Top 100 Quotes About Cowardice
#1. I always take credit for my acts of cruelty. To do otherwise is cowardice.
Neal Shusterman
#2. The truth is people are an extraordinary mixture of heroism and cowardice.
Agatha Christie
#3. All around him during the war, Ciro saw men lie, engage in acts of cowardice, create feeble attachments to women, only to leave them - men acting in pursuit of their own comforts, men behaving without grace. And
Adriana Trigiani
#4. Like a fellow running from or toward a gun ain't got time to worry whether the word for what he is doing is courage or cowardice.
William Faulkner
#5. Zaphod did not want to tangle with them and, deciding that just as discretion is the better part of valor, so was cowardice is the better part of discretion, he valiantly hid himself in a closet.
Douglas Adams
#6. Through laziness and cowardice a large part of mankind, even after nature has freed them from alien guidance, gladly remain immature. It is because of laziness and cowardice that it is so easy for others to usurp the role of guardians. It is so comfortable to be a minor!
Immanuel Kant
#7. All that blood and ... stuff. Me, I'll take intelligent cowardice over foolhardy bravery any day
A.C. Crispin
#8. When will the state of the country be sound? ... When its people believe that the end result of cowardice is more disastrous than that of behaving with integrity.
Naguib Mahfouz
#9. Courage is defined as: the ability to face danger, difficulty, uncertainty, or pain without being overcome by fear or being deflected from a chosen course of action. Many of today's world leaders have great courage: I wonder ... would we be better off with cowardice?
Joshua Fernandez
#10. Strength and manliness are virtue; weakness and cowardice are sin.
Swami Vivekananda
#11. All the best novels are about one thing: how we go on. The characters must survive the fallout of their own cowardice, folly, denial or misguided passion. They squander what matters most, and still they pick up the pieces.
Julia Glass
#12. Just as discretion was the better part of valor, so was cowardice the better part of discretion, he valiantly hid himself in the closet.
Douglas Adams
#13. Christians take Scriptures out of context to try to justify or to vindicate retreat and cowardice.
Randall Terry
#14. Since cowardice must occur at a time and place where an enemy either has already appeared or may yet turn up, servicemen in peacetime - and ordinary civilians - can breathe a sigh of relief. If you are yellow-bellied back home, you're not technically a coward.
Charles Duhigg
#15. When would he realize that it wasn't his infidelity I couldn't bear, but his cowardice?
Tatiana De Rosnay
#16. I deserted the world and sought solitude because I became tired of rendering courtesy to those multitudes who believe that humility is a sort of weakness, and mercy a kind of cowardice, and snobbery a form of strength.
Kahlil Gibran
#17. Before thy undertaking of any design, weigh the glory of thy action with the danger of the attempt; if the glory outweigh the danger, it is cowardice to neglect it; if the danger exceed the glory, it is rashness to attempt it; if the balances stand poised, let thy own genius cast them.
Francis Quarles
#18. I abstain from the people who consider insolence bravery and tenderness cowardice. And I abstain from those who consider chatter wisdom and silence ignorance.
Kahlil Gibran
#20. Cowardice, the dread of what will happen.
Epictetus
#21. I always say the truth is best even when we find it unpleasant. Any rat in a sewer can lie. It's how rats are. It's what makes them rats. But a human doesn't run and hide in dark places, because he's something more. Lying is the most personal act of cowardice there is.
Nancy Farmer
#22. It is astonishing and a little sad to realize how many discoveries, how many advancements, have been delayed for years, for decades, not because the information was unavailable but because of sheer cowardice, fear of being laughed at, of being ostracized by one's colleagues.
Hanya Yanagihara
#23. If pessimism is despair, optimism is cowardice and stupidity. Is there any need to choose between them?
Francis Parker Yockey
#24. If you want to send a manuscript, send it to an agent. And send a letter first, asking permission. Launch it into the real world of cold-blooded commercial response, not into the fantasyland of wishful thinking, cowardice and surrender to Resistance.
Steven Pressfield
#25. Let every man remind their descendants that they also are soldiers who must not desert the ranks of their ancestors, or from cowardice fall behind.
Plato
#26. The worship of reason is arrogance and betrays a lack of intelligence. The rejection of reason is cowardice and betrays a lack of faith.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#27. I was struck by the joy of those pilots in committing coldblooded murder ... Frankly, this is not cojones. This is cowardice.
Madeleine Albright
#28. At the bottom of not a little of the bravery that appears in the world, there lurks a miserable cowardice. Men will face powder and steel because they have not the courage to face public opinion.
Edwin Hubbel Chapin
#29. Fear of corrupting the mind of the younger generation is the loftiest form of cowardice.
Holbrook Jackson
#31. So where it is a general rule that it is wrong to gratify lovers, this can be attributed to the defects of those who make that rule: the government's lust for rule and the subjects' cowardice
Plato
#32. When you disarm the people, you commence to offend them and show that you distrust them either through cowardice or lack of confidence, and both of these opinions generate hatred.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#33. True courage is mixed with circumspection, the kind of healthy skepticism that asks, 'Is this the best way to do this?' True cowardice is marked by chronic skepticism, which always says, 'It can't be done.'
William Bennett
#34. Knowledge! What does that mean? Your knowledge is nothing but cowardice. No, really, that's all it is. You just want to put a little wall around infinity. And you're afraid to look on the other side of that wall.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#37. That was the source of my vanity and my cowardice: always I believed everyone was watching me.
Andre Dubus
#38. I believe that we have reached a stage in life in the economic development of Africa where moving forward is perilous, moving backwards is cowardice and standing still is suicidal but we must persevere because winners do not quit and quitter never win.
Patrick L.O. Lumumba
#40. She never forgets a slight, real or imagined. She takes caution for cowardice and dissent for defiance. And she is greedy. Greedy for power, for honour, for love.
George R R Martin
#41. It is not a single cowardice that drives us into fiction's fantasies. We often fear that literature is a game we can't afford to play - the product of idleness and immoral ease. In the grip of that feeling it isn't life we pursue, but the point and purpose of life - its facility, its use.
William H Gass
#42. I think if you are a musician, and artist, you have to have a certain courage. Repeating yourself or photocopying other's art... it's cowardice. If you actually risk your career to do something new, even if it's in a very small way, then it's art.
Thomas Gabriel Fischer
#43. Wow, I think my crush just disappeared. Cowardice was a surprisingly big turn-off.
L. H. Cosway
#44. Sometimes, courage is really just cowardice. Sometimes the bravest thing is to let go.
Miguel Syjuco
#46. Christianity is not a law of bondage; and if it respect the hand of God which sometimes raises up tyrants, it draws up where obedience degenerates into guilty cowardice.
Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire
#47. In any case, it's the cowardice of people like you who give dictators the chance to install themselves!
Marjane Satrapi
#48. No cowardice, no sin, no crime, no weakness - the rest will come of itself ...
Swami Vivekananda
#50. If the written word has contributed anything at all to our developing species and our half developed culture, it is this: Great writing has been a staff to lean on, a mother to consult, a wisdom to pick up stumbling folly, a strength in weakness and a courage to support sick cowardice.
John Steinbeck
#51. Covetousness like jealousy, when it has taken root, never leaves a person, but with their life. Cowardice is the dread of what will happen.
Epictetus
#52. But by God, he was going to stop running from his cowardice. He had to own his shit - even if it made him hate himself to the core. Because maybe if he did, he'd stop trying to distract himself with sex and drinking, and figure out what he did want.
Apart from Blay, that was.
J.R. Ward
#53. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture
Tim O'Brien
#54. 'Can't really say?' Nick said, and heard, as he sometimes did, his own father's note of evasive sympathy. It was how his family sidled round its various crises; nothing was named, and you never knew for sure if the tone was subtly comprehensive, or just a form of cowardice.
Alan Hollinghurst
#55. When we choose to stay down, we are in reality confusing wisdom with cowardice. When we choose to stand back up, we are using wisdom to overcome cowardice.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#56. Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without he heroic mind.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#57. Moral cowardice that keeps us from speaking our minds is as dangerous to this country as irresponsible talk. The right way is not always the popular and easy way. Standing for right when it is unpopular is a true test of moral character.
Margaret Chase Smith
#58. The minds of human beings are not always entirely at one with the world in which they live, some people have trouble adjusting to reality, basically they're just weak, confused spirits who use words, sometimes very skillfully, to justify their cowardice.
Jose Saramago
#59. Why, why, when one writes, does a sort of shackle bind one's imagination? I become conscious of a deadening mediocrity, perhaps a form of mental cowardice, and I long to break free, to let my imagination take wings. It doesn't - yet ...
Winifred Holtby
#60. Conservatives often seem afraid of questions and liberals afraid of answers - which is even sillier, because that's like being afraid of food. Being afraid of questions is like being afraid of hunger. That's only cowardice.
Peter Kreeft
#61. Everything seems to be catching up with me at once. My failures. My cowardice. My stupidity. Sometimes I'm just so tired of this life.
Tahereh Mafi
#62. Humility is not cowardice. Meekness is not weakness. Humility and meekness are indeed spiritual powers.
Swami Sivananda
#64. Cowardice shuts the eyes till the sky is not larger than a calf-skin: shuts the eyes so that we cannot see the horse that is running away with us; worse, shuts the eyes of the mind and chills the heart.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#65. He felt in his heart cruelty and cowardice, the things which made him brave and kind.
T.H. White
#66. Unlike the beasts of the wild, the many cruel varieties of human monsters, when at last cornered, seldom fight with greater ferocity. Instead, they reveal the cowardice at the core of their brutality.
Dean Koontz
#68. Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. Learning to suspend your imagination and live completely in the very second of the present with no before and no after is the greatest gift a soldier can acquire.
Ernest Hemingway,
#70. Fear is far more painful to cowardice than death to true courage.
Philip Sidney
#71. There is a certain cowardice, a certain weakness, rather, among respectable folk. Only brigands are convinced-of what? That they must succeed. And so they do succeed.
Charles Baudelaire
#72. 35 There are many pretty terms I don't like: you call cowardice "prudence." Your "prudence" gives an opportunity to those enemies of God, without any ideas in their heads, to pass themselves off as scholars, and so reach positions that they never should attain.
Josemaria Escriva
#73. I hate those men who would send into war youth to fight and die for them; the pride and cowardice of those old men, making their wars that boys must die.
Mary Roberts Rinehart
#74. Where choice is set between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence ... I prefer to use arms in defense of honor rather than remain the vile witness of dishonor ...
Mahatma Gandhi
#75. It is from cowardice and not from want of enlightenment that we do not read in our own hearts.
Stendhal
#77. When faced with a choice between violence and cowardice, always choose violence
Mahatma Gandhi
#78. The greatest obstacle in the apostolate of the Church is the timidity or rather the cowardice of the faithful.
Pope Pius X
#80. Asking forgiveness is not ALWAYS an admission of cowardice and of sin, It is to show that having inner peace is far more important than pride especially if they think that you have wronged them in any way.
The Eldest
#82. Ahimsa is an attribute of the brave. Cowardice and ahimsa don't go together any more that water and fire.
Mahatma Gandhi
#83. Sloth is the great enemy
the inspirer of cowardice, irresolution, self-pitying grief, and trivial, hairsplitting doubts. Sloth may also be a psychological cause of sickness. It is tempting to relax from our duties, take refuge in ill-health and hide under a nice warm blanket.
Patanjali
#84. Young men go to war. Sometimes because they have to, sometimes because they want to. Always, they feel they are supposed to. This comes from the sad, layered stories of life, which over the centuries have seen courage confused with picking up arms, and cowardice confused with laying them down.
Mitch Albom
#86. Cowardice, when done correctly, can be its own kind of bravery.
Paul Neilan
#87. Remember, Monsieur, that the downfall of most Communities comes from the cowardice of Superiors in not holding firm and in not purging them of the troublesome and incorrigible.
Vincent De Paul
#88. Because I care about human beings, I want them to be free to do what is right for them. Isn't that more important than mere peace on earth? Isn't freedom, even dangerous freedom, preferable to the safest slavery, to peace bought with ignorance, cowardice, and submission?
CrimethInc.
#89. Only the difference between truth and lies, courage and cowardice.
J.K. Rowling
#90. Janetty tried to dive through the window to escape, what an act of cowardice.
Bobby Heenan
#92. I'm currently in the middle of a depression. I couldn't really tell you what set it off, but I think it stems from my cowardice, which confronts me at every turn.
Anne Frank
#94. And each time the cowardice that deters us from every difficult task, every important enterprise, has urged me to leave the thing alone, to drink my tea and to think merely of the worries of today and my hopes for tomorrow, which can be brooded over painlessly.
Marcel Proust
#95. He would have us without carefulness, without doubt, without cowardice. Our Master does not think so lightly of our unbelief as we do.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#96. The empire took Rhenydd through deceit, murder, and trickery. I don't speak treason. I speak loyalty- loyalty to the monarchy. To sit by and let the empire rape this kingdom and burn this city is treason and, what's more, it's foolhardy cowardice!
Michael J. Sullivan
#97. Could there be a greater proof of our cowardice than fighting amongst ourselves?
Mahatma Gandhi
#98. I really know nothing more criminal, more mean, and more ridiculous than lying. It is the production either of malice, cowardice, or vanity; and generally misses of its aim in every one of these views; for lies are always detected, sooner or later.
Lord Chesterfield
#99. You are less majestically neutral than cloaking your cowardice in principle.
George Hearst
#100. The ultimate evil is the weakness, cowardice, that is one of the constituents of so much human nature. When, rarely, unalloyed nobility does occur, its chances of prevailing are slim. Yet it exists, and its mere existence is reason enough for not wiping the name of mankind off the slate.
John Simon
