Euripides said, 'A coward turns away but a brave man's choice is danger.'

What the ancient Greeks learned, as the first truly intellectual and philosophical people, is that there is more danger to one's hope, one's mettle, one's pride, in venturing into the battle of ideas, than in murdering a man who disagrees with you ... and that doing so therefore takes proportionally more courage.

Most people tend to think of courage as a warrior virtue, as belonging typically to battle, and therefore, by analogy, to endeavor on the upper slopes of Everest, in the deep sea, and even on the sports field ... in other words, wherever endurance, grit and determination in the face of physical challenges are required.

That is true enough.

But courage is often demonstrated, because it is often needed, in greater quantities in daily life, and there are even times when 'merely to live', as Seneca put it in a letter to Lucilius, 'is itself an act of courage'.

~~~A.C. Grayling~~~