Quotes & Sayings About Cowardice

Nostalgia is cowardice — Mario Vargas-Llosa

There has been among us, particularly in America, an adolescent competitiveness - a feeling that life is a race in which the victory of one must mean the defeat of the other. No one can measure how much personal unhappiness and inner cowardice have come from this immaturity of our social outlook, this childlike comparison, this absurd rivalry in every area of life. As our democracy becomes more mature, men have a chance of growing up and of realizing that every person is needed and has some contribution to make. — Joshua Loth Liebman

We believe that preparation eradicates cowardice, which we define as the failure to act in the midst of fear. — Veronica Roth

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

'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

On the whole, however, it is only out of pride or gross ignorance, or cowardice, that we refuse to see in the present the lineaments of times to come. — Marguerite Yourcenar

Many people today believe that cynicism requires courage. Actually, cynicism is the height of cowardice. It is innocence and open-heartedness that requires the true courage-however often we are hurt as a result of it. — Erica Jong

My dear Mrs. Grimstone, sometimes cowardice is merely another word for common sense. — Lauren Willig

Men can be pitiless towards a woman whose body has eluded them, particularly if this is thanks to their own cowardice. — Andrei Makine

The crowdedness of family life and the faithfulness of solitude - both brave decisions, or both decisions of cowardice - make little dent, in the end, on the profound and perplexing loneliness in which every human heart dwells. — Yiyun Li

So whatever is experientially real, accept it. You cannot do anything by denying it. By denying it you create the problem, and the problem becomes more complex. It is simple: you feel you are a coward, so what? So, "I am a coward." Just see the point! If you can accept cowardice you have already become brave. Only a brave person can accept the fact of being a coward; no coward can do that. You are already on the way to transformation. So the first thing is that nothing that is experienced as a fact has to be denied reality. Second, — Osho

One needs to be either more brave or more good, because if courage is lacking goodness can substitute, while cowardice is the deficiency of both. — Neel Burton

Pacifism is simply undisguised cowardice. — Adolf Hitler

What if there are children who will suffer somehow because I failed to obey God? What if my cowardice costs even one child somewhere in the world his or her life? — Richard Stearns

I have plumbed the depth of human cowardice and I realized that there is only one way to be right, and that is to be in power. — Georges Bidault

As someone who struggles with anxiety and cowardice, as we all do, I'm profoundly inspired by ... full-on commitment to wonder, to wonder as a response to anguish or difficulty. It makes everything a puzzle, right? A catastrophe is nothing but a puzzle with the volume of drama turned up very high. — Elizabeth Gilbert

For thousands to do to death a few hundreds is no bravery. It is worse than cowardice. It is unworthy of nationalism, of any religion. — Mahatma Gandhi

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

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

Those who are brave, are the greatest cowards of all. For they fear failure. — James Miller

Wherever it has been established that it is shameful to be involved with sexual relationships with men, that is due to evil on the part of the rulers, and to cowardice on the part of the governed. — Plato

Bullies are always to be found where there are cowards. — Mahatma Gandhi

The Sorting Hat is notorious for refusing to admit it has made a mistake in its sorting of a student. On those occasions when Slytherins behave altruistically or selflessly, when Ravenclaws flunk all their exams, when Hufflepuffs prove lazy yet academically gifted and when Gryffindors exhibit cowardice, the Hat steadfastly backs its original decision. On balance, however, the Hat has made remarkably few errors of judgement over the many centuries it has been at work. — J.K. Rowling

And I could test myself - my own courage - with it, too, because when the doors at either end of the secret staircase were closed, it was impenetrably dark. I hid in the staircase, shivering with terror, telling the narrative: The little girl was in a dark, dark place but she was very brave ... Sometimes the door at the bottom opened, and a wedge of light sliced up the stairs; a maid, her arms filled with folded laundry, would find me and ask in amazement what I was doing there.
And though I answered lightheartedly that I was playing, the truth is that I was not entirely certain what I was doing there, crouched and frightened in the darkness. Only now, sixty years later, do I see that I was arming myself, rehearsing panic, loss, and helplessness; assessing my own cowardice and courage, and and the same time reassuring myself that the door would always open, that the light would always find its way in. — Lois Lowry

The price of cowardice will only be evil. We shall reap courage and victory only when we dare to make sacrifices. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

They did not submit to the obvious alternative, which was simply to close the eyes and fall. So easy, really. Go limp and tumble to the ground and let the muscles unwind and not speak and not budge until your buddies picked you up and lifted you into the chopper that would roar and dip its nose and carry you off to the world. A mere matter of falling, yet no one ever fell. It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards. — Tim O'Brien

Cowardice is impotence worse than violence. The coward desires revenge but being afraid to die, he looks to others, maybe to the government of the day, to do the work of defense for him. A coward is less than a man. He does not deserve to be a member of a society of men and women. — Mahatma Gandhi

There is a secret earth gyrm, a place where the unbelievable, the unthinkable, the terrible, takes place every day. A place hidden by the veils of ignorance and cowardice and fear. On occasions we glimpse it, when its hidden terrors fall through that veil into plain sight, but mostly we just dismiss it as something else, somewhere else, to be dealt with by someone else. Long ago I found the veil and lifted it. And knowing as I do what is behind, what those behind it get away with, with impunity ... I cannot grow old basking on the bank of some safe-haven, no. — Shaun Hick

In Germany they came first for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up
because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up
because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up
because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up
because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time no one was left
to speak up for me. — Martin Niemoller

Even the most sacred things are not to be honored before the Devil has had his say against them. But since the evil advocate is always able to think of further objections, absolute certainty can never be achieved. He is also allowed to go to extremes, to make use of polemics, mockery or slander. A sentimental plea for tolerance and decorum is merely an attempt to protect one's own cowardice. — Wolfgang Sofsky

Pacifism is a virtue indistinguishable from cowardice. — Brent Weeks

Sometimes it takes bravery in order to be a coward. — Lionel Suggs

It is from cowardice and not from want of enlightenment that we do not read in our own hearts. — Stendhal

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

He who has conquered his own coward spirit has conquered the whole outward world; — Thomas Hughes

Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it is always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals come easily. — Cormac McCarthy

My cowardice is such of passion, complimenting the revolutionary spirit that lives in its shadow. — Ray Bradbury

You always know more than you think you know without being aware of it. You always remember best what has hurt most.
Memory is a reflex of the pain. Knowledge is the memory of the pain combined with the unconsciousness which we 'rationalize' via dreams or by means of reading literature. It is impossible to learn from someone else's experience unless we don't assume this experience as our own's, which we can achieve only by living it anew and from scratch. We can not live our lives at someone else's expense. Only life fraught with dangers and risks and lived as your own's deserves its name. Only selfish people do not live their lives as if they do not belong entirely to them. Cowardice equals a life that you refuse to live at its fullest and at its most dangerous. — Martin Walser

Ah, yes, superstition: it would appear to be cowardice in face of the supernatural. — Theophrastus

The price of freedom is high - far higher than that of slavery. And it is not paid in gold, nor in blood, nor in the most noble sacrifices, but in cowardice, in prostitution, in treachery, and in everything that is rotten in the human soul. — Curzio Malaparte

A man that flies from his fear may find that he has only taken a short cut to meet it. — J.R.R. Tolkien

I understood about fear. And I knew better than anyone in that room what Mouse was capable of. But still I had been raised in a place where to show your fear was worse than cowardice. It was suicide, a sin. — Walter Mosley

A coward's courage is in his tongue. — Edmund Burke

Perhaps I shouldn't call it shit. That's a bit crude. I don't really despise Christianity or even the Roman Church, and certainly not the incontrovertible glory of the Middle Ages. What I do despise is the contemporary inclination to flop to the knees and crawl back into the past, to shy from what seem like impossible problems in order to bury the head, asshole aloft and twitching, in the Sands of Time. Cowardice, I calls it. Illusion-seeking. Womb-crawling. And treason. Desertion in the face of the enemy.
Strong words indeed. But I've always been rather a blunt, tough, plain-spoken type ... — Edward Abbey

My dear," said my mother suddenly, "take the money and run on. I am going to faint." This was certainly the end for us both, I thought. How I cursed the cowardice of the neigbors; how I blamed my poor mother for her honesty and her greed, for her past foolhardiness and present weakness! We were just at the little bridge, by good fortune, and I helped her, tottering as she was, to the edge of the bank, where, sure enough, she gave a sigh and fell on my shoulder. I do not know how I found the strength to do it all, and I am afraid it was roughly done, but I managed to drag her down to the bank and a little way under the arch. Farther I could not mover her, for the bridge was too low to let me do more than crawl below it. So there we had to stay--my mother almost entirely visible and both of us within earshot of the inn. — Robert Louis Stevenson

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

The truth is people are an extraordinary mixture of heroism and cowardice. — Agatha Christie

I am a coward. I am a cowardly coward, full of cowardice. — Alex Flinn

Extremism thrives amid ignorance and anger, intimidation and cowardice. — Hillary Clinton

It is true that so far as wealth gives time for ideal ends and exercise to ideal energies, wealth is better than poverty and ought to be chosen. But wealth does this in only a portion of the actual cases. Elsewhere the desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption. There must be thousands of conjunctures in which a wealth-bound man must be a slave, whilst a man for whom poverty has no terrors becomes a freeman. — William James

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

I know you'll probably get angry with me for that, shout, stamp your feet: "speak just for yourself and your miseries in the underground, and don't go saying 'we all.'" Excuse me, gentleman, but I am not justifying myself with this allishness. As far as I myself am concerned, I have merely carried to an extreme in my life what you have not dared to carry even halfway, and, what's more, you've taken your cowardice for good sense, and found comfort in thus deceiving yourselves. So that I, perhaps, come out even more "living" than you. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Music is one way of saying things that you cannot really say to a person face to face, a sign of suppressed anger, unhealthy, deadly and gigantic idolatry. — The Eldest

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

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

Classic is our daring, classic our cowardice. Classic is our cruelty, classic our charity. — Robert Ardrey

Cowardice is not a sign of belief in God. — Mahatma Gandhi

It is what you do about the fear you feel that sets you apart, to be a coward or a courageous person. — Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

The age-old and noble thought of 'I will lay down my life to save another,' is nothing more than cowardice. — Charles Darwin

The past is devoid of meaning like the present, and a refuge for cowards. — E. M. Forster

That was the thing to remember about all monsters, They love to frighten
people, but the minute you stare them down, they turn tail and run. — Jeannette Walls

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

I think,' Olympia said slowly, 'that I know you quite well.' She looked down at the deck and added in a carefully mild voice, 'You can be a scoundrel; I know that. You stole from me and betrayed me and lied to me. You have no morals and no ideals; you think of yourself first and you're a coward sometimes on that account.' She hesitated, chewing her lip. 'What people call a coward, anyway. I don't know what cowardice is anymore. I don't know what heroism is.' She looked up. 'But I know one thing, and I learned it from you. I know what courage means. It means to pick up and go on, no matter what. It means having a heart of iron, like they say. You have that. — Laura Kinsale

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

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

The tyrant, who in order to hold his power, suppresses every superiority, does away with good men, forbids education and light, controls every movement of the citizens and, keeping them under a perpetual servitude, wants them to grow accustomed to baseness and cowardice, has his spies everywhere to listen to what is said in the meetings, and spreads dissension and calumny among the citizens and impoverishes them, is obliged to make war in order to keep his subjects occupied and impose on them permanent need of a chief. — Aristotle.

I want to attempt a thing like that and am frightened by these trifles," he thought, with an odd smile. "Hm ... yes, all is in a man's hands and he lets it all slip from cowardice, that's an axiom. It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what they fear most ... . But I am talking too much. It's because I chatter that I do nothing. Or perhaps it is that I chatter because I do nothing. I've learned to chatter this last month, lying for days together in my den thinking ... of Jack the Giant — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Cowardice is the most terrible of vices. — Mikhail Bulgakov

And Athos had. He'd broken Holland one bone, one day, one order at a time. Until all Holland wanted, more than the ability to save his world, more than the strength to bring the magic back, more than anything, was for it to end.
It was cowardice, he knew, but cowardice came so much easier than hope. — V.E Schwab

The temptation to hide in his job, to allow all his thoughts and emotions to become absorbed in the details of his career was hard to resist. It felt like virtue and it was quite possible to be completely self-righteous about it. But it was, he knew, only cowardice in disguise. If you weren't willing to face your life - all your life, including the rough parts - then you weren't truly living. You were just making a living. He — Pamela Morsi

What cowardice it is to be dismayed by the happiness of others and devastated by there good fortune. — Baron De Montesquieu

Cowardice rightly understood begins with selfishness and ends with shame. — Jose Rizal

A writer is merely a reader that had the guts to be read, and, heard. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

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

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

You will strip away your weakness, your cowardice, your hesitation. You will become like a waterfall, a volley of bullets - you will all surge in the same direction at the same pace toward the same cause. You will forgo comforts; you will live by duty alone. You will eat country and breathe nation. — Anthony Doerr

we do not ask. We want to be told. One of the most curious things in the structure of our psyche is that we all want to be told because we are the result of the propaganda of ten thousand years. We want to have our thinking confirmed and corroborated by another, whereas to ask a question is to ask it of yourself. — Jiddu Krishnamurti

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

Contrary to popular wisdom, bullies are rarely cowards.
Bullies come in various shapes and sizes. Observe yours. Gather intelligence.
Shunning one hopeless battle is not an act of cowardice.
Hankering for security or popularity makes you weak and vulnerable.
Which is worse: Scorn earned by informers? Misery endured by victims?
The brutal May have been molded by a brutality you cannot exceed.
Let guile be your ally.
Respect earned by integrity cannot be lost without your consent.
Don't laugh at what you don't find funny.
Don't support an opinion you don't hold.
The independent befriend the independent.
Adolescence dies in its fourth year. You live to be eighty. — David Mitchell

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

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

Our own selfishness makes us the most arrant cowards; our own selfishness is the great cause of fear and cowardice. — Swami Vivekananda

Faith, not cowardice, takes the step into unknown territory for the sake of Jesus Christ and His church. Love, not self-preserving protectiveness, sacrifices its own life that others might live. Hope of new life, not resignation to inevitable decline, yields itself up in the quest for a better future. — Darrin Patrick

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

True courage lies in the middle, between cowardice and recklessness. — Miguel De Cervantes

She bade us remember that it was cowardice to succumb to the greatest misfortunes, and that with time and courage there was no evil that could not be remedied. — Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot De Villeneuve

Without the blessing of cowardice, the world would long since have been torn to bits. — Mason Cooley

I have always thought it rather interesting to follow the involuntary movements of fear in clever people. Fools coarsely display their cowardice in all its nakedness, but the others are able to cover it with a veil so delicate, so daintily woven with small plausible lies, that there is some pleasure to be found in contemplating this ingenious work of the human intelligence. — Alexis De Tocqueville

Envy is a passion so full of cowardice and shame that nobody ever had the confidence to own it. — John Wilmot

It is thus that mutual cowardice keeps us in peace. Were one half of mankind brave and one cowards, the brave would be always beating the cowards. Were all brave, they would lead a very uneasy life; all would be continually fighting; but being all cowards, we go on very well. — Samuel Johnson

A coward: a man or woman who is unsatisfied by his condition and believes he was destined to accept it that way — Bangambiki Habyarimana

[L]ike it or not, the right timing is an inescapable part of human endeavor and thus of politics. . . . But some activists suggest that "timing" is irrelevant in public policy and politics. In their view, it's just another "excuse" by "incrementalists," another example of their traitorous cowardice, another reason why they should be condemned and purged. . . . There is a fundamental ethical and practical difference between compromise and prudently fighting for the most good that can be gained in the face of overwhelming odds. . . . Realizing the constraints and limits of this world should guard us against unrealistic expectations of what politics can or should achieve. And yet, the examples of Wilberforce and Lincoln, among many others, demonstrate that moral purpose can be successfully pursued in politics with prudence. — Clarke D. Forsythe

No, I wasn't going to refer to cowardice. What I was going to say was, that a man contemplating suicide should bear in mind that his act is usually paid for by others. It is not just his personal affair. Everyone who takes his or her own life increases the fear in all his progeny of committing the same act during a period of depression. In fact, every blood relation he possesses gets a drop of the same poison. Nice parting gift. — Olive Higgins Prouty

The thing that cowardice fears most is decision — Soren Kierkegaard

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

It's obsequious little nicety-nice girls like me who allow assholes to run the world: Miss Harlot O'Harlots, billionaire phony tree huggers, hypocrite drug-snorting, weed-puffing peace activists who fund the mass-murdering drug cartels and perpetuate crushing poverty in dirt-poor banana republics. It's my petty fear of personal rejection that allows so many true evils to exist. My cowardice enables atrocities. — Chuck Palahniuk

Some big guys, they think struttin' the muscle will put your tail between your legs, but all they got is strut, they ain't got the guts to back up the brag — Dean Koontz

For peace, with justice and honor, is the fairest and most profitable of possessions, but with disgrace and shameful cowardice, it is the most infamous and harmful of all. — Polybius

As long as greed, stupidity and cowardice remain a part of the human condition, there will be a constituency for Democrats. — Jack Kelly

The problem about cutting out the best of your heart and giving it to people, is that 1. It hurts to do that; and 2. You never know if they are going to throw it away or not. But then you should still do it. Because any other way is cowardice. At the end of the day, it's about being brave and we are only haunted by the ghosts that we trap within ourselves; we are not haunted by the ghosts that we let out. We are haunted by the ghosts that we cover and hide. So you let those ghosts out in that best piece of your heart that you give to someone. And if the other person throws it away? Or doesn't want it to begin with? Someone else will come along one day, cut out from his/her heart that exact same jagged shape that you cut out of your own heart, and make their piece of heart fit into the rest of yours. Wait for that person. And you can fill their missing piece with your soul. — C. JoyBell C.