These audacity quotes will inspire you. Audacity is a willingness to take bold risks or rude or disrespectful behavior; impudence.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging audacity quotes, audacity sayings, and audacity proverbs.
Famous Audacity Quotes
- “Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.” ~ John Dewey
- “I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
- “Success is the child of audacity.” ~ Benjamin Disraeli
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“The difference between a vision and a daydream is the audacity to act.” ~ Steven Furtick
- “Mistakes you commit through audacity are easily corrected with more audacity.” ~ Paulo Coelho
- “In every artist, there is a touch of audacity without which no talent is conceivable.” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- “The first quality that is needed is audacity.” ~ Winston Churchill
- “If you are unsure of a course of action, do not attempt it. Your doubts and hesitations will infect your execution. Timidity is dangerous: Better to enter with boldness. Any mistakes you commit through audacity are easily corrected with more audacity. Everyone admires the bold; no one honors the timid.” ~ Robert Greene
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“With audacity, one can undertake anything, but not do everything.” ~ Napoleon Bonaparte
- “Hope — Hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope! In the end, that is God’s greatest gift to us…A belief in things not seen. A belief that there are better days ahead.” ~ Barack Obama , Audacity quotes of hope
- “If the leader is filled with high ambition and if he pursues his aims with audacity and strength of will, he will reach them in spite of all obstacles.” ~ Carl von Clausewitz
- “Audacity, more audacity, always audacity.” ~ Georges Danton
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“Audacity augments courage; hesitation, fear.” ~ Publilius Syrus
- “Those who directed the state in the time of Solon and Cleisthenes did not establish a polity which … trained the citizens in such fashion that they looked upon insolence as democracy, lawlessness as liberty, impudence of speech as equality, and license to do what they pleased as happiness, but rather a polity which detested and punished such men and by so doing made all the citizens better and wiser.” ~ Isocrates
- “Fear created gods; audacity created kings.” ~ Prosper Jolyot de Crebillon
- “The great characteristic of men of active genius is a sublime self-confidence, springing not from self-conceit, but from an intense identification of the man with his object, which lifts him altogether above the fear of danger and death, which gives to his enterprise a character of insanity to the common eye, and which communicates an almost superhuman audacity to his will.” ~ Edwin Percy Whipple
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“Never forget that no military leader has ever become great without audacity.” ~ Carl von Clausewitz
- “The method of the enterprising is to plan with audacity and execute with vigor.” ~ Christian Nestell Bovee
- “There’s a fine line between audacity and idiocy.” ~ Jim Butcher
- “Given the same amount of intelligence, timidity will do a thousand times more damage than audacity” ~ Carl von Clausewitz
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“Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.” ~ Jean Cocteau
- “I still believe that one-day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive goodwill will proclaim the rule of the land.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr. , Audacity quotes war
- “In the wake of 9/11, my meetings with Arab and Pakistani Americans, for example, have a more urgent quality, for the stories of detentions and FBI questioning and hard stares from neighbors have shaken their sense of security and belonging. They have been reminded that the history of immigration in this country has a dark underbelly; they need specific reassurances that their citizenship really means something, that America has learned the right lessons from the Japanese internments during World War II, and that I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.” ~ Barack Obama
- “Fear made the gods; audacity has made kings.
[Fr., La crainte fit les dieux; l’audace a fait les rois.]” ~ Prosper Jolyot de Crebillon -
“Such is the audacity of man, that he hath learned to counterfeit Nature, yea, and is so bold as to challenge her in her work.” ~ Pliny the Elder
- “Timidity betrays want of powers, and audacity a want of skill. There are, indeed, two things, knowledge and opinion, of which the one makes its possessor really to know, the other to be ignorant.” ~ Hippocrates
- “Obama had the audacity to say, ‘I have unequivocally prohibited the use of torture by the United States.’ Ladies and gentlemen, torture in the United States has always been illegal.” ~ Rush Limbaugh
- “The Hollies, after I left in 1968, had the audacity, the gall, to have three number one records after I left. Thanks a lot, guys.” ~ Graham Nash
- “To revenge reasonable incredulity by refusing evidence is a degree of insolence with which the world is not yet acquainted; and stubborn audacity is the last refuge of guilt.” ~ Samuel Johnson
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“There are few performers who would have had the audacity to even bring up the fact that they had been poorly reviewed.” ~ Sandra Bernhard
- “These people have elevated audacity to symphonic and operatic levels. The Florida Supreme Court relied on new law to resolve the election dispute down there.” ~ Vincent Bugliosi
- “I received your letter of June 10th. I have never talked to a Jesuit priest in my life and I am astonished by the audacity to tell such lies about me. From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest, I am, of course, and have always been an atheist.” ~ Albert Einstein
- “I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down men other-centered can build up. I still believe that one-day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive goodwill proclaim the rule of the land.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
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“Hope – Hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope!” ~ Barack Obama
- “God beckons storm clouds and they come. He tells the wind to blow and the rain to fall, and they obey immediately. He speaks to the mountains, ‘You go there,’ and He says to the seas, ‘You stop here, and they do it. Everything in all creation responds in obedience to the Creator…until we get to you and me. We have the audacity to look God in the face and say, ‘No.” ~ David Platt
- “A country survives its legislation. That truth should not comfort the conservative nor depress the radical. For it means that public policy can enlarge its scope and increase its audacity, can try big experiments without trembling too much over the result. This nation could enter upon the most radical experiments and could afford to fail in them.” ~ Walter Lippmann
- “I can understand how some people might resent me for having the audacity to continue playing music, but it’d take a lot more than that to stop me from doing it. I started Foo Fighters because I didn’t want to retreat.” ~ Dave Grohl
- “You know what the issue is? Do you want to know? It’s what these guys have decided to call America. They have the audacity to say, ‘There, you sons of bitches, don’t lay a finger on it. That is a finished product.'” “But any country is still in the making. Always. That’s just history, people have to see that.” ~ Barbara Kingsolver
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“Innocence alone dares commit certain acts of audacity. Virtue, when tutored, is as calculating as vice.” ~ Honore de Balzac
- “The new school of art and thought does indeed wear an air of audacity and breaks out everywhere into blasphemies as if it required any courage to say a blasphemy. There is only one thing that it requires real courage to say, and that is a truism.” ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton
- “What price would God demand from the churches for having the audacity to lighten the color of his son’s skin, and straighten out his nappy hair?” ~ Dick Gregory
- “In many ways [those middle-aged black ladies] my touchstone, because they are what I meant when I talked about the audacity of hope.” ~ Barack Obama
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“Love: the skillful audacity required to share an inner life.” ~ Gertrude Stein
- “The fly ought to be used as the symbol of impertinence and audacity; for whilst all other animals shun man more than anything else, and run away even before he comes near them, the fly lights upon his very nose.” ~ Arthur Schopenhauer
- “[Six principles that make for a good story:] 1. Absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature; 2. total objectivity; 3. truthful descriptions of persons and objects; 4. extreme brevity; 5. audacity and originality: flee the stereotype; 6. compassion.” ~ Anton Chekhov
- “What paralyzes life is lack of faith and lack of audacity. The difficulty lies not in solving problems but identifying them.” ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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“Audacity, and again, audacity, and always audacity.” ~ Georges Danton
- “You must be practically a hero to retain your composure in the midst of universal panic. But just try to scream and tear around when everyone else is going about his business — that takes a lot of audacity.” ~ Lidiya Ginzburg
- “Self-definition and self-determination is about the many varied decisions that we make to compose and journey toward ourselves, about the audacity and strength to proclaim, create, and evolve into who we know ourselves to be. It’s okay if your personal definition is in a constant state of flux as you navigate the world.” ~ Janet Mock
- “The only way we really create change is to enter any situation with the humility to listen and to recognize the world as it is, and then the audacity to dream what it could be.” ~ Jacqueline Novogratz
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“All too often, it is audacity and not talent that moves an artist to center stage.” ~ Julia Cameron
- “Audacity, always audacity – soundest principle of strategy.” ~ Robert A. Heinlein
- “Crime, once exposed, has no refuge but in audacity.” ~ Tacitus
- “It is often in the audacity, in the steadfastness, of the general that the safety and the conservation of his men is found.” ~ Napoleon Bonaparte
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“audacity is of all qualities the most youthful.” ~ Ellen Glasgow
- “The audacity to love. Do you know what a gift that is?” ~ Laini Taylor
- “Audacity succeeds as often as it fails; in life, it has an even chance.” ~ Napoleon Bonaparte
- “Hypocrisy is the audacity to preach integrity from a den of corruption.” ~ Wes Fesler
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“Audacity is the currency for authoritarians.” ~ Van Jones
- “We are the lucky generation. We first broke our earthly bonds and ventured into space. From our descendants- perches on other planets or distant space cities, they will look back at our achievement with wonder at our courage and audacity and with appreciation at our accomplishments, which assured the future in which they live.” ~ Walter Cronkite
- “We live in a wondrous time in which the strong is weak because of his moral scruples and the weak grows strong because of his audacity.” ~ Otto von Bismarck
- “We must err, do so on the side of audacity” ~ Sue Monk Kidd
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“In war, nothing is impossible, provided you use audacity.” ~ George S. Patton
- “All comedians are a bit attention-seeking and I’m no different. Anyone with the audacity to want to be listened to for an hour and a half must be.” ~ Jimmy Carr
- “The skyscrapers began to rise again, frailly massive, elegantly utilitarian, images in their grace, audacity, and inconclusiveness, of the whole character of the people who produces them.” ~ Malcolm Muggeridge
Audacity is a confident and daring quality that is often seen as shocking or rude.
