All great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and both must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage.
Interpretation
Great achievements often come with significant challenges, and facing these challenges requires bravery.
This quote by William Bradford emphasizes that to achieve great and honorable actions, one must confront and navigate through substantial difficulties. Overcoming these obstacles is intrinsic to the act of valor itself, suggesting that courage is not just about facing fears but also about committing to the pursuit of meaningful goals despite potential hardships.
In practice
In a graduation speech to inspire students about the challenges ahead.
Having undertaken, for the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith, and honor of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God, and one of another, covenant and combine our selves together.
As one small candle may light a thousand, so the light here kindled hath shone unto many, yea in some sort to our whole nation.
Thus out of small beginnings greater things have been produced by His hand that made all things of nothing, and gives being to all things that are; and, as one small candle may light a thousand, so the light here kindled hath shone unto many.
In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong.
Because if you don't stand up for the stuff you don't like, when they come for the stuff you do like, you've already lost.
Once I was lost in a forest. I was so afraid. My blood pounded in my chest and I knew my heart's strength would soon be exhausted. I saved myself without thinking. I grasped the two syllables closest to me, and replaced my heartbeat with your name.
I am kind; I am humane. I open to you my fatherly arms. Come, all of you; I will receive you all - no less those of the South than those of the West, and of the North, who, gained over by Rigaud, have deserted your firesides, your wives, your children, to place yourselves at his side.
I used to be a discipline problem, which caused me embarrassment until I realized that being a discipline problem in a racist society is sometimes an honor.
That's why I stand here tonight. Because for two hundred and thirty two years, at each moment when that promise was in jeopardy, ordinary men and women - students and soldiers, farmers and teachers, nurses and janitors - found the courage to keep it alive.
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