your soul has been assailed by cowardice,
which often weighs so heavily on a man — distracting him from honorable trials — as phantoms frighten beasts when shadows fall.

, your spirit is attacked by cowardly fear, that often weighs men down, so that it deflects them from honourable action

Thy soul is by vile fear assailed, which oft so overcasts a man, that he recoils from noblest resolution, like a beast at some false semblance in the twilight gloom.

At the bottom of a good deal of the bravery that appears in the world there lurks a miserable cowardice. Men will face powder and steel because they cannot face public opinion.

:::by all that the coward fears.

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.

All too often cowardice wears the habit of wounded pride.

That man is not truly brave who is afraid either to seem or to be, when it suits him, a coward.

I'm a coward when it comes to matters of the heart. That is my fatal flaw.

:To be led by a coward

Take hope from the heart of man and you make him a beast of prey.

The ghost of the generous poet replied: ‘If I have understood your words correctly, your spirit is attacked by cowardly fear, that often weighs men down, so that it deflects them from honourable action, like a creature seeing phantoms in the dusk.

A cowardly leader is the most dangerous of men.

The man who shuns and fears everything and stands up to nothing becomes a coward; the man who is afraid of nothing at all, but marches up to every danger becomes foolhardy. Similarly the man who indulges in pleasure and refrains from none becomes licentious (akolastos); but if a man behaves like a boor (agroikos) and turns his back on every pleasure, he is a case of insensibility. Thus temperance and courage are destroyed by excess and deficiency and preserved by the mean.