Top 40 Hero Quotes (2023 Update)

1. “Heroes are ordinary people who make themselves extraordinary.”

— Gerard Way

2. “The real hero is the man who fights even though he is scared.”

— George S. Patton Jr.

Also featured in: Real Quotes

3. “Live your life like you’re the hero in your movie.”

— Joe Rogan

4. “I think a hero is any person really intent on making this a better place for all people.”

— Maya Angelou

5. “One person can and does make a difference.”

— Albert Schweitzer

6. “The legacy of heroes is the memory of a great name and the inheritance of a great example.”

— Benjamin Disraeli

Also featured in: Quotes About Memories

7. “Be a hero. Always say, ‘I have no fear.’ Tell this to everyone – ‘Have no fear.’”

— Swami Vivekananda

8. “Heroes come and go, but legends are forever.”

— Kobe Bryant

9. “Every man is a hero of his own story.”

— Brandon Sanderson

Also featured in: Quotes About Stories

10. “Those who say that we’re in a time when there are no heroes, they just don’t know where to look.”

— Ronald Reagan

11. “I went from zero to my own hero.”

— Katy Perry

12. “Gold is tried by fire, brave men by adversity.”

— Seneca the Younger

Also featured in: Adversity Quotes

13. “Nobody is a villain in their own story. We’re all the heroes of our own stories.”

— George R.R. Martin

Also featured in: Quotes About Stories

14. “If we choose, we can live in a world of comforting illusion.”

— Noam Chomsky

15. “Live as a villain, die as a hero.”

— Banksy

16. “There is what I would call the hero journey, the night sea journey, the hero quest, where the individual is going to bring forth in his life something that was never beheld before.”

— Joseph Campbell

17. “One cannot always be a hero, but one can always be a man.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

18. “The absurd hero’s refusal to hope becomes his singular ability to live in the present with passion.”

— Albert Camus

Also featured in: Passion Quotes

19. “Not every flying hero has a cape.”

— Michael Jordan

20. “Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel. Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

21. “The blood of heroes is closer to the Lord than the ink of scholars and the prayers of the pious.”

— Julius Evola

22. “My heroes are and were my parents. I can’t see having anyone else as my heroes.”

— Michael Jordan

23. “One murder makes a villain. Millions a hero.”

— Charlie Chaplin

24. “Love is a hero’s journey, and the hero’s journey is a noble but difficult path.”

— Marianne Williamson

Also featured in: Love Is Quotes

25. “We live in a world in which we need to share responsibility. It’s easy to say “It’s not my child, not my community, not my world, not my problem.” Then there are those who see the need and respond. I consider those people my heroes.”

— Fred Rogers

Also featured in: Responsibility Quotes

26. “Don’t be a hero. Don’t have an ego.”

— Paul Tudor Jones

Also featured in: Ego Quotes

27. “In the face of pain there are no heroes.”

— George Orwell

28. “We’re all flawed heroes. Responsibility is power. Take responsibility for the consequences of your actions, and the world is yours. Everything is a choice.”

— Tom Hiddleston

Also featured in: Responsibility Quotes

29. “The hero of my tale, whom I love with all the power of my soul, whom I have tried to portray in all his beauty, who has been, is, and will be beautiful, is Truth.”

— Leo Tolstoy

30. “I’ve read a lot of books on the laws of attraction, and in my home I have a big book on Muhammad Ali, which I’ve read, because he is like a hero of mine, but other than that, no, I’m not a big reader.”

— Conor McGregor

Also featured in: Book Quotes

31. “If you look at all of the villains in the course of human history, they’ve all believed, delusionally, in the virtue of their actions – every villain is a hero in his own mind.”

— Tom Hiddleston

32. “As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.”

— Ernest Hemingway

33. “The average is the borderline that keeps mere men in their place. Those who step over the line are heroes by the very act. Go.”

— Henry Rollins

34. “We relish news of our heroes, forgetting that we are extraordinary to somebody too.”

— Helen Hayes

35. “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”

— Charles Dickens

36. “Steal five dollars and you’re a common thief. Steal thousands and you’re either the government or a hero.”

— Terry Pratchett

37. “The Byronic hero, incapable of love, or capable only of an impossible love, suffers endlessly. He is solitary, languid, his condition exhausts him. If he wants to feel alive, it must be in the terrible exaltation of a brief and destructive action.”

— Albert Camus

38. “Translators are the shadow heroes of literature, the often forgotten instruments that make it possible for different cultures to talk to one another, who have enabled us to understand that we all, from every part of the world, live in one world.”

— Paul Auster

39. “I’m just a man, not a hero. just a boy, who wants to sing this song.”

— Gerard Way

40. “You don’t raise heroes, you raise sons. And if you treat them like sons, they’ll turn out to be heroes, even if it’s just in your own eyes.”

— Wally Schirra