Passages about heroism and honour

Tell me, O Muse, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide after he had sacked the famous town of Troy.

I would rather be a paid servant in a poor man's house and be above ground than king of kings among the dead.

I sing of arms and of the man who first came, a fugitive by fate, from the coasts of Troy to Italy and the Lavinian shores.

Can there be such anger in the minds of the gods?

Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians.

As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity. The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timber burgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning.

For it is not histories that I am writing, but lives.

A small thing, a phrase or a joke, often shows character better than battles with thousands of dead and the greatest sieges.

In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind, there lived not long since one of those gentlemen that keep a lance in the lance-rack, an old buckler, a lean hack, and a greyhound for coursing.

Sancho points out that the giants are windmills, and Quixote answers that the enchanter Freston turned them into windmills to rob him of the glory of the victory.

O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, / Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse / Without all hope of day!

Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves.

The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind, for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see.

Of late years wealth has made us greedy, and self-indulgence has brought us to the point where we can endure neither our vices nor their cure.

I know you all, and will awhile uphold the unyoked humour of your idleness.

What is honour? A word. What is in that word honour? What is that honour? Air. A trim reckoning. Who hath it? He that died o' Wednesday.

He who saw the Deep, the country's foundation, who knew the proper ways, was wise in all matters.

My friend, whom I loved so dear, who with me went through every danger, Enkidu, whom I loved so dear, who with me went through every danger: the doom of mortals overtook him.

I know that by nature you are not the sort to say such things or to devise mischief. But the prize of victory is sweet to win, so bring yourself to do it, and we shall be shown to be just another time.

Everything becomes disgust when a man abandons his own nature and does what does not befit him.

Roland is brave and Oliver is wise, and both are men of amazing courage.

Companion Roland, sound your horn of ivory. Charles will hear it and the army will turn back. Roland answers: God forbid that my kinsmen should be blamed for me, or that sweet France should fall into disgrace.

A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine, / Ycladd in mightie armes and silver shielde, / Wherein old dints of deepe woundes did remaine, / The cruell markes of many a bloody fielde.

Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas, / Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please.

The barge she sat in, like a burnish'd throne, / Burn'd on the water: the poop was beaten gold; / Purple the sails, and so perfumed that / The winds were love-sick with them.

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety: other women cloy / The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry / Where most she satisfies.

If I go through the fire I shall go through it to their hearts for ever and ever. And so, God be with me!

You promised me my life; but you lied. You think that life is nothing but not being stone dead. It is not the bread and water I fear: I can live on bread. But to shut me from the light of the sky and the sight of the fields and flowers.

He was sixteen. For six years now he had been a man's hunter. For six years now he had heard the best of all talking.

It was of the men, not white nor black nor red, but men, hunters, with the will and hardihood to endure and the humility and skill to survive.

So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness. We have heard of those princes' heroic campaigns.

Often, for undaunted courage, fate spares the man it has not already marked.

Conaire is warned from the start that he must never let two of his foster-brothers commit robbery in his kingdom without punishment, and when circumstance eventually forces his hand against them, the exile he imposes plants the seed of the very vengeance that returns to destroy him.

Travelling toward the hostel of Dá Derga, Conaire finds himself compelled by a sequence of small circumstances, three red horsemen on the road, a hunting party, to break one geis after another, each transgression individually explicable and yet cumulatively fatal.

Siegfried, killer of a dragon and owner of the Nibelung treasure, comes to Worms to win Kriemhild, sister of the Burgundian king Gunther, and helps Gunther by trickery to win the Icelandic queen Brünhild, a deception that will eventually prove fatal.

A quarrel between the two queens exposes the deceit by which Brünhild was won, and Gunther's vassal Hagen murders Siegfried and sinks the treasure in the Rhine, converting Kriemhild's husband's death and the lost treasure into a permanent grievance.

The Völuspá presents a seeress recounting the creation of the world and foretelling its destruction at Ragnarök within a single continuous vision, giving Norse mythology a comprehensive cosmic frame running from absolute beginning through prophesied end.

The Hávamál collects sayings attributed to Odin, blending everyday worldly wisdom about hospitality, friendship and caution directly alongside the god's own mythic self-sacrifice, refusing any clean separation between practical advice and cosmic religious knowledge.

Sigmund draws the sword that Odin thrust into the tree in Volsung's hall, which no other man could move, and the saga follows the sword through its breaking and reforging into the hand of his son Sigurd.

Sigurd kills the dragon Fafnir, wins its cursed gold, tastes its blood and understands the birds who warn him of Regin's treachery, and rides to wake the valkyrie Brynhild from her enchanted sleep.

Njal, a wise lawyer, and Gunnar of Hlidarendi, a formidable warrior, maintain a close friendship even as their wives Bergthora and Hallgerd feud with each other, a chain of killings and settlements running alongside the two men's own steady loyalty.

Gunnar is outlawed and killed at his home after refusing to leave Iceland as the law required, his attachment to his own land overriding clear knowledge of the danger this refusal would bring upon him.

At Arthur's New Year feast a huge green knight offers to take a blow from an axe if the striker will accept one in return a year later, Gawain beheads him, and the knight picks up his head and rides off, establishing the poem's central binding wager.

At a castle on the way, a lord proposes to exchange each day's winnings while the lady of the house tries to seduce him, and Gawain accepts a green girdle said to protect him and hides it, a single significant lapse within otherwise scrupulous honor.

Froissart describes the English longbowmen at Crécy cutting down wave after wave of mounted French knights, a battle that shattered French confidence in the traditional cavalry charge and marked, though Froissart does not frame it this way explicitly, a genuine turning point in how European warfare would be conducted.

Froissart recounts how six leading burghers of Calais, dressed in sackcloth with ropes around their necks, offered their own lives to Edward III in exchange for sparing their starved, besieged city, a gesture of chivalric self-sacrifice Froissart presents as the war's most morally exemplary single episode.

Arthur draws the sword from the stone, proving his right to the throne, and subsequently founds the Round Table, establishing the fellowship of knights whose adventures, alliances and eventual internal betrayals will structure the entire remainder of the narrative.

Galahad alone achieves the quest of the Holy Grail, his exceptional purity succeeding where Lancelot's otherwise considerable chivalric excellence cannot, a pointed distinction between worldly knightly virtue and the specifically spiritual worthiness the Grail quest actually requires.

The king sits in Dunfermline town drinking his blood-red wine, and asks where he might find a good sailor to sail his ship, and an old knight names Sir Patrick Spens, who receives the king's letter and laughs once, then weeps, knowing the voyage the season demands will drown him.

Two ravens sit discussing, in a tone of complete and chilling indifference, where they shall dine, and settle on a newly slain knight lying behind an old turf wall, known to no one but his hawk, his hound and his lady, who has already taken another mate.

All men of whatsoever quality they be, who have done anything of merit, or which really has a semblance of merit, if so be they are men of truth and good repute, should write the tale of their life with their own hand.

I began to throw in the pewter plates, plates and bowls, to the number of some two hundred, all at once, into the channels, feeding the furnace at the same time with wood, until the fury of the fire caused the bronze to flow.

The account describes the passage through the Strait of Magellan and the execution of Thomas Doughty at Port St Julian, a fellow Englishman Drake condemned for alleged mutiny and witchcraft, exposing command's brutal underside during an otherwise celebrated voyage.

The plunder of Spanish ships and towns along the Pacific coast of the Americas, and the landing in what Drake named Nova Albion in California, together stage English privateering violence and territorial ambition against Spanish colonial power in the Pacific.

Raleigh describes the capture of the Spanish governor at Trinidad and the ascent of the Orinoco river in open boats, in search of El Dorado, the golden city of Manoa, a considerable expedition undertaken specifically to restore his standing with Elizabeth I.

Raleigh describes the tribes he met and enlisted as English allies against Spain, and the wealth he was told of but never saw, combining calculated imperial diplomatic strategy with an unusually honest admission about treasure he could not actually confirm.

A Chorus asks the audience to imagine the armies the stage cannot hold, making theatrical limitation itself an explicit theme, Shakespeare drawing attention to performance's own constructed nature rather than concealing it behind conventional dramatic illusion.

Henry exposes three traitors, takes Harfleur, hangs his old companion Bardolph for looting, and walks in disguise among his soldiers the night before Agincourt, demonstrating the reformed prince's complete transformation into disciplined wartime king.

In the seventh year of the Trojan War, the Trojan prince Troilus loves Cressida, whose father has defected to the Greeks, and her uncle Pandarus brings them together, staging romance within a war already grinding well past its initial heroic excitement.

The next morning Cressida is traded to the Greek camp for a prisoner, and Troilus watches from hiding as she gives herself to the Greek Diomedes, staging betrayal witnessed rather than merely reported and forcing the audience to share his devastating position.

Caius Martius, a Roman patrician and unmatched soldier, wins the surname Coriolanus by taking the Volscian city of Corioli almost single-handed, put forward for consul but unable to flatter the common people whose votes he needs.

The tribunes provoke him into contempt that gets him banished, and he joins his old enemy Aufidius and leads the Volscians against Rome, personal grievance against the city that rejected him overriding whatever patriotic loyalty his service there might command.

The account describes the attack on Nombre de Dios, where Drake was wounded, an early and costly raid on Spanish colonial territory that nonetheless established the pattern of daring assault on Spain's American possessions Drake would pursue throughout his career.

Drake allies with the Cimaroons, escaped African slaves who guided him across the isthmus of Panama, a genuine partnership against shared Spanish colonial power that complicates any simple reading of this voyage as purely English enterprise.

Rodrigue asks himself whether he should avenge his father and lose Chimène, or keep Chimène and live with a father's dishonor, and concludes that a single moment's hesitation would itself be a second, unforgivable dishonor added to the first.

Chimène tells the king that she demands Rodrigue's death not because her love for him has died, but precisely because it has not, and that only justice, not diminished feeling, drives her to ask for his execution.

Polyeucte tells Néarque, who urges caution, that he can no longer bear to see idols worshipped as gods, and that he will overturn them at the very altar, whatever the cost to himself, since faith once truly received cannot be practiced only in secret.

Pauline pleads before Félix, her own father, that whatever crime Polyeucte has committed against the state's gods, he remains her husband and an innocent man by every standard that actually matters, and that condemning him would be an injustice dressed as law.

After his baptism, Jesus is led into the desert, where Satan, uncertain who he is, tempts him over forty days with bread, wealth, the kingdoms of the world, the glory of Rome and the learning of Athens, each temptation testing a different possible answer to who Jesus actually is.

Jesus refuses each of Satan's temptations in turn with quiet argument rather than any display of miraculous power, choosing verbal refusal and patient reasoning as his mode of resistance throughout the extended wilderness confrontation.

Ventidius, Antony's loyal general, argues directly and repeatedly that Cleopatra has cost Antony everything a Roman should value, honor, command, the world itself, and that true friendship requires speaking this hard truth rather than flattering a friend toward his own ruin.

Octavia arrives in Alexandria with the couple's children, appealing to Antony's sense of duty as husband and father rather than to political ambition alone, and for a time genuinely seems to be winning him back to Rome before Cleopatra's own intervention reverses his course.

Major von Tellheim, discharged from military service and under suspicion of dishonesty despite his actual innocence, has broken off his engagement to Minna von Barnhelm specifically because he refuses to bring a ruined name into marriage, treating his compromised reputation as a genuine barrier rather than something love alone could overcome.

Minna arrives in Berlin searching for Tellheim, and when direct argument fails to move him from his stubborn position, she tricks him by pretending she too has been disinherited, restoring symmetry to their circumstances so that his own sense of honor now obliges him to marry her rather than continuing to refuse.

William of Orange warns Egmont repeatedly that the Duke of Alba's arrival in Brussels signals real, immediate danger, and urges him to flee while he still can, but Egmont, trusting in his own popularity and his personal standing with the king, dismisses the warning and remains.

Klärchen, Egmont's lover, attempts to rouse the citizens of Brussels to rise in his defense once he has been arrested, and when the crowd fails to act, overwhelmed by fear of Alba's forces, she despairs entirely and takes poison rather than continue living without him.

Under the tyranny of the Habsburg governor Gessler, the men of three forest cantons swear an oath of resistance on the Rütli meadow, giving collective political rebellion a specific founding ritual moment distinct from any individual act of defiance.

The hunter Tell, who has kept apart from politics, refuses to bow to Gessler's hat on a pole, is forced to shoot an apple from his son's head, staging tyranny's cruelty in unforgettably concrete and personal form beyond abstract political grievance.

Sir Walter Scott, in speaking of him, we are to speak chiefly of the literary man, though it was not chiefly as a literary man that he wished to be regarded, or perhaps was regarded, either by himself or by the world.

The Waverley Novels, without one true delineation of human passion or human character, have taught all men this, at least, that the bygone ages of the world were actually filled by living men, not by protocols, state-papers, controversies and abstractions of men.

There is a vice called Cruelty, and this Sin of thine is crueler than any name Vice ever wore.

I am he that stabbed his friend, and sister's lover, ignorant of both, in the mere darkness of a jealous fit.

The elegy In Memoriam A. H. H. mourns the death of Tennyson's friend Arthur Hallam across many short sections written over years, moving slowly from despair toward a trust that has absorbed doubt rather than dismissed it.

The dramatic monologues Ulysses and Tithonus give voice to an aged king who cannot rest from travel and a lover granted immortality without youth, opposed longings for more life and for release.

Emerson argues that great men exist to be used, not worshipped, and that the real value of studying them lies in discovering that the specific power each one demonstrates at unusual scale is actually latent, in smaller measure, in every person who studies them.

Emerson praises Montaigne for an honesty so complete it refuses even the comfort of settled philosophical conclusion, presenting genuine, sustained skepticism not as a failure of nerve but as itself a rare and difficult form of intellectual courage.

The narrator, walking home through a ploughed field, finds a thistle crushed by the plough but still standing, and remembers a story from the Caucasus long ago, of a man who would not surrender.

Hadji Murat, a famous Avar commander, quarrels with the imam Shamil and defects to the Russians, hoping they will help him rescue his family, whom Shamil holds hostage; the Russians treat him as a curiosity and a bargaining chip.

Macomber runs from a wounded lion in front of his wife Margot and their professional hunter Robert Wilson, a public act of cowardice Margot punishes that same night by openly leaving her husband's tent to spend the night with Wilson while Macomber lies awake, powerless to object.

Hunting buffalo the following day, Macomber discovers that his fear has entirely vanished, and feels, for what the story explicitly calls the first time in his life, genuinely happy, a transformation Hemingway ties directly to Macomber finally meeting physical danger without flinching.