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I am obstinate and I will not give in.
Sep 10, 2025
Thinking too little about things or thinking too much both make us obstinate and fanatical.
The world doesn't come to the clever folks, it comes to the stubborn, obstinate, one-idea-at-a-time people.
Many are obstinate with regard to the pathway once they have set upon it, few with regard to the goal.
Obstinacy is ever most positive when it is most in the wrong.
Narrowness of mind is often the cause of obstinacy; we do not easily believe beyond what we see.
Obstinacy and vehemency in opinion are the surest proofs of stupidity.
You're obstinate, pliant, merry, morose, all at once. For me there's no living with you, or without you.
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.
Obstinacy is the result of the will forcing itself into the place of the intellect.
An island can be dreadful for someone from outside. Everything is complete, and everyone has his obstinate, sure and self-sufficient place. Within their shores, everything functions according to rituals that are as hard as rock from repetition, and at the same time they amble through their days as whimsically and casually as if the world ended at the horizon.
I do not argue with obstinate men. I act in spite of them.
Obstinate, headstrong girl!
Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.
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.
It is of course, entirely possible that men (or anyone who is relatively privileged) are most defensive, most obstinate and unseeing when they are worried about losing privileges.... In the reactions of husbands, I detect a haunting worry about what they will lose when true gender equality arrives.
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.
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."
Obstinate people can be divided into the opinionated, the ignorant, and the boorish.
There is nothing more likely to drive a man mad, than the being unable to get rid of the idea of the distinction between right and wrong, and an obstinate, constitutional preference of the true to the agreeable.
resolute, adj. Obstinate in a course that we approve.
Every returning New Yorker asks the question: Is this still my city? I have a ready answer, cloaked in obstinate despair: It is. And if it's not, I will love it all the more. I will love it to the point where it becomes mine again.
By that time it was already clear that the next prime minster was going to be Golda Meir, a woman whom I frankly detested - a mutual sentiment, I might add. I knew her as an opinionated, obstinate person, primitive in her outlook, rigid in her attitudes, with a genius for reaching and exploiting the deepest fears and prejudices of the Jewish masses. I was certain that with her as prime minister, all peace efforts would come to a total standstill.
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.
I have never observed other effects of whipping than to render boys more cowardly, or more willfully obstinate.
I bid you conquer in your warfare against your four great enemies, the world, the devil, the flesh, and above all, that obstinate and perverse self-will, unaided by which the other three would be comparatively powerless.
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.
Public opinion is a compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs.
I like mountains, always have done. Big obstinate bits of rock sticking up where they're not wanted and getting in folk's way. Great. Climbing them is a different matter altogether though. I hate that.
The obstinacy of cleverness and reason is nothing to the obstinacy of folly and inanity.
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.
The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration.
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.
I have become an obstinate heretic in the eyes of my colleagues. Momentary success carries more power of conviction than reflections upon principles.
It is useless to check the vain dunce who has caught the mania of scribbling, whether prose or poetry, canzonets or criticisms,--let such a one go on till the disease exhausts itself. Opposition like water, thrown on burning oil, but increases the evil, because a person of weak judgment will seldom listen to reason, but become obstinate under reproof.
Charlotte slammed the paper down onto her desk with an exclamation of rage. “Aloysius Starkweather is the most stubborn, hypocritical, obstinate, degenerate—” She broke off, clearly fighting for control of her temper. Tessa had never seen Charlotte’s mouth so firmly set into a hard line. “Would you like a thesaurus?” Will inquired. “You seem to be running out of words.
Even if you are on the brink of damnation, even if you have one foot in hell, even if you have sold your soul to the devil as sorcerers do who practice black magic, and even if you are a heretic as obstinate as a devil, sooner or later you will be converted and will amend your life and will save your soul, if-and mark well what I say-if you say the Holy Rosary devoutly every day until death for the purpose of knowing the truth and obtaining contrition and pardon for your sins.
Even after the Truth has been realised, there remains that strong, obstinate impression that one is still an ego - the agent and experiencer. This has to be carefully removed by living in a state of constant identification with the supreme non-dual Self. Full Awakening is the eventual ceasing of all the mental impressions of being an ego.
Passions often produce their contraries: avarice sometimes leads to prodigality, and prodigality to avarice; we are often obstinate through weakness and daring through timidity.
Lawsuits generally originate with the obstinate and the ignorant, but they do not end with them; and that lawyer was right who left all his money to the support of an asylum for fools and lunatics, saying that from such he got it, and to such he would bequeath it.
Obstinacy and heat in argument are surest proofs of folly. Is there anything so stubborn, obstinate, disdainful, contemplative, grave, or serious, as an ass?
You know Balbec so well - do you have friends in the area?' I have friends wherever there are companies of trees, wounded but not vanquished, which huddle together with touching obstinacy to implore an inclement and pitiless sky.' That is not what I meant,' interrupted my father, as obstinate as the trees and as pitiless as the sky.
I was a peaceful sedentary man, a lover of a quiet life, with no appetite for perils and commotions. But I was beginning to realise that I was very obstinate.
They went down to Egypt and provided food when famine reigned; they came to the obstinate sea, and taught it wisdom with a rod; they went out into the hostile desert and adorned it with a pillar; they entered the furnace, fiercely heated, and sprinkled it with their dew; into the pit where they had been thrown an angel entered and taught its wild beasts to fast.
Trench says a wild man is a willed man. Well, then, a man of will who does what he wills or wishes, a man of hope and of the future tense, for not only the obstinate is willed, but far more the constant and persevering. The obstinate man, properly speaking, is one who will not. The perseverance of the saints is positive willedness, not a mere passive willingness. The fates are wild, for they will; and the Almighty is wild above all, as fate is.
True wisdom is less presuming than folly. The wise man doubteth often, and changeth his mind; the fool is obstinate, and doubteth not; he knoweth all things but his own ignorance.
I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.
Obama acknowledges his overreach openly every time he argues that he intends to do the job of an obstinate Republican congress.
Real success and accomplishment, at whatever it is you are passionate about, requires real work. Real sacrifice. Real disappointment. Real failure. And it requires the ability to scrape your sorry ass up off the floor, stumble to your feet, wipe the rivulets of watery drool from your face, and do it again, like an obstinate toddler running against the wall with his head in a bucket.
A man who is furnished with arguments from the mint, will convince his antagonist much sooner than one who draws them from reason and philosophy. - Gold is a wonderful clearer of the understanding; it dissipates every doubt and scruple in an instant; accommodates itself to the meanest capacities; silences the loud and clamorous, and cringes over the most obstinate and inflexible. - Philip of Macedon was a man of most invincible reason this way. He refuted by it all the wisdom of Athens; confounded their statesmen; struck their orators dumb; and at length argued them out of all their liberties.