Top 85 Obstinacy Quotes & Sayings

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.

Love is the only fire that is hot enough to melt the iron obstinacy of a creatures's will.

I owe as much of my success to an uncompromising obstinacy as to any original ideas.

May God in his mercy enable us without obstinacy to perceive our errors.

Narrowness of mind is often the cause of obstinacy; we do not easily believe beyond what we see.

There is something in obstinacy which differs from every other passion. Whenever it fails, it never recovers, but either breaks like iron, or crumbles sulkily away, like a fractured arch. Most other passions have their periods of fatigue and rest, their sufferings and their cure; but obstinacy has no resource, and the first wound is mortal.

Obstinacy and dogmatism are the surest signs of stupidity. Is there anything more confident, resolute, disdainful, grave and serious than an ass?

[The Germans] so easily confuse obstinacy with energy, and rudeness with firmness.

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.

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.

Public opinion is a compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs.

Obstinacy is the result of the will forcing itself into the place of the intellect.

It is not error which opposes the progress of truth; it is indolence, obstinacy, the spirit of routine, every thing which favors inaction.

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.

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.

Steadfastness is a noble quality, but unguided by knowledge or humility, it becomes rashness, or obstinacy.

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.

The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error.

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.

A narrow mind begets obstinacy; we do not easily believe what we cannot see.

Sheer obstinacy is very very important for anybody who wants to create.

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.

Obstinacy and vehemency in opinion are the surest proofs of stupidity.

Obstinacy in a bad cause is but constancy in a good.

One of the satisfactions of a genius is his will-power and obstinacy.

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.

The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won't.

'Tis known by the name of perseverance in a good cause, and of obstinacy in a bad one.

'Tis known by the name of perseverance in a good cause,-and of obstinacy in a bad one.

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?

Obstinacy standing alone is the weakest of all things in one whose mind is not possessed by wisdom.

We often credit ourselves with vices the reverse of what we have, thus when weak we boast of our obstinacy.

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.

Perfect typography is certainly the most elusive of all arts. Sculpture in stone alone comes near it in obstinacy.

The Master was entirely free from four things: prejudice, foregone conclusions, obstinacy, and egoism.

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.

The despotism of will in ideas is styled plan, project, character, obstinacy; its despotism in desires is called passion.

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.

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.

Writing, for me, was a feat of self-preservation. If I did not do it, I would die. So I did it. Obstinacy, not talent, saved my life.

I wish, my dear Kepler, that we could have a good laugh together at the extraordinary stupidity of the mob. What do you think of the foremost philosophers of this University? In spite of my oft-repeated efforts and invitations, they have refused, with the obstinacy of a glutted adder, to look at the planets or the Moon or my glass [telescope].

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.

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.

Obstinacy alone is not a virtue.

Obstinacy can bring only a penalty and no reward.

And obstinacy is the sister of constancy, at least in vigour and stability.

Optimism," said Cacambo, "What is that?" "Alas!" replied Candide, "It is the obstinacy of maintaining that everything is best when it is worst.

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.

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.

No man is good for anything who has not some particle of obstinacy to use upon occasion.

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.

Obstinacy is ever most positive when it is most in the wrong.

Obstinacy and heat in argument are surest proofs of folly. Is there anything so stubborn, obstinate, disdainful, contemplative, grave, or serious, as an ass?

Obstinacy and contention are common qualities, most appearing in, and best becoming, a mean and illiterate soul.

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.

The obstinacy of cleverness and reason is nothing to the obstinacy of folly and inanity.

The obstinacy of the indolent and weak is less conquerable than that of the fiery and bold.

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.

I have always had the urge to open forbidden doors: with a curiosity and an obstinacy that verge on masochism.

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.