31 Quotes About Overcoming Cowardice

In moments of hesitation or fear, we often find ourselves grappling with cowardice, an emotion that can hold us back from achieving our true potential. Overcoming this feeling requires courage and resilience, but sometimes a few wise words can spark the motivation we need to push forward. In this blog post, we have compiled a collection of powerful quotes that delve into the essence of facing fears and rising above them. These quotes serve as a reminder that courage isn't the absence of fear, but the mastery of it. As you explore these insights, may they inspire you to confront whatever fears lay ahead and emerge stronger on the other side.

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

2. “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

3. “The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards.” - William Francis Butler

4. “The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.” - Umberto Eco

5. “A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave.” - Mahatma Gandhi

6. “If you go to your death rather than do everything you might to prevent what is happening, you are merely committing suicide and trying to make yourself feel better about it. That is the act of a coward. It is beneath contempt.” - Jim Butcher

7. “Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated.” - George Bernard Shaw

8. “It is better by noble boldness to run the risk of being subject to half of the evils we anticipate than to remain in cowardly listlessness for fear of what might happen.” - Herodotus

9. “Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a portion of mankind, after nature has long since discharged them from external direction (naturaliter maiorennes), nevertheless remains under lifelong tutelage, and why it is so easy for others to set themselves up as their guardians. It is so easy not to be of age. If I have a book which understands for me, a pastor who has a conscience for me, a physician who decides my diet, and so forth, I need not trouble myself. I need not think, if I can only pay - others will easily undertake the irksome work for me.That the step to competence is held to be very dangerous by the far greater portion of mankind...” - Immanuel Kant

10. “You, why are you so afraid of war and slaughter? Even if all the rest of us drop and die around you, grappling for the ships, you’d run no risk of death: you lack the heart to last it out in combat—coward!” - Homer

11. “To say you have no choice is to relieve yourself of responsibility.” - Patrick Ness

12. “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

13. “Being afraid you'll look like a coward is the worst reason for doing anything.” - John Irving

14. “Proximity to power has an unsurprising ability to mutate a politician's spinal cord into bright yellow jelly.” - Tariq Ali

15. “Tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.” - Ayaan Hirsi Ali

16. “It may...be judged indecent in me to come forward on this occasion; but when I see a fellow-creature about to perish through the cowardice of her pretended friends, I wish to be allowed to speak, that I may say what I know of her character.” - Mary Shelley

17. “So you were going to rescue the Prince! Why did you pretend to run away? To deceive the Witch?""Not likely! I'm a coward. Only way I can do something this frightening is to tell myself I'm not doing it!” - Diana Wynne Jones

18. “If you don't make a few ememies now and then, you're a coward-or worse. Besides, it as worth it to see his reaction. Oh, he was angry!- Angela to Eragon” - Christopher Paolini

19. “The devil's happy when the critics run you off.” - Criss Jami

20. “Cowards make the best torturers. Cowards understand fear and they can use it.” - Mark Lawrence

21. “Cowardice rightly understood begins with selfishness and ends with shame.” - Jose Rizal

22. “How reprehensible it is when those blessed with commodities insist on ignoring the poor. Better to torment them, force them into indentured servitude, inflict compulsion and blows—this at least produces a connection, fury and a pounding heart, and these too constitute a form of relationship. But to cower in elegant homes behind golden garden gates, fearful lest the breath of warm humankind touch you, unable to indulge in extravagances for fear they might be glimpsed by the embittered oppressed, to oppress and yet lack the courage to show yourself as an oppressor, even to fear the ones you are oppressing, feeling ill at ease in your own wealth and begrudging others their ease, to resort to disagreeable weapons that require neither true audacity nor manly courage, to have money, but only money, without splendor: That’s what things look like in our cities at present” - Robert Walser

23. “That was the thing to remember about all monsters, They love to frightenpeople, but the minute you stare them down, they turn tail and run.” - Jeanette Walls

24. “Sometimes it takes bravery in order to be a coward.” - Lionel Suggs

25. “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

26. “We may place blame, give reasons, and even have excuses; but in the end, it is an act of cowardice to not follow your dreams.” - Steve Maraboli

27. “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

28. “All of us, I suppose, like to believe that in a moral emergency we will behave like the heroes of our youth, bravely and forthrightly, without thought of personal loss or discredit. Certainly that was my conviction back in the summer of 1968. Tim O'Brien: a secret hero. The Lone Ranger. If the stakes ever became high enough—if the evil were evil enough, if the good were good enough—I would simply tap a secret reservoir of courage that had been accumulating inside me over the years. Courage, I seemed to think, comes to us in finite quantities, like an inheritance, and by being frugal and stashing it away and letting it earn interest, we steadily increase our moral capital in preparation for that day when the account must be drawn down. It was a comforting theory. It dispensed with all those bothersome little acts of daily courage; it offered hope and grace to the repetitive coward; it justified the past while amortizing the future.” - Tim O'Brien

29. “She has her helmet, shield and sword. Does she finish him or take pity on the gutless thing before her?Does she set fire and smoke him out, forcing him to fight, or does she let him live with himself and take satisfaction from knowing that he has never been in a real fight in his life and that one day he will have to face his demons in person, along with the consequences, and that both can be far more painful than anything she could ever do to him.” - Donna Lynn Hope

30. “It's my petty fear of personal rejection that allows so many true evils to exist. My cowardice enables atrocities.” - Chuck Palahniuk

31. “Tom's cowardice was as huge as his courage, as it must be in great men.” - John Steinbeck