It takes courage, or foolhardiness, to take risks in life. Not taking any risks often means no success at all. What have some wise thinkers said about risk?
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You can’t get there by bus, only by hard work and risk and by not quite knowing what you’re doing. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover will be yourself.
I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.
If we listened to our intellect, we’d never have a love affair. We’d never have a friendship. We’d never go into business, because we’d be too cynical. Well, that’s nonsense. You’ve got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.
Investors should start with a view of skepticism. They should become intellectual investors rather than emotional investors. They should be careful, and they should be skeptical.
Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, reveling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community.
You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don’t try.
The price of doing the same old thing is far higher than the price of change.
I’ve found that luck is quite predictable. If you want more luck, take more chances. Be more active. Show up more often.
The important thing is this: To be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.
Either you decide to stay in the shallow end of the pool or you go out in the ocean.
Don’t be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated. You can’t cross a chasm in two small jumps.
Everything worth doing in the world is a desperate gamble, a game of chance, where nothing is certain.
What is love? Is it not a wild and sublime speculation that can end in ecstasy or despair?
What is courage? Is it not a hazardous risk of fortune that can end in victory or defeat?
What is adventure? Is it not a blind leap in the dark that can end in joy or disaster?
The only person who never makes mistakes is the person who never does anything.
The great affair, the love affair with life,
is to live as variously as possible,
to groom one’s curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred,
climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day.
Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat and unyielding,
and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours,
life will seem to have none of its magnificent geography, only a length.
It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery,
but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.
Shake my future push me past my complacency
my taken-for-granted my comfort zone
shake my future let me source the unimagined
be released from the sentence of the inevitable
take control, empower myself
past the dour predictions of the present
and change myself …
There is no security on this earth. Only opportunity.
It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.
Do one thing every day that scares you.
Bite off more than you can chew, then chew it.
Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties.
Sometimes it seem like to tell the truth today is to run the risk of being killed. But if I fall, I’ll fall five feet four inches forward in the fight for freedom. I’m not backing off.
Progress always involves risks. You can’t steal second base and keep your foot on first.
To save all we must risk all.
An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
If you risk nothing, then you risk everything.
A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent in doing nothing.
Don’t be afraid to go out on a limb. That’s where the fruit is.
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.
If a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs.
Buy the ticket, take the ride.
Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart, for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.
Playful arising is authorized by both risk and trust in the process and in oneself. To be truly playful and improvisational one must not look for results.
The only real stumbling block is fear of failure. In cooking you’ve got to have a ‘What the hell?’ attitude.
Whenever I prepare for a journey I prepare as though for death. Should I never return, all is in order.
With courage you will dare to take risks, have the strength to be compassionate, and the wisdom to be humble. Courage is the foundation of integrity.
You won’t skid if you stay in a rut.
Those who try to do something and fail are infinitely better than those who try nothing and succeed.
I’m not afraid of storms, for I’m learning how to sail my ship.
There can be no vulnerability without risk; there can be no community without vulnerability; there can be no peace, and ultimately no life, without community.
It is easy to follow, but it is uninteresting to do easy things. We find out about ourselves only when we take risks, when we challenge and question.
It’s not so much that we’re afraid of change or so in love with the old ways, but it’s that place in between that we fear . . . . It’s like being between trapezes. It’s Linus when his blanket is in the dryer. There’s nothing to hold on to.
The person who has had a bull by the tail once has learned 60 or 70 times as much as a person who hasn’t.
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
Loyalty to a petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.
To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it’s based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility.
Your heart is beating, isn’t it?
You’re not in chains, are you?
There is nothing more pathetic than caution when headlong might save a life,
even, possibly, your own.
To fly, we have to have resistance.
Get messy. Play in the dirt. Take a few falls, let them happen. Cuts and bruises, scrapes and scars are good for the soul. You bleed, you heal, you rise.
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