When I was a boy, I always saw myself as a hero in comic books and in movies. I grew up believing this dream.
7. William H McRaven
Petraeus is the finest general I have ever worked for; Holly Petraeus is a great American hero.
8. Christopher Reeve
A hero is someone who, in spite of weakness, doubt or not always knowing the answers, goes ahead and overcomes anyway.
9. Novalis
A hero is one who knows how to hang on one minute longer.
10. Bruce Willis
Too many children in foster care are falling through cracks. Be a hero, take the time learn about adoption today.
11. MaryJanice Davidson
I’m a sucker for the big, gruff, distant, emotionally closed-off hero who sloooowly warms up to the feisty, awesome, sweet heroine.
12. Ralph Waldo Emerson
A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer.
13. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every hero becomes a bore at last.
14. Steven Wright
My favorite book is anything by Kurt Vonnegut – he’s my literary hero. I got to meet him several times, which was a great thrill for me. I don’t really remember what we talked about.
15. Plato
A hero is born among a hundred, a wise man is found among a thousand, but an accomplished one might not be found even among a hundred thousand men.
16. Will Rogers
Being a hero is about the shortest-lived profession on earth.
17. Will Rogers
This thing of being a hero, about the main thing to it is to know when to die.
18. George Bernard Shaw
You cannot be a hero without being a coward.
19. Walt Whitman
And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero.
20. Bob Dylan
A hero is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with his freedom.
21. Bob Dylan
I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom.
22. Edmund Hillary
I have never regarded myself as a hero, but Tenzing undoubtedly was.
23. Robert Kennedy
What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr’s cause has ever been stilled by an assassin’s bullet. No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled or uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of the people.
24. Maria Montessori
Through machinery, man can exert tremendous powers almost as fantastic as if he were the hero of a fairy tale. Through machinery, man can travel with an ever increasing velocity; he can fly through the air and go beneath the surface of the ocean.
25. F Scott Fitzgerald
Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy.
26. Jordan Peterson
A properly balanced story provides an equal representation of the negative and positive attributes of, I could say the world, but it’s actually a being. ‘Harry Potter”s a good example. So Harry’s the hero, right. But he’s tainted with evil. There’s a dark and a light in every bit of that narrative. It’s well balanced.
27. Richard P. Feynman
When I was a young man, Dirac was my hero. He made a breakthrough, a new method of doing physics. He had the courage to simply guess at the form of an equation, the equation we now call the Dirac equation, and to try to interpret it afterwards.
28. Clint Eastwood
I grew up with J. Edgar Hoover. He was the G-man, a hero to everybody, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation was the big, feared organization. He was ahead of his time as far as building up forensic evidence and fingerprinting. But he took down a lot of innocent people, too.
29. G.K.Chesterton
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
30. Tom Brady
Who’s my hero? That’s a great question… Well, I think my dad is my hero, because he’s someone I look up to every day.
31. Norman Schwarzkopf
It doesn’t take a hero to order men into battle. It takes a hero to be one of those men who goes into battle.
32. Norman Schwarzkopf
It takes a hero to be one of those men who goes into battle.
33. Francois de La Rochefoucauld
Though nature be ever so generous, yet can she not make a hero alone. Fortune must contribute her part too; and till both concur, the work cannot be perfected.
34. Noam Chomsky
Fidel Castro, whatever people may think of him, is a hero in Latin America, primarily because he stood up to the United States.
35. Simon Sinek
I like stories of the classic hero, of good versus evil, the ones in which the good guys wear white and the bad guys wear black… and I love a good sword fight.
36. Tecumseh
When your time comes to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death, so that when their time comes they weep and pray for a little more time to live their lives over again in a different way. Sing your death song, and die like a hero going home.
37. W.H. Auden
No hero is mortal till he dies.
38. Johan Cruyff
One trophy is good, but two are better. That way, when a hero wears his medals on his chest, at least his steps are level as he walks by.
39. Henry Rollins
If the Constitution was a movie, the Preamble would be the trailer, the First Amendment the establishing shot, the 13th the crowd pleaser and the 14th the ultimate hero scene.
40. Cate Blanchett
I always dressed as a man when I was at school. I loved wearing a tie and a shirt, and I was always wearing suits. Annie Lennox was my hero. I was always playing men in high school.
41. Arnold Schwarzenegger
Teddy Roosevelt is still a hero among environmentalists for his conservationist policies.
42. Salma Hayek
‘Frida’ was a joy; this was delicious, I couldn’t wait every day to get to the set, although I was exhausted, and have my leg get cut off or lose the baby or be in her shoes and get to play my hero and be able to go places emotionally. You know, we live for parts like this. This is a dream for an actor.
43. Nathaniel Hawthorne
A hero cannot be a hero unless in a heroic world.
44. David Mamet
The basis of drama is… the struggle of the hero towards a specific goal at the end of which he realises that what kept him from it was, in the lesser drama, civilisation and, in the great drama, the discovery of something that he did not set out to discover but which can be seen retrospectively as inevitable.
45. Steven Spielberg
For one thing, I don’t think that anybody in any war thinks of themselves as a hero.
46. Steven Spielberg
I don’t think that anybody in any war thinks of themselves as a hero. The minute anybody presumes that they are heroes, they get their boots taken away from them and buried in the sand.
47. Michael Phelps
I learned how fast you can go from being an international hero to being a reference in a joke on a late night talk show.
48. Alfred Hitchcock
Luck is everything… My good luck in life was to be a really frightened person. I’m fortunate to be a coward, to have a low threshold of fear, because a hero couldn’t make a good suspense film.
49. Morgan Freeman
Dr. Martin Luther King is not a black hero. He is an American hero.
50. Marilyn Manson
In any story, the villain is the catalyst. The hero’s not a person who will bend the rules or show the cracks in his armor. He’s one-dimensional intentionally, but the villain is the person who owns up to what he is and stands by it.
51. Marilyn Manson
The hero is never the star of the story.
52. David Lee Roth
You want a hero in the music world? James Brown. He brought a feeling to music without really using words. He’s just famous for his sound.
53. Spike Milligan
I’m a hero with coward’s legs.
54. May Sarton
One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.
55. Timothy Leary
At the peak of his scientific triumphs, Newton became a ‘head,’ a student of the inner spiritual world – or in modern terms, a neurologician. Modern physicists do not dwell on this dramatic life-change in their hero.
56. Martha Stewart
I am a hero worshiper. I love the number one tennis player. I love the number one baseball player. I want to see those records broken.
57. Taika Waititi
You realise that there’s nothing more endearing than people who are desperately trying to be liked or trying to be the hero, you know? Who also probably just need a hug or want to impress their dad?
58. Buzz Aldrin
All the Chinese have to do is fly around the Moon and back, and they’ll appear to have won the return to the Moon with humans. They could put one person on the surface of the Moon for one day and he’d be a national hero.
59. Magic Johnson
My dad was my hero. And I got my personality from my mother.
60. Robin S Sharma
Most of us are cut from the same cloth. We all can be a hero if we choose. And it just isn’t that hard.
61. John Greenleaf Whittier
One brave deed makes no hero.
62. Dave Grohl
Neil Young is my hero, and such a great example. You know what that guy has been doing for the past 40 years? Making music. That’s what that guy does. Sometimes you pay attention, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes he hands it to you, sometimes he keeps it to himself. He’s a good man with a beautiful family and wonderful life.
63. Simone Weil
To be a hero or a heroine, one must give an order to oneself.
64. Alan Alda
Marie Curie is my hero. Few people have accomplished something so rare – changing science. And as hard as that is, she had to do it against the tide of the culture at the time – the prejudice against her as a foreigner, because she was born in Poland and worked in France. And the prejudice against her as a woman.
65. Tom Stoppard
Lou Reed was a hero because he was an anti-hero.
66. Corazon Aquino
It wasn’t until we got over the self pity that we were able to accept suffering as apart of our life with Christ. A man or woman reaches this plane only when he or she ceases to be the hero.
67. Robert Downey Jr
Do I want to be a hero to my son? No. I would like to be a very real human being. That’s hard enough.
68. Robert Downey Jr
I think that we all do heroic things, but hero is not a noun, it’s a verb.
69. Martin Scorsese
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.
70. Henry Miller
The ordinary man is involved in action, the hero acts. An immense difference.
71. Quentin Tarantino
I liked the idea of creating a new pop-culture, folkloric hero character that I created with ‘Django’ that I think’s gonna last for a long time. And I think as the generations go on and everything, you know, my hope is it can be a rite of passage for black fathers and their sons. Like, when are they old enough to watch ‘Django Unchained’?
72. Washington Irving
The idol of today pushes the hero of yesterday out of our recollection; and will, in turn, be supplanted by his successor of tomorrow.
73. Tom Hanks
A hero is somebody who voluntarily walks into the unknown.
74. Tom Hanks
I have gone through so many examinations of what a hero is, between the World War II stuff and the astronaut stuff.
75. Tom Hanks
Some people are cowards… I think by and large a third of people are villains, a third are cowards, and a third are heroes. Now, a villain and a coward can choose to be a hero, but they’ve got to make that choice.
76. Christopher Reeve
A hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles.
77. Christopher Reeve
What makes Superman a hero is not that he has power, but that he has the wisdom and the maturity to use the power wisely. From an acting point of view, that’s how I approached the part.
78. Umberto Eco
The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.
79. Mick Rowe
The one thing that TV is bad at doing is preaching. There are two extremes, you either turn the people into a punchline or turn them into hero, and both of those things suck, because most people are neither in real life.
80. Mick Rowe
I come from a blue-collar family, but my personal life isn’t. I didn’t get the gene that my grandfather had in spades. He was a local hero. Built the church that I went to. Built the house I grew up in. Steamfitter, pipefitter, electrician, mechanic and plumber. I wanted to do those things. But it just didn’t come easy.
81. Baltasar Gracian
Aspire rather to be a hero than merely appear one.
82. Adam Sandler
This character feels so much like my brother. He has two children. He has a wife. He works with me. He chooses to stay in New Hampshire because he wants his kids to grow up in the school they started with. He doesn’t want them to lose friends. He is his family’s hero.
83. Greg Boyle
Don’t forget, you are the hero of your own story.
84. Jack Ma
I got my story, my dream, from America. The hero I had is Forrest Gump… I like that guy. I’ve been watching that movie about 10 times. Every time I get frustrated, I watch the movie. I watched the movie before I came here again to New York. I watched the movie again telling me that no matter whatever changed, you are you.
85. Charles Bronson
When you see weakness in a hero, you are doing something to his identity. You take something away from the kids, the next generation; you steal away giving them anything to look up to.
86. Ian Fleming
I don’t regard James Bond precisely as a hero, but at least he does get on and do his duty, in an extremely corny way.
87. John Henry Newman
Calculation never made a hero.
88. John Henry Newman
In this world no one rules by love; if you are but amiable, you are no hero; to be powerful, you must be strong, and to have dominion you must have a genius for organizing.
89. Gerard Way
‘Watchmen’ is a politically charged story, and it explores exactly what a hero is, how the world would treat them and how they would react. It was the first time I read a superhero story that explored that situation. These are very real people with very real problems.
90. Steve Wozniak
Another hero was Tom Swift, in the books. What he stood for, the freedom, the scientific knowledge and being and engineer gave him the ability to invent solutions to problems. He’s always been a hero to me. I buy old Tom Swift books now and read them to my own children.
91. Fred Rogers
When I was very young, most of my childhood heroes wore capes, flew through the air, or picked up buildings with one arm. They were spectacular and got a lot of attention. But as I grew, my heroes changed, so that now I can honestly say that anyone who does anything to help a child is a hero to me.
92. India Arie
I loved her music and the fact that she was a classically trained pianist and that her voice was so unique, but what made Nina Simone my hero is that I had never seen anyone in the public eye who looked anything like me at all, ever.
93. Dusty Rhodes
When I became ‘The American Dream,’ they needed a hero down here. I had no money – I couldn’t buy a car without being tied under – but I had to have a Cadillac with blue stars on the hood no matter what it cost because just driving in it will set how they look at me and perceive this guy; they’ll know.
94. Conrad Anker
Yes, I was inspired by Jack London and still love reading his books. Ernie Banks is another hero because I lived in Chicago for two years as a kid, and I loved that he was the Cubs’ loyal underdog and one of the first African-Americans to make that breakthrough.
95. Elizabeth Barrett Browning
And each man stands with his face in the light. Of his own drawn sword, ready to do what a hero can.
96. Edward Snowden
I don’t see myself as a hero because what I’m doing is self-interested: I don’t want to live in a world where there’s no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity.
97. Edward Snowden
If I had to describe myself, I wouldn’t use words like ‘hero.’ I wouldn’t use ‘patriot,’ and I wouldn’t use ‘traitor.’ I’d say I’m an American and I’m a citizen, just like everyone else.
98. Bob Riley
Hard times don’t create heroes. It is during the hard times when the ‘hero’ within us is revealed.
99. Doris Lessing
What is a hero without love for mankind.
100. George Foreman
A hero is someone right who doesn’t change.
