Courage Versus Bravery
I was watching an interview with Maya Angelou yesterday where she explained the difference between humility and modesty, and her disdain for the latter:
“I don’t know what arrogance means,” she said. “You see, I have no patience with modesty. Modesty is a learned adaptation. It’s stuck on like decals. As soon as life slams a modest person against the wall, that modesty will fall off faster than a G-string will fall off a stripper.
Whenever I’m around some who is modest, I think, ‘run like hell and all of fire,’” she said. “You don’t want modesty, you want humility. Humility comes from inside out. It says someone was here before me and I’m here because I’ve been paid for. I have something to do and I will do that because I’m paying for someone else who has yet to come.”
It got me thinking about what other words are commonly used as synonyms or synonymous when in reality they are not all that similar. And one of the first examples to come to mind is courage versus bravery.
Like Angelou’s example, bravery is a learned adaptation. Circumstances require bravery, and like with modesty, this means that under enough pressure or duress, bravery can falter. And we all know this to be true.
However, contrast bravery to courage. Courage, like humility, comes from within. Courage is an inner awareness of one’s own strength that can only be built or destroyed by one’s own mind. Courage can create bravery, but bravery alone cannot create courage.1
I don’t feel up to writing a more in-depth post on this today, but perhaps take a moment to consider the implications of the difference between courage and bravery. More directly, is it possible to appear a coward when in fact being courageous? I would answer emphatically in the affirmative. And on the opposite side, and perhaps this will resonate at the time of publishing, if someone appears brave when in fact they are a coward, you should run like hell and all of fire.
Footnotes
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Hence why it is often so difficult to distinguish between bravery and stupidity. ↩