C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Timidity
Women do not fancy timid men.
Timidity is a disease of the mind.
Timidity challenges the scorn of women.
That mute eloquence which passeth speech.
Looks that asked, yet dared not hope relief.
No woman dares express all she thinks.
Silent when glad; affectionate, though shy.
An ounce of courage will go farther with women than a pound of timidity.
Death of thy soul! those linen cheeks of thine are counsellors to fear.
Early and provident fear is the mother of safety.
The absent danger greater still appears; less fears he who is near the thing he fears.
A thousand fears still overawe when she appears.
Bestow, base man, thy idle threats elsewhere; my mother’s daughter knows not how to fear.
Women, somehow, have the same fear of witty men as of fireworks.
The beings who appear cold, but are only timid, adore where they dare to love.
Speechless with wonder and half dead with fear.
A woman is seldom merciful to the man who is timid.
One with more of soul in his face than words on his tongue.
Presumption will be easily corrected; but timidity is a disease of the mind more obstinate and fatal.
Until every good man is brave, we must expect to find many good women timid—too timid even to believe in the correctness of their own best promptings, when these would place them in a minority.
Love is frightened at the intervals of insensibility and callousness that encroach by little and little on the dominion of grief, and it makes efforts to recall the keenness of the first anguish.