Rollo May
Courage is not a virtue of value among other personal values like love or fidelity. It is the foundation that underlies and gives reality to all other virtues and personal values. Without courage our love pales into mere dependency. Without courage our fidelity becomes conformism.
Freedom is man's capacity to take a hand in his own development. It is our capacity to mold ourselves.
Freedom requires the capacity to accept, bear and live constructively with anxiety. I refer of course to the normal anxiety all of us experience at every step in our psychological growth as well as in this upset contemporary world. To be free means to face and bear anxiety, to run away from anxiety means automatically to surrender one's freedom.
if one is unable to assert oneself, one is unable to participate in a genuine relationship.
The word courage comes from the same stem as the French word coeur, meaning ''heart''. Thus just as one's heart, by pumping blood to one's arms, legs, and brain enables all the other physical organs to function, so courage makes possible all the psychological virtues. Without courage other values whither away into mere facsimiles of virtue.