Cowardice Quotes - Page 19

• Your devotion is nothing more than cowardice. You would not be here if you had anywhere else to go.

  J. K. Rowling

  Devotion, Ifs

  J.K. Rowling (2015). “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire”, p.17, Pottermore

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• I'd never understood the injunction not to regret anything, couldn't see how that wasn't cowardice.

  China Mieville

  Regret, Understood

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• Nothing wrong with cowardice as long as it comes with prudence. But when a coward stops remembering who he is... God help him.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Long, Coward, Helping

  Khaled Hosseini (2004). “The Kite Runner”, p.206, Penguin

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

  Veronica Roth

  Fear, Believe, Preparation

  Veronica Roth (2013). “Divergent Trilogy”, p.45, HarperCollins UK

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• I do not fight battles that cannot be won. Do not confuse that with cowardice.

  Paolo Bacigalupi

  Fighting, Battle

  Paolo Bacigalupi (2012). “The Drowned Cities: Number 2 in series”, p.84, Hachette UK

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• Retreat itself is often a plan of resistance and may be a precursor of great bravery and sacrifice. Every retreat is not cowardice which implies fear to die.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Sacrifice, Bravery, May

  Mahatma Gandhi (1979). “Collected Works”

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• Let us be wary of ready-made ideas about cowardice and courage: the same burden weighs infinitely more heavily on some shoulders than on others.

  Francois Mauriac

  Ideas, Burden, Made

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• Nearly everything in the scheme of things works to dull a first-rate talent. But the worst probably is cowardice.

  Norman Mailer

  Courage, Dull, Firsts

  Norman Mailer (2003). “The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing”, p.106, Random House

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• We do not choose to be born.We do not--most of us, choose to die, or the times or conditions of our death. But within all this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we shall live--Courageously or in cowardice, Honorably or dishonorably, With purpose or adrift. We decide what is important and what is trivial. What makes us significant is what we DO, Or REFUSE TO DO. WE DECIDE and WE CHOOSE--and so we give definition to our lives.

  Joseph Epstein

  Giving, Important, Adrift

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• If suicide be supposed a crime, it is only cowardice can impel us to it. If it be no crime, both prudence and courage should engage us to rid ourselves at once of existence when it becomes a burden. It is the only way that we can then be useful to society, by setting an example which, if imitated, would preserve every one his chance for happiness in life, and would effectually free him from all danger or misery.

  David Hume

  Suicide, Example, Way

  David Hume (2006). “Essays: Moral, Political and Literary”, p.595, Cosimo, Inc.

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• In unanimity there may well be either cowardice or uncritical thinking.

  Donald Rumsfeld

  Thinking, May, Wells

  Twitter post from Oct 22, 2010

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• It is the part of cowardice, not of courage, to go and crouch in a hole under a massive tomb, to avoid the blows of fortune.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Blow, Holes, Fortune

  Michel de Montaigne (1925). “The essays of Montaigne”

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• Bravery is a mean state concerned with things that inspire confidence and with things fearful ... and leading us to choose danger and to face it, either because to do so is noble, or because not to do so is base. But to court death as an escape from poverty, or from love, or from some grievous pain, is no proof of bravery, but rather of cowardice.

  Aristotle

  Pain, Mean, Bravery

  Aristotle (1869). “The Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle”, p.84

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• It is good to be a cynic - it is better to be a contented cat - and it is best not to exist at all. Universal suicide is the most logical thing in the world - we reject it only because of our primitive cowardice and childish fear of the dark. If we were sensible we would seek death - the same blissful blank which we enjoyed before we existed.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Suicide, Cat, Dark

  "Collected Essays, Volume 5: Philosophy" edited by S. T. Joshi, (p. 71), 2006.

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• 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

  Military, Bravery, Levels

  Ralph Peters (2002). “Beyond Terror”, p.134, Stackpole Books

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• I believe there is no other difference between those who are called courageous and those who are branded craven than that the second are fearful before the danger and the first after it. No one can be much frightened, certainly, during a period of great and immanent peril -- the mind is too much concentrated on the thing itself, and on the actions necessary to meet or avoid it. The coward is a coward, then, because he has brought his fear with him; persons we think cowardly will sometimes amaze us by their bravery, if they have had no forewarning of their danger.

  Gene Wolfe

  Believe, Thinking, Differences

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• Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Mind, Heroic, Scholar

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2015). “Emerson's Essays: Top Essays”, p.16, 谷月社

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• Often life asks much of you, and you either honor life by answering with all your heart, or you cower your way into your grave.

  James Rollins

  Heart, Honor, Way

  Twitter post from May 05, 2013

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• What are the characters that I discern most clearly in the so-called Anglo-Saxon type of man? I may answer at once that two stickout above all others. One is his curious and apparently incurable incompetence--his congenital inability to do any difficult thing easily and well, whether it be isolating a bacillus or writing a sonata. The other is his astounding susceptibility to fears and alarms--in short, his hereditary cowardice.... There is no record in history of any Anglo-Saxon nation entering upon any great war without allies.

  H. L. Mencken

  War, Writing, Character

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “Mencken Chrestomathy”, p.173, Vintage

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• Better it were not to live than to live a coward.

  Walter Raleigh

  Coward

  Sir Walter Raleigh, William Oldys, Thomas Birch (1829). “The Works of Sir Walter Ralegh, Kt: The life of Sir Walter Ralegh, by William Oldys. The life of Sir Walter Ralegh, by Tho. Birch”, p.360

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• 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

  Coward, Miserable, Delinquency

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• It is cowardice to commit suicide.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Suicide, Commit

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• True devotion must not get dispirited; nor elated or satisfied with lesser gains; it must fight against failure, loss, calumny, calamity, ridicule and against egoism and pride , impatience and cowardice .

  Sathya Sai Baba

  Fighting, Pride, Loss

  FaceBook post by Sri Sathya Sai Baba from Oct 27, 2016

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• 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

  Hands, Law, Tyrants

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• Really, one of us ought to have the courage to call the experiment off and shoulder the responsibility for the decision, but the majority reckons that that kind of courage would be a sign of cowardice, and the first step in a retreat. They think it would mean an undignified surrender for mankind as if there was any dignity in floundering and drowning in what we don't understand and never will.

  Stanislaw Lem

  Mean, Responsibility, Thinking

  "Solaris". Book by Stanisław Lem, translated by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox. Chapter 11: "The Thinkers", p. 158, 1970.

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