Top 100 Quotes About Cowardice
#1. Cowards do not count in battle; they are there, but not in it.
Euripides
#2. Without the blessing of cowardice, the world would long since have been torn to bits.
Mason Cooley
#3. We shall never know how many acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of appearing not sufficiently progressive.
Charles Peguy
#4. Heckling is an act of cowardice. If you want to speak, get up in front of the microphone and speak, don't sit in the dark hiding. It's easy to hide and shout and waste people's time.
Billy Connolly
#6. I hate cowardice; I will have nothing to do with cowards or political nonsense.
Swami Vivekananda
#7. All too often cowardice wears the habit of wounded pride.' Anomander
Steven Erikson
#8. That which in mean men we entitle patience
Is pale cold cowardice in noble breasts.
William Shakespeare
#9. What a delight you are! Blessed with the ripe sweetness of a woman, yet as green and untutored as any girl." He made her sound, she realized with bemusement, as charming and pleasing with her cowardice as any courtesan with her wiles.
Christina Dodd
#10. Conscience is just a polite word for cowardice. No civilised man regrets a pleasure.
Lord Henry Wotton
#11. I think there's quite a lot of cowardice in music. I don't mind if it goes wrong, I just want to go for it.
Sophie Ellis-Bextor
#12. A feeble body makes a feeble mind. I do not know what doctors cure us of, but I know this: they infect us with very deadly diseases, cowardice, timidity, credulity, the fear of death. What matter if they make the dead walk, we have no need of corpses; they fail to give us men, and it is men we need.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#13. If cowardice were not so completely a coward as to be unable to look steadily upon the effects of courage, he would find that there is no refuge so sure as dauntless valor.
Jane Porter
#14. Some Saian mountaineer
Struts today with my shield.
I threw it down by a bush and ran
When the fighting got hot.
Life seemed somehow more precious.
It was a beautiful shield.
I know where I can buy another
Exactly like it, just as round.
Archilochos
#15. When we create hope and opportunity in the lives of others, we allow love, decency and promise to triumph over cowardice and hate.
Kirsten Gillibrand
#16. The irony is, nothing is more frightening than being frightened.
Neel Burton
#18. To incessantly blame others for my shortcomings is cowardice borne of fear, fed by fear, and haunted by fear. To be steadfastly accountable for my shortcomings is bravery borne of God, fed by God, and blessed by God.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#19. It is only in pain that a woman is capable of rising above mediocrity. Her resistance to pain is infinite; one can use and abuse it without any fear that she will die, as long as some childish physical cowardice or some religious hope keeps her from the suicide that offers her a way out.
Colette
#20. There is nothing more pathetic than people hiding their
cowardice behind seemingly noble intentions.
Amish Tripathi
#22. Silence becomes cowardice when occasion demands speaking out the whole truth and acting accordingly.
Mahatma Gandhi
#23. As I hear him, I understand that he's not more moronic because of the brandy than he is because of his cowardice.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#24. Beware instinct
the lion will not touch the true prince.
Instinct is a great matter.
William Shakespeare
#25. A man who rightly governs self, may also govern family without the crippling cowardice, crutch of control.
T.F. Hodge
#26. I traded cowardice for cruelty; I traded weakness for ferocity.
Veronica Roth
#27. There is such a thing as a hatred of lies and dissimulation, which is the outcome of a delicate sense of humor; there is also the selfsame hatred but as the result of cowardice, in so far as falsehood is forbidden by Divine law. Too cowardly to lie.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#28. You disappoint yourself more often by not doing things because of cowardice and temerity than you ever did by doing things that turn out to be wrong.
Fred Hollows
#29. Courage, like cowardice, is undoubtedly contagious, but some persons are not liable to catch it.
George D. Prentice
#30. In self-defense and in defense of the innocent, cowardice is the only sin.
Dean Koontz
#31. When cowardice becomes a fashion its adherents are without number, and it masquerades as forbearance, reasonableness and whatnot.
Eric Hoffer
#32. Cowards make the best torturers. Cowards understand fear and they can use it.
Mark Lawrence
#33. Many never become sweet; they rot even in the summer. It is cowardice that holdeth them fast to their branches.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#34. Patience and submission are very carefully to be distinguished from cowardice and indolence. We are not to repine, but we may lawfully struggle; for the calamities of life, like the necessities of Nature, are calls to labor and diligence.
Samuel Johnson
#35. We believe that preparation eradicates cowardice, which we define as the failure to act in the midst of fear.
Veronica Roth
#36. Some have been thought brave because they were afraid to run away.
Thomas Fuller
#37. To the cowards, change is a want; to the weak, change is a wish; but to the brave, change is a must. People who put change ahead of all things are those who make a difference!
Israelmore Ayivor
#38. Like certain devotees, who think they can fool God and wrest a pardon by paying lip-service to prayer and adopting the humble attitude of the penitent, Therese humiliated herself, beat her chest, found words of repentance, without having anything in the bottom of her heart except fear and cowardice.
Emile Zola
#39. The passions do very often give birth to others of a nature most contrary to their own. Thus avarice sometimes brings forth prodigality, and prodigality avarice; a man's resolution is very often the effect of levity, and his boldness that of cowardice and fear.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#40. Tom's cowardice was as huge as his courage, as it must be in great men.
John Steinbeck
#41. To be afraid is the miserable condition of a coward. To do wrong, or omit to do right from fear, is to superadd delinquency to cowardice.
David Dudley Field II
#42. I'm a fucking coward."
"Maybe." Craw jerked his thumb over his shoulder at Whirrun's corpse. "There's a hero. Tell me who's better off.
Joe Abercrombie
#43. Since I no longer expect anything from mankind except madness, meanness, and mendacity; egotism, cowardice, and self-delusion, I have stopped being a misanthrope.
Irving Layton
#44. We know all about you, Rincewind the magician. You are a man of great cunning and artifice. You laugh in the face of Death. Your affected air of craven cowardice does not fool me.
It fooled Rincewind.
Terry Pratchett
#46. He never got up high enough to see.
That's why I don't advise your trying this side.
He tried this side. I've always meant to go
And look myself, but you know how it is:
It doesn't seem so much to climb a mountain
You've worked around the foot of all your life.
Robert Frost
#47. Mr. Bradley-Mr. Martin is two people because it is a statement of the impasse of dualistic universe which he has created, they have created. I think that any dualistic universe ends in Nova. Mr. Bradley-Mr. Martin is a kind of God. A God of stupidity, cowardice, ugliness.
William S. Burroughs
#48. What--has O-Tar seen an ulsio and fainted?" demanded I-Gos with broad sarcasm.
"Men have died for less than that, ancient one," E-Thas reminded him.
"I am safe," retorted I-Gos, "for I am not a brave and popular son of the jeddak of Manator.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
#49. The radiance of this beautiful scene shed a cruel light on every past horror, every insult tolerated, every unspoken retort, every gesture of rejection. Marianne was grieving, and her boundless grief made her regret every moment of cowardice in her life.
Nina George
#50. Be not intimidated ... nor suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberties by any pretense of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three different names for hypocrisy, chicanery and cowardice.
John Adams
#51. I often say to people that producing is the best-paid form of cowardice. When you produce things, you almost always get credit if it's a good record, but you hardly ever get the blame if it's not! You don't really take responsibility for your work.
Brian Eno
#52. your soul is sunken in that cowardice that bears down many men, turning their course and resolution by imagined perils, as his own shadow turns the frightened horse.
Dante Alighieri
#53. They say cowardice is infectious; but then argument is, on the other hand, a great emboldener;
Robert Louis Stevenson
#54. Hm ... yes, all is in a man's hands and he lets it all slip from cowardice, that's an axiom
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#55. We are for ever trying to make our weakness look like strength, our sentiment like love, our cowardice like courage, and so on.
Swami Vivekananda
#56. Each of us has his cowardice. Each of us is afraid to lose, afraid to die. But hanging back is the way to remain a coward for life. The Way to find courage is to seek it on the field of conflict. And the sure way to victory is willingness to risk one's own life.
Mas Oyama
#57. If you must run, have something to run toward, so it feels less like cowardice.
Mark Lawrence
#58. What is in reality cowardice and faithlessness, we call charity, and consider it the part of benevolence sometimes to forgive men's evil practice for the sake of their accurate faith, and sometimes to forgive their confessed heresy for the sake of their admirable practice.
John Ruskin
#59. She had grown up in a time of monsters, and it was fear and cowardice that had kept her alive through the millennia.
Michael Scott
#60. They must be cool but determined ... he threatened instant death to any man who showed cowardice.
David McCullough
#62. I detest bullies for their cowardice, and despise them for their cruelty. I never knew a tough man who preyed on the weak. Tough men hate bullies almost as much as bullies hate tough men.
Gregory David Roberts
#63. Her cowardice had been re-branded as self-preservation, and she was grateful for it.
Jayne Lockwood
#64. Humour is the most engaging cowardice. With it myself I have been able to hold some of my enemy in play far out of gunshot.
Robert Frost
#65. From long familiarity, we know what honor is. It is what enables the individual to do right in the face of complacency and cowardice. It is what enables the soldier to die alone, the political prisoner to resist, the singer to sing her song, hardly appreciated, on a side street.
Mark Helprin
#66. The hero and the coward both feel the same thing, but the hero uses his fear, projects it onto his opponent, while the coward runs. It's the same thing, fear, but it's what you do with it that matters. - Cus D'Amato
Cus D'Amato
#67. There is no lack of bravery in the ranks of our armed forces, but bureaucratic cowardice rules in our intelligence establishment (as well as at the higher levels of military command).
Ralph Peters
#68. Was my sin basically one of untruthfulness? Or, more likely, one of cowardice? But the liar knows the truth. The coward knows his fear and runs away.
Josephine Hart
#69. To say you have no choice is to relieve yourself of responsibility.
Patrick Ness
#71. There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the fashionable non-conformist.
Ayn Rand
#72. Your devotion is nothing more than cowardice. You would not be here if you had anywhere else to go.
J.K. Rowling
#73. I tell you, old friend, I'd rather be stuck here in a Strander burrow than blowing smoke rings in Glipwood, where the Fangs spit and howl and kill our spirits. At least we're here because we choose to be. We're here out of bravery and not cowardice.
Andrew Peterson
#74. Byerozkin knew very well that the man with no quiet at the bottom of his soul was unable to endure for long, however courageous he might be in combat. He thought of fear or cowardice, on the other hand, as something temporary, something that could be cured as easily as a cold.
Vasily Grossman
#76. I say people who feel they must have a faith or religion in order to face life are showing a kind of cowardice, which in any other sphere would be considered contemptible. But when it is in the religious sphere it is thought admirable, and I cannot admire cowardice whatever sphere it is in.
Bertrand Russell
#77. Nonviolence does not admit of running away from danger ... Between violence and cowardly flight I can only prefer violence to cowardice.
Mahatma Gandhi
#78. Those words, temperate and moderate, are words either of political cowardice, or of cunning, or seduction. A thing, moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper, is always a virtue; but moderation in principle, is a species of vice.
Thomas Paine
#80. Between cowardice and despair, valour is gendred.
John Donne
#81. Courage is often lack of insight, whereas cowardice in many cases is based on good information.
Peter Ustinov
#82. They fled. The American louts fled. Indeed, concerning the fighting waged by the heroes of the Arab Socialist Baath Party yesterday, one amazing thing really is the cowardice of the American soldiers. we had not anticipated this.
Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf
#83. Cynicism is a form of cowardice, a failure of courage to hope.
Merle Shain
#84. I had dug myself into Hell by not having the bravery to admit my cowardice. I resolved not to get into a similar situation again.
Mark Lawrence
#85. Procrastination is the junior enemy of action; cowardice, the senior.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#86. Blood has an oder faint but distinct, of conceit and modesty, of courage and cowardice, of charity and greed, of faith and doubt, in short the fragrance of what we might have been and the smell of what we are ...
Dean Koontz
#87. Intemperance is naturally punished with diseases; rashness, with mischance; injustice; with violence of enemies; pride, with ruin; cowardice, with oppression; and rebellion, with slaughter.
Thomas Hobbes
#88. The monster is never just there where we think he is. What is truly monstrous is our cowardice and sloth.
Henry David Thoreau
#89. Do you see the irony at all, Tristan?'
I stare at him and shake my head. He seems determined not to speak again until I do. 'What irony?' I ask eventually, the words tumbling out in a hurried heap. 'That I am to be shot as a coward while you get to live as one.
John Boyne
#90. O cowardly amd tyrannous race of monks, persecutors of the bard, and the gleemen, haters of life and joy! O race that does not draw the sword and tell the truth! O race that melts the bones of the people with cowardice and with deceit! ("The Crucifixion Of The Outcast")
W.B.Yeats
#91. Many people feel they are powerless to do anything effective with their lives. It takes courage to break out of the settled mold, but most find conformity more comfortable. This is why the opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it's conformity.
Rollo May
#92. Cowardice is not synonymous with prudence. It often happens that the better part of discretion is valor.
William Hazlitt
#93. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.
George Orwell
#94. She opened her eyes- closing them was cowardice, and the Carstairs were not cowards.
Cassandra Clare
#95. Too many strive for the unachievable, and this pursuit consumes them. They rush frantic and desperate and so reveal weakness in the face of sadness. More than weakness, in fact. It is in truth a kind of cowardice, that which espouses an evasive disposition as if it were a virtue.
Steven Erikson
#96. Cowardice was undoubtedly one of the most terrible vices - thus spoke Yeshua Ha-Nozri. 'No, philosopher, I disagree with you: it is the most terrible vice!
Mikhail Bulgakov
#97. The one thing you can count on in Hollywood - across the board - is cowardice.
Sean Penn
#98. To tell a lie in cowardice, to tell a lie for gain, or to avoid deserved punishment
are all the blackest of black lies.
Emily Post
#99. Hanging a noose on my door reeks of cowardice and fear on many, many levels.
Madonna Ciccone
#100. It would be bad enough if we were just restless, meandering through life, and a little cowardly. But we've spiritualized restless and meandering cowardice, making it feel like piety instead of passivity.
Kevin DeYoung
