Top 88 Quotes About Obstinacy
#1. The despotism of will in ideas is styled plan, project, character, obstinacy; its despotism in desires is called passion.
Antoine Rivarol
#2. It is altogether as worthy of God and as much becoming Him to pardon and show mercy, in case of repentance and submission and reformation, as to punish, in case of impenitency and obstinacy.
Benjamin Whichcote
#3. If you deal obstinacy with obstinacy in this world; resolution will not come. Simplicity against obstinacy will bring about resolution.
Dada Bhagwan
#4. [The Germans] so easily confuse obstinacy with energy, and rudeness with firmness.
Madame De Stael
#5. Steadfastness is a noble quality, but unguided by knowledge or humility, it becomes rashness, or obstinacy.
Aaron Swartz
#6. I believe that obstinacy, or the dread of control and discipline, arises not so much from self-willedness as from a conscious defect of voluntary power; as foolhardiness is not seldom the disguise of conscious timidity.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#7. Of course, I'm aware of the animosities destroying brain cells on both sides, and I know all about the obstinacy of the warring parties, their refusal to reach an agreement, their devotion to their own murderous hatred ... .
Yasmina Khadra
#8. Revolutions arise from obstinacy. People are dissatisfied with what they are told and they develop new ideas.
Dirk Kurbjuweit
#9. Where the subject lies so far beyond our reach, the difference between the highest and the lowest of human understandings may indeed be calculated as infinitely small; yet the degree of weakness may perhaps be measured by the degree of obstinacy and dogmatic confidence.
Edward Gibbon
#10. Mostly he misses Jutta: her loyalty, her obstinacy, the way she always seems to recognize what is right. Though in Werner's weaker moments, he resents those same qualities in his sister. Perhaps she's the impurity in him, the static in his signal that the bullies can sense.
Anthony Doerr
#12. Whatever excites the spirit of contradiction is capable of producing the last effects of heroism; which is only the highest pitch of obstinacy, in a good or bad cause, in wisdom or folly.
William Hazlitt
#13. Obstinacy and heat in argument are surest proofs of folly. Is there anything so stubborn, obstinate, disdainful, contemplative, grave, or serious, as an ass?
Michel De Montaigne
#14. God sends his messengers to those whose hardness and obstinacy he certainly knows and foresees, that it may appear he would have them turn and live.
Matthew Henry
#15. John Masterman once wrote: Sometimes in life27 you feel that there is something which you must do, and in which you must trust your own judgment and not that of any other person. Some call it conscience and some plain obstinacy. Well, you can take your choice.
Ben Macintyre
#16. May God in his mercy enable us without obstinacy to perceive our errors.
Michael Servetus
#17. Regard the Franj! Behold with what obstinacy they fight for their religion, while we, the Muslims, show no enthusiasm for waging holy war.
Kenneth S. Saladin
#18. Whitewash on the forehead hardens the brain into a state of obstinacy, perhaps.
Charles Dickens
#19. What is it that doesn't allow you to go to moksha? Obstinacy!
Dada Bhagwan
#20. Novel writing is mostly triage (this now, that later) and obstinacy. Trying something, and when that doesn't work, trying something else. Welcoming clutter Surrendering a good idea for a better one. Knowing you won't find the finish line for a year or two, or five ...
Richard Russo
#21. If by sticking to the moral principles you have followed all your life, you jeopardize your happiness and that of others, throw over your principles. Principles for principles' sake -that is not wisdom; that is obstinacy. Principles should be fluid because life is fluid.
Epifanio De Los Santos
#22. Public opinion is a compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs.
Robert Peel
#23. A nation ignorant of the equal benefits of liberty and law, must be awed by the flashes of arbitrary power: the cruelty of a despot will assume the character of justice; his profusion, of liberality; his obstinacy, of firmness.
Edward Gibbon
#24. Perversity and obstinacy are integral tae the Scottish character.
Irvine Welsh
#26. Obstinacy is the sister of constancy, at least in vigor and stability.
Michel De Montaigne
#27. The Master was entirely free from four things: prejudice, foregone conclusions, obstinacy, and egoism.
Confucius
#28. Obstinacy and dogmatism are the surest signs of stupidity. Is there anything more confident, resolute, disdainful, grave and serious than an ass?
Michel De Montaigne
#29. Pride had given way at last, obstinacy was gone: the will was powerless.
Emmuska Orczy
#30. The obstinacy of cleverness and reason is nothing to the obstinacy of folly and inanity.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
#31. Obstinacy is a fault of temperament. Stubbornness and intolerance of contradiction result from a special kind of egotism, which elevates above everything else the pleasure of its autonomous intellect, to which others must bow.
Carl Von Clausewitz
#32. Make something, a kind of object, which as it changes or falls apart (dies as it were) or increases in its parts (grows as it were) offers no clue as to what its state or form or nature was at any previous time. Physical and Metaphysical. Obstinacy. Could this be a useful object?
Jasper Johns
#33. Obstinacy is ever most positive when it is most in the wrong.
Suzanne Curchod
#34. Obstinacy is the strength of the weak. Firmness founded upon principle, upon the truth and right, order and law, duty and generosity, is the obstinacy of sages.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#35. Obstinacy in a bad cause is but constancy in a good.
Thomas Browne
#36. It is a thing to be regretted (and prevented, if possible) that a whole nation should be ruined for the pride and obstinacy of its princes,
Matthew Henry
#37. One of the satisfactions of a genius is his will-power and obstinacy.
Man Ray
#38. To write is to transform that inward gaze into words, to study the worlds into which we pass when we retire into ourselves, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy.
Orhan Pamuk
#39. Hitherto the plans of the educationalists have achieved very little of what they attempted, and indeed we may well thank the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still possesses.
C.S. Lewis
#40. Because - and don't let anybody tell you different - novel writing is mostly triage (this now, that later) and obstinacy.
Richard Russo
#41. The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is, that one often comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won't.
Henry Ward Beecher
#42. The fascination of sleep, which pits the lure of the void against the obstinacy of an impotent will, is an obstacle that life has perhaps never surmounted.
Georges Bataille
#43. Obstinacy and vehemency in opinion are the surest proofs of stupidity.
Bernard Barton
#44. The line between pride in our work and neurotic obstinacy is a narrow one. We make our recommendations clear. But we do not grudge our clients the right to the final say. It is their money.
David Ogilvy
#45. Like the periwig and the bowler hat, the plus-four and the bow-tie, the blazer is on the way out, and those who persist in wearing it do so with a smattering of self-consciousness, a touch of obstinacy, even a pinch of camp.
Craig Brown
#46. Sheer obstinacy is far more durable than courage, though it's not as pretty.
Lionel Shriver
#47. I have always had the urge to open forbidden doors: with a curiosity and an obstinacy that verge on masochism.
Jeanne Moreau
#48. Unbelief shall be left inexcusable, and convicted of a wilful obstinacy.
Matthew Henry
#49. Would Mr. Darcy then consider the rashness of your original intention as atoned for by your obstinacy in adhering to it?
Jane Austen
#50. Obstinacy is the result of the will forcing itself into the place of the intellect.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#51. We often credit ourselves with vices the reverse of what we have, thus when weak we boast of our obstinacy.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#52. There, he had learnt to distinguish between the steadiness of principle and the obstinacy of self-will, between the darings of heedlessness and the resolution of a collected mind.
Jane Austen
#53. Perfect typography is certainly the most elusive of all arts. Sculpture in stone alone comes near it in obstinacy.
Jan Tschichold
#54. Heretics were most often bitterly persecuted for the their least deviation from accepted belief. It was precisely their obstinacy about trifles that irritated the righteous to madness.
Lev Shestov
#55. At the back of it there lies the central citadel of obstinacy: I will not give up my right to myself
the thing God intends you to give up if ever you are going to be a disciple of Jesus Christ.
Oswald Chambers
#56. Obstinacy is will asserting itself without being able to justify itself. It is persistence without a reasonable motive. It is the tenacity of self-love substituted for that of reason and conscience.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#57. Flowing egoism is not objectionable but if it is caught-up even a little-bit; it is known as obstinacy. Flowing egoism is dramatic egoism. It is not problematic.
Dada Bhagwan
#58. The artist, surgeon, through clay form, can only look for cure with great obstinacy until he discovers, repeatedly, that love is god's only gift that enables man to transcend his tragedy and regain his wholeness and well-being beyond the claws of evil, rampaging as evil may be.
Jabra Ibrahim Jabra
#59. The obstinacy on which power is based is never so fragile as in the moment of its triumph.
Italo Calvino
#60. One blames politicians, not for inconsistency but for obstinacy. They are the interpreters, not the masters, of our fate. It is their job, in fact, to register the fact accompli.
John Maynard Keynes
#62. Obstinacy and contention are common qualities, most appearing in, and best becoming, a mean and illiterate soul.
Michel De Montaigne
#63. Optimism," said Cacambo, "What is that?" "Alas!" replied Candide, "It is the obstinacy of maintaining that everything is best when it is worst.
Voltaire
#64. I invite you, citizens, to open your eyes and to give serious attention to the future. Reflect on the disasters which may ensue from longer obstinacy. Submit to lawful authority, if you wish to preserve the South untouched. Save your families and your property.
Toussaint Louverture
#65. A narrow mind begets obstinacy; we do not easily believe what we cannot see.
John Dryden
#66. People who want a sane, static, measurable world take the first aspect of an event or person and stick to it, with an almost self-protective obstinacy, or by a natural limitation of their imaginations. They do not indulge in either deepening or magnifying.
Anais Nin
#67. No man is good for anything who has not some particle of obstinacy to use upon occasion.
Henry Ward Beecher
#68. The obstinacy of the indolent and weak is less conquerable than that of the fiery and bold.
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#69. General scepticism is the live mental attitude of refusing to conclude. It is a permanent torpor of the will, renewing itself in detail towards each successive thesis that offers, and you can no more kill it off by logic than you can kill off obstinacy or practical joking.
William James
#70. 'Tis known by the name of perseverance in a good cause, and of obstinacy in a bad one.
Laurence Sterne
#71. Obstinacy is perhaps the only human quality that matters at the end of the day, not only in the profession of the policeman but in many professions. At least in any that have something to do with the notion of truth.
Michel Houellebecq
#72. It is not error which opposes the progress of truth; it is indolence, obstinacy, the spirit of routine, every thing which favors inaction.
Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot
#73. I can see no justification whatever for the attitude which refuses on purely a priori grounds to accept action at a distance ... Such an attitude bespeaks an unimaginativeness, a mental obtuseness and obstinacy.
Percy Williams Bridgman
#74. I owe as much of my success to an uncompromising obstinacy as to any original ideas.
Albert Einstein
#75. No man is defeated without some resentment which will be continued with obstinacy while he believes himself in the right, and asserted with bitterness, if even to his own conscience he is detected in the wrong.
Samuel Johnson
#76. Love is the only fire that is hot enough to melt the iron obstinacy of a creatures will
Alexander MacLaren
#77. When a woman falls in love with me, I feel guilty. I am convinced that it's pure obstinacy that keeps me from reciprocating her passion. As I explain to her that I'm gay, it sounds, even to me, like a silly excuse; I scarcely believe it myself.
Edmund White
#78. For obstinacy standing alone is the weakest of all things in one whose mind is not possessed by wisdom.
Aeschylus
#79. I had of course met with incredulity..., but seldom with a will to incredulity.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#80. Worldly life is not an impediment; your obstinacies and your ignorance of the self are only the impediments.
Dada Bhagwan
#82. If you plan to build walls around me, know this - I will walk through them.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#83. One should not be obstinate even in worldly interaction. If you are obstinate with a 'collector', what will he do? He will throw you in jail. So then what will happen if you are obstinate with God? God won't put you in jail, but his happiness upon you will break (will go away).
Dada Bhagwan
#85. Many are obstinate with regard to the pathway once they have set upon it, few with regard to the goal.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#86. When people misjudge, they inhale and exhale with obstinate, stagnant prejudice." ~ Angelica Hopes, If I Could Tell You
Angelica Hopes
#87. There should be no tenacity of insistence or obstinate insistence of any kind. If there is any tenacity, it should be the kind that will go away if you tell it to!
Dada Bhagwan
#88. The Roman world is in collapse but we do not bend our neck.
St. Jerome
