Timidity is a fault for which it is dangerous to reprove persons whom we wish to correct of it.

It's very difficult to escape your background. You know, I don't think it's necessary to even try to escape it. More and more, I start to think that it's necessary to see exactly what it is that you inherited on both ends of the stick: your timidity, your courage, your self-deceit, and your honesty - and all the rest of it.

On the environment and climate change, I suspect that future generations will think there was too much timidity, too much fear of upsetting business. Basically, New Labour was very nervous about regulating business, or requiring it to do anything, even when there was a very clear social or environmental case for doing so.

I didn't want to be on the losing side. I was fed up with Jewish weakness, timidity and fear. I didn't want any more Jewish sentimentality and Jewish suffering. I was sickened by our sad songs.

Whatever one wants to say about the conduct of the Iraq War, going to war to remove Saddam Hussein in 2003 was a necessary act. It should and could have been done earlier, had not the Clinton White House, which understood the need, not wasted the opportunity through timidity and bluster.

In talking, shyness and timidity distort the very meaning of my words. I don't pretend to know anybody well. People are like shadows to me and I am like a shadow.

What is a fear of living? It's being preeminently afraid of dying. It is not doing what you came here to do, out of timidity and spinelessness. The antidote is to take full responsibility for yourself - for the time you take up and the space you occupy. If you don't know what you're here to do, then just do some good.

Who timidly requests invites refusal.

... it's possible to let love fly by like a cloud in a windy sky if one is too timid, or perhaps unable to believe he is entitled to good fortune.

Faint hearts fair ladies never win.

Remember the old saying, Faint heart ne'er won fair lady.

What is more mortifying than to feel that you have missed the plum for want of courage to shake the tree?

Happiness hates the timid! So does Science!

He will never have true friends who is afraid of making enemies.

He suddenly became shy and developed a conceited grin-the grin of the village yokel whose cricket score is mentioned before a stranger.

There are men whose language is strong and defying enough, yet their eyes and their actions ask leave of other men to live.

Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment.

Shyness has a strange element of narcissism, a belief that how we look, how we perform, is truly important to other people.

There is that destroyeth his own soul through bashfulness.

Women do not fancy timid men.