"Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others"
About this Quote
Stevenson’s line is a Victorian-era piece of emotional stagecraft: not “be fearless,” but curate what you broadcast. It’s advice for living in public, where moods are contagious and vulnerability can become a kind of social weather. “Keep your fears to yourself” isn’t a macho dismissal of anxiety so much as a warning about how easily fear turns performative - how quickly it recruits an audience, asks for reassurance, and quietly hands your agency to whoever comforts you. Fear is treated as private data: real, human, but not automatically communal property.
The second clause flips the ethic from self-management to community building. Courage, in Stevenson’s formulation, is meant to be shared the way light is shared: not by announcing your bravery, but by making it usable to someone else. The subtext is slyly anti-romantic. He’s not selling solitary heroism; he’s selling morale. Courage is a public good, a renewable resource that multiplies when modeled, narrated, or lent.
Context matters: Stevenson wrote in an age obsessed with respectability, self-command, and the stiff upper lip, yet his own life was marked by illness, restlessness, and risk. That tension gives the line its bite. It’s less a sermon than a survival tactic from someone who knew dread intimately: fear will visit, often without permission. The choice is what you do with it - whether you let it spread, or whether you translate it into steadiness that helps the room hold together.
The second clause flips the ethic from self-management to community building. Courage, in Stevenson’s formulation, is meant to be shared the way light is shared: not by announcing your bravery, but by making it usable to someone else. The subtext is slyly anti-romantic. He’s not selling solitary heroism; he’s selling morale. Courage is a public good, a renewable resource that multiplies when modeled, narrated, or lent.
Context matters: Stevenson wrote in an age obsessed with respectability, self-command, and the stiff upper lip, yet his own life was marked by illness, restlessness, and risk. That tension gives the line its bite. It’s less a sermon than a survival tactic from someone who knew dread intimately: fear will visit, often without permission. The choice is what you do with it - whether you let it spread, or whether you translate it into steadiness that helps the room hold together.
Quote Details
| Topic | Motivational |
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