No.
Consider three variables, $X$, $Y$ and $Z = X+Y$. Their covariance matrix, $M$, is not positive definite, since there's a vector $z$ ($= (1, 1, -1)'$) for which $z'Mz$ is not positive.
Population covariance matrices are positive semi-definite.
(See property 2 here.)
Sample covariance matrices - depending on how they deal with missing values in some variables - may or may not be positive semi-definite. If pairwise deletion is used, for example, then there's no guarantee of positive semi-definiteness. Further, accumulated numerical error can cause sample covariance matrices that should be notionally positive semi-definite to fail to be.
Like so:
x <- rnorm(30)
y <- rnorm(30) - x/10 # it doesn't matter for this if x and y are correlated or not
z <- x+y
M <- cov(data.frame(x=x,y=y,z=z))
z <- rbind(1,1,-1)
t(z)%*%M%*%z
[,1]
[1,] -1.110223e-16
The result came out negative, even though it should be algebraically zero. A different set of numbers might yield a positive number or an "exact" zero.
--
Example of moderate missingness leading to loss of positive semidefiniteness via pairwise deletion:
z <- x + y + rnorm(30)/50 # same x and y as before.
xyz1 <- data.frame(x=x,y=y,z=z) # high correlation but definitely of full rank
xyz1$x[sample(1:30,5)] <- NA # make 5 x's missing
xyz1$y[sample(1:30,5)] <- NA # make 5 y's missing
xyz1$z[sample(1:30,5)] <- NA # make 5 z's missing
cov(xyz1,use="pairwise") # the individual pairwise covars are fine ...
x y z
x 1.2107760 -0.2552947 1.255868
y -0.2552947 1.2728156 1.037446
z 1.2558683 1.0374456 2.367978
chol(cov(xyz1,use="pairwise")) # ... but leave the matrix not positive semi-definite
Error in chol.default(cov(xyz1, use = "pairwise")) :
the leading minor of order 3 is not positive definite
chol(cov(xyz1,use="complete")) # but deleting even more rows leaves it PSD
x y z
x 0.8760209 -0.2253484 0.64303448
y 0.0000000 1.1088741 1.11270078
z 0.0000000 0.0000000 0.01345364