Source identified
“Fear not, therefore, to try the mountain-passes.”
The invitation encourages experience beyond familiar safety while following Muir’s argument that wilderness danger should not automatically prevent exploration.
Source note: The Mountains of California, immediately after Muir’s comparison of mountain hazards with the risks of home.
Source identified
“The better part of valour is discretion.”
Voice: Fictional character · Falstaff
Courage is balanced with judgment here: avoiding a needless danger can sometimes be wiser than performing bravery for appearance.
Source note: Act 5, Scene 4; Falstaff reframes survival as a form of judgment.
Source identified
“hope for the patience to win my freedom.”
Freedom is paired with patient hope rather than anxious rescue, suggesting that endurance and inner steadiness are part of the desired liberation.
Source note: Fruit-Gathering, poem LXXIX; Project Gutenberg #6522. This excerpt completes a prayer against anxious craving to be saved and retains that spiritual context.
Source identified
“These are the times that try men's souls.”
Crisis reveals commitment because principles become costly to maintain precisely when fear, fatigue, and uncertainty make retreat easier.
Source note: Opening of The American Crisis No. I; Paine addresses perseverance during a difficult stage of the American Revolution.
Source identified
“Nothing noble can be performed without danger.”
Avoiding every danger can also prevent worthy action; prudence needs to distinguish reckless exposure from risks that meaningful conduct sometimes requires.
Source note: Essays of Montaigne, Book I, Charles Cotton translation, in a discussion of distrust, security, and princely conduct.
Source identified
“Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things.”
James resists treating every possible intellectual mistake as catastrophic, because an excessive fear of error can itself prevent inquiry, experience and the possibility of gaining truth.
Source note: The Will to Believe, essay “The Will to Believe”; Project Gutenberg #26659. James is contrasting the risk of being mistaken with the cost of refusing every uncertain intellectual venture.