Daily Inspiration Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson is selling a distinctly American kind of bravery: less charging into cannon fire, more building a self sturdy enough to act again tomorrow. “A great part of courage” is a sly downgrade of the romantic myth that courage is pure spontaneity. He reframes it as something almost procedural - the nerve that comes from precedent, from having already crossed the mental border once and survived.

The line’s quiet subtext is that fear isn’t defeated by lofty ideals; it’s defeated by repetition. Courage, for Emerson, isn’t a rare substance some people possess and others lack. It’s a habit you can acquire the way you acquire strength: by doing the hard thing, then doing it again with slightly less drama. That’s classic Emersonian self-reliance, but stripped of its poster-ready swagger and grounded in a practical psychology.

Context matters: Emerson wrote in a 19th-century America intoxicated with reinvention - of the nation, of the self, of moral and social order. Transcendentalism often gets caricatured as airy spiritual optimism, yet this sentence is almost anti-mystical. It admits that the self is trained, not simply “awakened.” Experience becomes the engine of character.

There’s also a subtle ethical nudge here: if courage grows out of prior action, then waiting to “feel ready” is a trap. The first attempt is the most expensive, emotionally. After that, bravery becomes less a heroic pose than a memory you can stand on.