This courage will not be the opposite of despair. We shall often be faced with despair, as indeed every sensistive person has been during the last several decades in this country. Hence Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and Camus and Satre have proclaimed that courage is not the absence of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair.

— Rollo May, The Courage to Create, 1975

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear — not absence of fear.

— Mark (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) Twain, “Puddd’nhead Wilson’s New calander, Chp. 12”

So they take off after each other straight into an endless black prairie. The sun is just comin’ down and they can feel the night on their backs. What they don’t know is that each one of ’em is afraid, see. And then keep ridin’ like that straight into the night. Not knowing. And the one who’s chasin’ doesn’t know where the other one is taking him. And the one who’s being chased doesn’t know where he’s going.

— Sam Shepard, True West

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

— Henry David Thoreau, Walden, “Economy”