pusilanimity

Updated: May 25, 2025

Among other opposite qualities of the mind, which may become dangerous, though in different degrees, I have often had occasion to consider the contrary effects of presumption and despondency; of steady confidence, which promises a victory without contest, and heartless pusilanimity, which shrinks back from the thought of great undertakings, confounds difficulty with impossibility, and considers all advancement towards any new attainment, as irreversibly prohibited.

John Hamilton Moore - The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant

Now, gentlemen, I charge on the stolid vain gloriousness in the first instance, and the contemptible pusilanimity in the second instance, of the Manchester police the valiant Seth Bromleys all that followed. On the skirts of the city the van was attacked by some eighteen Irish youths, having three revolvers three revolvers, gentlemen, and no more amongst them.

A.M. (Alexander Martin) Sullivan - The Wearing of the Green, or The Prosecuted Funeral Procession

Examine yourself, and see whether your notions of the world are changed, by experience, from what they were two years ago in theory; for that alone is one favorable symptom of improvement. One thinks that everything is to be carried by spirit and vigor; that art is meanness, and that versatility and complaisance are the refuge of pusilanimity and weakness.

Earl of Philip Dormer Stanhope Chesterfield - Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a Gentleman, 1752

Our character is the same throughout, say they, and appears best where artifice, fear, and policy have no place, and men can neither be hypocrites with themselves nor others. The generosity, or baseness of our temper, our meekness or cruelty, our courage or pusilanimity, influence the fictions of the imagination with the most unbounded liberty, and discover themselves in the most glaring colours.

David Hume - A Treatise of Human Nature

Examine yourself, and see whether your notions of the world are changed, by experience, from what they were two years ago in theory; for that alone is one favorable symptom of improvement. One thinks that everything is to be carried by spirit and vigor; that art is meanness, and that versatility and complaisance are the refuge of pusilanimity and weakness.

Earl of Philip Dormer Stanhope Chesterfield - Complete Project Gutenberg Earl of Chesterfield Works