Obstinate Quotes - Page 5

• This obstinate will to personal happiness is the cause of unrest and division in your soul. Give it up and work against it: the rest will be given you without effort.

  Tito Colliander

  Giving, Effort, Soul

  Tito Colliander (1982). “Way of the Ascetics: The Ancient Tradition of Discipline and Inner Growth”, p.23, St Vladimir's Seminary Press

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• All the time I was plowing through books on dyslexia, I found myself asking: what if, what if? What if you were a kid the 1950s with this condition, when there were no books on it, when there was no understanding of it. I remember kids in my class at school who just didn't seem to progress in their reading. There was no extra help. People just thought, "Oh, he or she isn't so bright, or they're obstinate."

  Maggie O'Farrell

  Book, Reading, School

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• When the Gauls laid waste Rome, they found the senators clothed in their robes, and seated in stern tranquillity in their curule chairs; in this manner they suffered death without resistance or supplication. Such conduct was in them applauded as noble and magnanimous; in the hapless Indians it was reviled as both obstinate and sullen. How truly are we the dupes of show and circumstances! How different is virtue, clothed in purple and enthroned in state, from virtue, naked and destitute, and perishing obscurely in a wilderness.

  Washington Irving

  Rome, Purple, Waste

  Washington Irving (1983). “History, Tales, and Sketches”, p.1011, Library of America

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Presumption will be easily corrected; but timidity is a disease of the mind more obstinate and fatal.

  Samuel Johnson

  Mind, Disease, Presumption

  Samuel Johnson (1840). “The Life and Writings of Samuel Johnson...”, p.154

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• The pastoral labours of the archbishop of Constantinople provoked and gradually united against him two sorts of enemies; the aspiring clergy, who envied his success, and the obstinate sinners, who were offended by his reproofs. When Chrysostom thundered from the pulpit of St. Sophia against the degeneracy of the Christians, his shafts were spent among the crowd, without wounding or even marking the character of any individual.

  Edward Gibbon

  Christian, Character, Past

  Edward Gibbon (1854). “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, p.502

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Strong mental agitation and disturbance was no novelty to him, even before his late sufferings. It never is, to obstinate and sullen natures; for they struggle hard to be such.

  Charles Dickens

  Strong, Struggle, Words Of Wisdom

  Charles Dickens (1848). “Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son, Wholesale, Retail, and for Exportation”, p.295

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• The death sentence is a necessary and efficacious means for the Church to attain its end when rebels act against it and disturbers of the ecclesiastical unity, especially obstinate heretics and heresiarchs, cannot be restrained by any other penalty from continuing to derange the ecclesiastical order and impelling others to all sorts of crime ... When the perversity of one or several is calculated to bring about the ruin of many of its children it is bound effectively to remove it, in such wise that if there be no other remedy for saving its people it can and must put these wicked men to death.

  Pope Leo XIII

  Wise, Children, Mean

  66 Copy quote

• Leading the Jewish people is not easy -- we are a divided, obstinate, highly individualistic people who have cultivated faith, sharp wittedness and polemics to a very high level.

  Shimon Peres

  People, Levels, Easy

  47 Copy quote

• He must be theory-mad beyond redemption who ... shall ... persist in attempting to reconcile the obstinate oils and waters of Poetry and Truth.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Oil And Water, Mad, Poetry

  Edgar Allan Poe (1876). “Poems and Essays of Edgar Allan Poe: Including Memoir”, p.162

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• An obstinate man does not hold opinions, but they hold him; for when he is once possessed with an error, it is, like a devil, only cast out with great difficulty.

  Samuel Butler

  Men, Errors, Devil

  5 Copy quote

• A powerful portfolio of physiological and behavioural evidence now exists to support the case that fish feel pain and that this feeling matters. In the face of such evidence, any argument to the contrary based on the claim that fish 'do not have the right sort of brain' can no longer be called scientific. It is just obstinate.

  John Webster

  Pain, Powerful, Support

  John Webster (2008). “Animal Welfare: Limping Towards Eden”, p.69, John Wiley & Sons

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• In time of war all countries behave equally badly, because the power of action is handed over to stupid and obstinate men.

  Kenneth Clark

  Country, Stupid, War

  "The Other Half: A Self Portrait". Book by Kenneth Clark, 1977.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Thinking too little about things or thinking too much both make us obstinate and fanatical.

  Blaise Pascal

  Thinking, Littles, Too Much

  Blaise Pascal (2008). “Human Happiness”, Penguin Group USA

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Among other common lies, we have the silent lie - the deception which one conveys by simply keeping still and concealing the truth. Many obstinate truth-mongers indulge in this dissipation, imagining that if they speak no lie, they lie not at all.

  Mark Twain

  Lying, Indulge In, Deception

  Mark Twain (2000). “The Jumping Frog: And 18 Other Stories”, p.28, Book Tree

  67 Copy quote

  Show source

• The security of the Nation is not at the ramparts alone, Security also lies in the value of our free institutions. A cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous press must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know.

  Murray Gurfein

  Lying, Expression, Order

  5 Copy quote

• If I refuse to allow my leg to be amputated, its mortification and my death may prove that I was wrong; but if I let the leg go, nobody can ever prove that it would not have mortified had I been obstinate. Operation is therefore the safe side for the surgeon as well as the lucrative side.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Legs, May, Safe

  From his Preface on Doctors published with The Doctor's Dilemma (1911)

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Time and time again, the obstinate refusal of the tsarist regime to concede reforms turned what should have been a political problem into a revolutionary crisis... the tsarist regime's downfall was not inevitable; but its own stupidity made it so.

  Orlando Figes

  Should Have, Stupidity, Political

  41 Copy quote

• A cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous press must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know.

  Murray Gurfein

  Expression, Order, People

  4 Copy quote

• I am obstinate and I will not give in.

  Jane Goodall

  Giving

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.co.uk

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I'm interested in the ongoing war between the individual and community. That inner dissent against whatever group is surrounding you. No one wants to cede their selfhood to a group, right? And yet no one can exactly live outside the group, either. Even the most obstinate survivalist probably lives in some telepathic communion with all the other obstinate survivalists out there in the woods.

  Jonathan Raymond

  War, Community, Groups

  "Jon Raymond’s Californian Epic". Interview with Christopher Bollen, www.interviewmagazine.com. February 1, 2017.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• For the life of her, she couldn't understand how such an obstinate, boneheaded chauvinist could make her pulse race and her insides turn to jelly.

  Joanne Fluke

  Race, Pulse, Jelly

  4 Copy quote

• The two commonest mistakes in judgement ... are, the confounding of shyness with arrogance - a very common mistake indeed - and the not understanding that an obstinate nature exists in a perpetual struggle with itself.

  Charles Dickens

  Mistake, Struggle, Two

  Charles Dickens (2015). “Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son: Wholesale, Retail and for Export”, p.2, Jester House Publishing

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Although I never lack the presence and plain image of my own wretched
  infirmity, yet seeing sin so manifestly abounds in all estates, I am
  compelled to thunder out the threatenings of God against the obstinate
  rebels.

  John Knox

  Rebel, Sin, Threatening

  John Knox (1842). “Writings of the Rev. John Knox: Minister of God's Word in Scotland”

  46 Copy quote

  Show source

• Discipline is, in a manner, nothing else but the art of inspiring the soldiers with greater fear of their officers than of the enemy. This fear has often the effect of courage: but it cannot prevail against the fierce and obstinate valor of people animated by fanaticism, or warm love of their country.

  Claude Adrien Helvetius

  Country, Art, Discipline

  "De l'esprit or, Essays on the Mind, and Its Several Faculties". Book by Claude Adrien Helvétius, 1758.

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• Every day that we allow ourselves to take things for granted, every day that we allow some little physical infirmity or worldly worry to come between us and our obstinate, indignant, defiant exultation, we are weakening our genius for life.

  John Cowper Powys

  Worry, Genius, Littles

  "The Meaning of Culture". Book by John Cowper Powys, p. 134, 1929.

  26 Copy quote

  Show source