These Soldier quotes will inspire you. A soldier is one who fights as part of an army. A soldier can be a conscript, a volunteer enlisted a non-commissioned officer, or an officer. In other words, soldiers are military personnel who participate in the land, sea, air, or space forces known as armies, navy, air force, and space forces respectively.
Being a soldier is an act of bravery and selflessness. They endure long hours and sleepless nights in unfavorable conditions and often face the ultimate sacrifice. Honor those who serve with the list of motivating and insightful soldier quotes and sayings.
Inspirational Soldier Quotes
- “I am a Soldier, I fight where I am told, and I win where I fight.” ~ George S. Patton
- “Be strong, saith my heart; I am a soldier; I have seen worse sights than this.” ~ Homer
- “The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.” ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton
- “The soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war.” ~ Douglas MacArthur
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“A soldier never dies. His blood makes the grass green for his children.” ~ Carol Berg
- “Only the soldier is a free man, because he can look death in the face.” ~ Friedrich Schiller
- “Good soldiers are defined by what they can endure, not by what they can inflict.” ~ Gregory David Roberts
- “A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.” ~ Joseph Campbell
- “A warrior with a cause is the most dangerous soldier of all” ~ Michael Scott
- “The preservation of freedom, is not the task of soldiers alone. The whole nation has to be strong.” ~ Lal Bahadur Shastri
- “On the battlefield, the military pledges to leave no soldier behind. As a nation, let it be our pledge that when they return home, we leave no veteran behind.” ~ Dan Lipinski
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“The hardest thing of all for a soldier is to retreat.” ~ Duke of Wellington
- “Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to an end requires some of the same courage that a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men and women to win them.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson , Soldier quotes on bravery
- “The brave die never, though they sleep in dust: Their courage nerves a thousand living men.” ~ Minot Judson Savage
- “The first virtue in a soldier is endurance of fatigue; courage is only the second virtue.” ~ Napoleon Bonaparte
- “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.” ~ George S. Patton
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“I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” ~ Nathan Hale
- “In war, there are no unwounded soldiers.” ~ Jose Narosky
- “Every lover is a soldier.” ~ Ovid
- “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.” ~ Douglas MacArthur
- “A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.” ~ Georg C. Lichtenberg
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“We will be soldiers, so our sons may be farmers, so their sons may be artists” ~ Thomas Jefferson
- “There’s only one way for a professional soldier to die. That’s from the last bullet of the last battle of the last war.” ~ George S. Patton
- “The most vital quality a soldier can possess is self-confidence.” ~ George S. Patton
- “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.” ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
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“A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.” ~ Napoleon Bonaparte
- “Maybe the ultimate wound is the one that makes you miss the war you got it in.” ~ Sebastian Junger
- “I believe that a man is the strongest soldier for daring to die unarmed.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi
- “Another soldier has been killed. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.” ~ William C. Brown
- “The soldier is the Army. No army is better than its soldiers. The Soldier is also a citizen. In fact, the highest obligation and privilege of citizenship is that of bearing arms for one’s country” ~ George S. Patton
- “The most important thing I learned is that soldiers watch what their leaders do. You can give them classes and lecture them forever, but it is your personal example they will follow.” ~ Colin Powell
- “For a man to be a man, did he have to be a soldier, or at least prepare himself for war? For a woman to be a woman, did she have to be a mother, or at least prepare herself to raise children? Soldiers and mothers were the sacrificial couple, honored by statues in the park, lauded for their willingness to give their lives to others.” ~ Carol Gilligan
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“Soldiers’ bellies are not satisfied with empty promises and hopes.” ~ Peter the Great
- “The patriot volunteer, fighting for country and his rights, makes the most reliable soldier on earth.” ~ Stonewall Jackson, Soldier quotes patriot
- “Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.” ~ Otto von Bismarck
- “Every soldier must know, before he goes into battle, how the little battle he is to fight fits into the larger picture, and how the success of his fighting will influence the battle as a whole.” ~ Bernard Law Montgomery, Soldier quotes battle
- “And they who for their country die shall fill an honored grave, for glory lights the soldier’s tomb, and beauty weeps the brave.” ~ Joseph Rodman Drake
- “You’ve never lived until you’ve almost died. For those who have fought for it, life has a flavor the protected shall never know.” ~ Guy de Maupassant
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“One can be a soldier without dying and a lover without sighing.” ~ Edwin Arnold
- “This soldier, I realized, must have had friends at home and in his regiment; yet he lay there deserted by all except his dog. I looked on, unmoved, at battles which decided the future of nations. Tearless, I had given orders which brought death to thousands. Yet here I was stirred, profoundly stirred, stirred to tears. And by what? By the grief of one dog. Napoleon Bonaparte, on finding a dog beside the body of his dead master, licking his face and howling, on a moonlit field after a battle. Napoleon was haunted by this scene until his own death.” ~ Napoleon Bonaparte
- “Ambition, the soldier’s virtue.” ~ William Shakespeare, Soldier quotes ambition
- “Theirs is not to make reply: Theirs is not to reason why: Theirs is but to do and die.” ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson
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“What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight – it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
- “Soldiers are issued armor for their flesh and bones, but they must fashion their own for their souls. Piece by piece.” ~ Steven Erikson
- “It is important to live each day with a positive perspective. It is not wise to pretend problems do not exist, but it is wise to look beyond the problem to the possibilities that are in it. When Goliath came against the Israelites, the soldiers all thought, “He’s so big, we can never kill him.” But David looked at the same giant and thought, “He’s so big, I can’t miss him.” ~ Dale E. Turner
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“Soldiers generally win battles; generals get credit for them.” ~ Napoleon Bonaparte
- “Battles are sometimes won by generals; wars are nearly always won by sergeants and privates.” ~ F. E. Adcock
- “It is time to acknowledge the extraordinary sacrifice of all of our veterans. While many Massachusetts soldiers served our nation in a period technically dubbed ‘peacetime,’ they restored American pride in the wake of Vietnam and helped bring a successful end to the Cold War. The service of these men and women was not without cost. There are countless stories of soldiers who served with great distinction only to be denied veteran status after returning home. Every man and woman who volunteered to serve this country should be treated with the same degree of respect, gratitude and dignity.” ~ Mitt Romney, Soldier quotes respect
- “Honor to the soldier and sailor everywhere, who bravely bears his country’s cause. Honor, also, to the citizen who cares for his brother in the field and serves, as he best can, the same cause.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
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“No one hates war like a soldier hates war.” ~ Tommy Franks
- “It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda tours.” ~ George Orwell
- “Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.” ~ Paul Fussell, Soldier quotes wars
- “When we assumed the Soldier, we did not lay aside the Citizen.” ~ George Washington
- “Kill every enemy twice, Wilky said. Better than gettin’ shot by a soldier pretending to be dead.” ~ Joseph Bruchac
- “It’s better to fade away like an old soldier than to burn out.” ~ John Lennon
- “When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your gawd like a soldier.” ~ Rudyard Kipling
- “Alabama soldiers, all I ask of you is to keep up with the Texans!” ~ Robert E. Lee
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“Soldiers win battles and generals get the medals.” ~ Napoleon Bonaparte
- “War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.” ~ William Tecumseh Sherman
- “We are born into this time and must bravely follow the path to the destined end. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost position, without hope, without rescue, like that Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him. That is greatness. That is what it means to be a thoroughbred. The honorable end is the one thing that can not be taken from a man.” ~ Oswald Spengler
- “I don’t duel, boy. I kill as a soldier kills, which is as a butcher kills, as quickly, efficiently, and with as least risk to myself as I can arrange.” ~ Lois McMaster Bujold
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“War is too serious a matter to leave to soldiers.” ~ William Tecumseh Sherman
- “Get there first with the most men.” ~ Nathan Bedford Forrest
- “In “The Myth of Sisyphus”, his most important non-fiction work, Albert Camus suggested that if we believed what most people claim to be the purpose of life, we would feel compelled to commit suicide. If, however, we accept that life has no purpose we would be inclined to soldier on in a cussed, stoical manner like Sisyphus, endlessly pushing his rock up a hill only to see it roll down again.” ~ Philip French
- “Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom. Congress has no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birthright of an Americans.” ~ Tench Coxe
