Obstinacy Quotes

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

We guess as we read, we create; everything starts from an initial error; those that follow (and this applies not only to the reading of letters and telegrams, not only to all reading), extraordinary as they may appear to a person who has not begun at the same place, are all quite natural. A large part of what we believe to be true (and this applies even to our final conclusions) with an obstinacy equalled only by our good faith, springs from an original mistake in our premises. ~ Marcel Proust

In the time before Gnan (time before 1958 when Dada Bhagwan got manifested) there was obstinacy within me. 'I' discovered that obstinacy does not let the light of Gnan (Eternal Knowledge) to come through. Then I saw all that obstinacy, and it was destroyed. Thereafter the Gnan (Eternal Knowledge) manifested. One has to observe one's own self that where lies the obstinacies. The Self is an observatory itself. ~ Dada Bhagwan

And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it. ~ George Eliot

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

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

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

But I liked you from the moment I first heard your voice," he said, "when I had no idea what you looked like. I thought it delicious, the way you bargained for me, as though I were an old rug. Then I loved the way you looked at me. Then I loved the way you ordered me about. I loved your patient and impatient ways of explaining things to me. I love the sound of your voice and the way you move. I love your courage and your kindness and your generosity and your obstinacy and your passion." He paused. "You're the genius. What do you think that means? ~ Loretta Chase

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

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

Over the past year, since breaking up with Martin, she had begun to notice the foreignness of the place, to suffer from the chill that dried her skin and never really left her, even in the summer. And yet she couldn't make up her mind to leave. She depended on the place now; she had grown attached to it with the obstinacy with which people become attached only to things that hurt them. ~ Paolo Giordano

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

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

Youth enters the world with very happy prejudices in her own favour. ~ Samuel Johnson

Like other kinds of intelligence, the storyteller's is partly
natural, partly trained. It is composed of several qualities, most
of which, in normal people, are signs of either immaturity or
incivility: wit (a tendency to make irreverent connections);
obstinacy and a tendency toward churlishness (a refusal to
believe what all sensible people know is true); childishness (an
apparent lack of mental focus and serious life purpose, a fondness
for daydreaming and telling pointless lies, a lack of proper
respect, mischievousness, an unseemly propensity for crying
over nothing); a marked tendency toward oral or anal fixation
or both (the oral manifested by excessive eating, drinking,
smoking, and chattering; the anal by nervous cleanliness and
neatness coupled with a weird fascination with dirty jokes);
remarkable powers of eidetic recall, or visual memory (a usual
feature of early adolescence and mental retardation); a strange
admixture of shameless playfulness and embarrassing earnestness,
the latter often heightened by irrationally intense feelings
for or against religion; patience like a cat's; a criminal streak of
cunning; psychological instability; recklessness, impulsiveness,
and improvidence; and finally, an inexplicable and incurable
addiction to stories, written or oral, bad or good. ~ John Gardner

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

To read is to struggle to name, to subject the sentences of a text to a semantic transformation. This transformation is erratic; it consists in hesitating among several names: if we are told that Sarrasine had 'one of those strong wills that know no obstacle'. what are we to read? will, energy, obstinacy, stubbornness, etc.? ~ Roland Barthes

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

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

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

Never disregard a conviction that the Holy Spirit brings to you. If it is important enough for the Spirit of God to bring it to your mind, it is the very thing He is detecting in you. You were looking for some big thing to give up, while God is telling you of some tiny thing that must go. But behind that tiny thing lies the stronghold of obstinacy, and you say, "I will not give up my right to myself" - the very thing that God intends you to give up if you are to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. ~ Oswald Chambers

Repetition of an argument proves your determination, not truth. ~ Raheel Farooq

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

Perversity and obstinacy are integral tae the Scottish character. ~ Irvine Welsh

Many are obstinate with regard to the pathway once they have set upon it, few with regard to the goal. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Obstinacy is the sister of constancy, at least in vigor and stability. ~ Michel De Montaigne

As for what motivated me, it is quite simple; I would hope that in the eyes of some people it might be sufficient in itself. It was curiosity – the only kind of curiosity, in any case, that is worth acting upon with a degree of obstinacy: not the curiosity that seeks to assimilate what it is proper for one to know, but that which enables one to get free of oneself. After all, what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way or another and to the extent possible, in the knower's straying afield of himself? There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently that one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all. People will say, perhaps, that these games with oneself would better be left backstage; or, at best, that they might properly form part of those preliminary exercises that are forgotten once they have served their purpose. But, then, what is philosophy today – philosophical activity, I mean – if it is not the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself? In what does it consist, if not in the endeavour to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known? ~ Michel Foucault

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

Obstinacy alone is not a virtue. ~ Albert Camus

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

The Roman world is in collapse but we do not bend our neck. ~ St. Jerome

And if (as I said before) what we are matters even more than what we do - if, indeed, what we do matters chiefly as evidence of what we are - then it follows that the change which I most need to undergo is a change that my own direct, voluntary efforts cannot bring about. And this applies to my good actions too. How many of them were done for the right motive? How many for fear of public opinion, or a desire to show off? How many from a sort of obstinacy or sense of superiority which, in different circumstances, might equally have led to some very bad act? But I cannot, by direct moral effort, give myself new motives. After the first few steps in the Christian life we realise that everything which really needs to be done in our souls can be done only by God. ~ C.S. Lewis

How much must I overcome before I triumph? ~ Pierre Corneille

I had of course met with incredulity..., but seldom with a will to incredulity. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

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

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

You must, in order that it shall speak to you, take a thing during a certain time as the only one that exists, as the only phenomenon which through your diligent and exclusive love finds itself set down in the center of the universe. . . . Don't be frightened at the expression "fate" … I call fate all external events (illnesses, for example, included) which can inevitably step in to interrupt and annihilate a disposition of mind and training that is by nature solitary. . . .

That went through me like an arrow, when I learned it, but like a flaming arrow that, while it pierced my heart through, left it in a conflagration of clear sight. There are few artists in our day who grasp this stubbornness, this vehement obstinacy. But I believe that without it one remains always at the periphery of art, which is rich enough as it is to allow us pleasant discoveries, but at which, nevertheless, we halt only as a player at the green table who, while he now and again succeeds with a "coup", remains none the less at the mercy of chance, which is nothing but the docile and dexterous ape of the law. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

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

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

Obstinacy is ever most positive when it is most in the wrong. ~ Suzanne Curchod

Measures of policy are necessarily controlled by circumstances; and, consequently, what may be wise and expedient under certain circumstances might be eminently unwise and impolitic under different circumstances. To persist in acting in the same way under circumstances essentially different would be folly and obstinacy, and not consistency. ~ John C. Calhoun

Because - and don't let anybody tell you different - novel writing is mostly triage (this now, that later) and obstinacy. ~ Richard Russo

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

If each side had been frankly contending for its own real wish, they would all have kept within the bounds of reason and courtesy; but just because the contention is reversed and each side is fighting the other side's battle, all the bitterness which really flows from thwarted self-righteousness and obstinacy and from the accumulated grudges of the last ten years is concealed from them by the nominal or official "Unselfishness" of what they are doing or, at least, held to be excused by it. ~ C.S. Lewis

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

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

We receive a fatal imprint in childhood, at the time of our greatest plasticity, of our passive impressionism, of our helplessness before suggestion. In no period has the role of the parents loomed as immense, because we have recognized the determinism, but at the same time an exaggeration in the size of the Enormous Parent does not need to be permanent and irretrievable. The time has come when, having completed the scientific study of the importance of parents, we now must re-establish our power to revoke their imprint, to reverse our patterns, to kill our fatal downward tendencies. We do not remain smaller in suture than our parents. Nature had intended them to shrink progressively in our eyes to human proportions while we reach for our own maturity. Their fallibilities, their errors, their weaknesses were intended to develop our own capacity for parenthood. We were to discover their human weakness not to overwhelm or humiliate them, but to realize the difficulty of their task and awaken our own human protectiveness toward their failures or a respect for their partial achievement. But to place all responsibilities upon them is wrong too. If they gave us handicaps, they also gave us their courage, their obstinacy, their sacrifices, their moments of strength. We cannot forever await from them the sanction to mature, to impose on them our own truths, to resist or perhaps defeat them in our necessity to gain strength.

We cannot always place responsibility outside of ~ Anais Nin

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

He looked like his father. That is to say he was a closely-welded, round youth, dark, like his father, with not a trace of Molly's dash and vivacity. But unlike Richard, whose tenacious obstinacy was open, smouldering in his dark eyes and displayed in every impatient efficient movement, Tommy had a look of being buttoned in, a prisoner of his own nature. He ~ Doris Lessing

Some persons fancy that bias and counter-bias are favorable to the extraction of truth–that hot and partisan debate is the way to investigate. This is the theory of our atrocious legal procedure. But Logic puts its heel upon this suggestion. It irrefragably demonstrates that knowledge can only be furthered by the real desire for it, and that the methods of obstinacy, of authority and every mode of trying to reach a foregone conclusion, are absolutely of no value. These things are proved. The reader is at liberty to think so or not as long as the proof is not set forth, or as long as he refrains from examining it. Just so, he can preserve, if he likes, his freedom of opinion in regard to the propositions of geometry; only, in that case, if he takes a fancy to read Euclid, he will do well to skip whatever he finds with A, B, C, etc., for, if he reads attentively that disagreeable matter, the freedom of his opinion about geometry may unhappily be lost forever. ~ Charles Sanders Peirce

Revolutions arise from obstinacy. People are dissatisfied with what they are told and they develop new ideas. ~ Dirk Kurbjuweit

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

For a bag of pepper, they could cut each other's throats without hesitation, and would forswear their souls ... The bizarre obstinacy of that desire made them defy death in a thousand shapes; the unknown seas, the loathsome diseases; wounds, captivity, hunger, pestilence and despair. It made them great! By heavens! It made them heroic; and it made them pathetic, too, in their craving for trade with the inflexible death levying its toll on young and old ~ Joseph Conrad

Smallness of mind is the cause of stubbornness, and we do not credit readily what is beyond our view. ~ Francois De La Rochefoucauld

The greater part of mankind are naturally apt to be affirmative and dogmatical in their opinions; and while they see objects only on one side, and have no idea of any counterpoising argument, they throw themselves precipitately into the principles, to which they are inclined; nor have they any indulgence for those who entertain opposite sentiments. To hesitate or balance perplexes their understanding, checks their passion, and suspends their action. They are, therefore, impatient till they escape from a state, which to them is so uneasy: and they think, that they could never remove themselves far enough from it, by the violence of their affirmations and obstinacy of their belief. But ~ David Hume

But this inestimable privilege was soon violated: with the knowledge of truth the emperor imbibed the maxims of persecution; and the sects which dissented from the catholic church were afflicted and oppressed by the triumph of Christianity. Constantine easily believed that the heretics, who presumed to dispute his opinions or to oppose his commands, were guilty of the most absurd and criminal obstinacy; and that a seasonable application of moderate severities might save those unhappy men from the danger of an everlasting condemnation. ~ Edward Gibbon

I awaken by the heat
emanating from your body.
I wash the grapes
and eat the bad ones
so you don't taste
their bitterness.
You place the bowl
on your stomach
and the cold
makes you squeal.
I smile.
You simper.
That is enough for me.

I come home
and eat my meal
in silence.
I avoid you.
Your hand takes the dish
I just placed in the sink
and washes it.
I rest my head
on the wooden table.
The dish is placed to dry.
There are no footsteps.
Then
a mouth kisses the nape
of my neck.
My head sinks deep into the wood
and my obstinacy drowns.
That is enough for me.

I write because
of you,
about you and
for you.
I will not perish
when you leave
for your existence
is enough for me. ~ Kamand Kojouri

One is to cross this ocean in the form of obstinacy. We are standing on this side of obstinacy and we have to go to the other side. If someone becomes instrumental in removing your obstinacy; do not be disturbed about it, consider him to be extremely beneficial and undergo that experience with equanimity. ~ Dada Bhagwan

Every wise man have walked away from the world in his way with the only obstinacy to make it ~ P.S. Jagadeesh Kumar

Unbelief shall be left inexcusable, and convicted of a wilful obstinacy. ~ Matthew Henry

The obstinacy of the indolent and weak is less conquerable than that of the fiery and bold. ~ Johann Kaspar Lavater

If thou art indeed my father, then hast thou stained thy sword in the life-blood of thy son. And thous didst it of thine obstinacy. For I sought to turn thee unto love, and I implored of thee thy name, for I thought to behold in thee the tokens recounted of my mother. But I appealed unto thy heart in vain, and now is the time gone for meeting. ~ Khaled Hosseini

What is it that doesn't allow you to go to moksha? Obstinacy! ~ Dada Bhagwan

If you plan to build walls around me, know this - I will walk through them. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

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

When someone "can not" or will not let go of some notion, injustice or loss, a fixation can develop, which can "fix" that person in place. When a person, a soul (or a group), becomes stuck or fixated on some specific perspective or emotion to the exclusion of the bigger picture, one can get a distorted view, one can be lost for a while. I am reminded of the saying one can't see the forest for the trees, for short-sightedness, especially combined with reactive emotions, obstinacy, and even obsessiveness, can cause one to lose all proportion and perspective. One can lose one's bearings; One can get lost. ~ Stephen Poplin

For obstinacy standing alone is the weakest of all things in one whose mind is not possessed by wisdom. ~ Aeschylus

Pride had given way at last, obstinacy was gone: the will was powerless. ~ Emmuska Orczy

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

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

There us a kind of flame in Crete - let us call it "soul" - something more powerful than either life or death. There is pride, obstinacy, valor, and together with these something else inexpressible and imponderable, something which makes you rejoice that you are a human being, and at the same time tremble. (Report to Greco) ~ N. Kazantzakis

Had he but turned back then, and looked out once more on to the rose-lit garden, she would have seen that which would have made her own sufferings seem but light and easy to bear
a strong man, overwhelmed with his own passion and despair. Pride had given way at last, obstinacy was gone: the will was powerless. He was but a man madly, blindly, passionately in love and as soon as her light footstep had died away within the house, he knelt down upon the terrace steps, and in the very madness of his love he kissed one by one the places where her small foot had trodden, and the stone balustrade, where her tiny hand had rested last. ~ Emmuska Orczy

The most savory grape, the one that produces the wines with best texture and aroma, the sweetest and most generous, doesn't grow in rich soil but in stony land; the plant, with a mother's obstinacy, overcomes obstacles to thrust its roots deep into the ground and take advantage of every drop of water. That, my grandmother explained to me, is how flavors are concentrated in the grape. ~ Isabel Allende

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Men of integrity are generally pretty obstinate, in adhering to an opinion once adopted. ~ William Cobbett

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

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

If ... if I didn't try to get my life moving on my own account, I should think it just absurd to go on living.'
A look of smiling obstinacy had come into Marcelle's face.
'Yes, yes - it's your vice.'
'It's not a vice. It's how I'm made.'
'Why aren't other people made like that, if it isn't a vice?'
'They are, only they don't know it. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

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

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

Whitewash on the forehead hardens the brain into a state of obstinacy, perhaps. ~ Charles Dickens

If we pass now from physical nature to the moral world, we still find ourselves subject to the same deceptions of appearance, to the same influences of spontaneity and habit. But the distinguishing feature of this second division of our knowledge is, on the one hand, the good or the evil which we derive from our opinions; and, on the other, the obstinacy with which we defend the prejudice which is tormenting and killing us. ~ Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Everybody has a hard job. All real work is hard. My work happened also to be undoable. Morning after morning for 50 years, I faced the next page defenseless and unprepared. 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. ~ Philip Roth

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, Baron De Laune

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

The fair-haired man was one of those people in whose character there is at first sight a certain obstinacy. Before you can open your mouth, they are already prepared to argue and, it seems, will never agree to anything that is clearly contrary to their way of thinking, will never call a stupid thing smart, and in particular will never dance to another man's tune; but it always ends up that there is a certain softness in their character, that they will agree precisely to what they had rejected, will call a stupid thing smart, and will then go off dancing their best to another man's tune - in short, starts out well, ends in hell. ~ Nikolai Gogol

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]. ~ Galileo Galilei

The sudden and uncalled for coldness with which you treated me just before I left last night, both surprised and deeply hurt me - surprised because I could not have believed that such sullen and inflexible obstinacy could exist in the breast of any girl in whose heart love had found place; and hurt me, because I feel for you more than I have ever professed and feel a slight from you more than I care to tell.

My object in writing to you is this: if hasty temper produces this strange behaviour, acknowledge it when I give you the opportunity - not once or twice, but again and again. If a feeling of you know not what - a capricious restlessness of you can't tell what, and a desire to tease, you don't know why, give rise to it - overcome it; it will never make you more amiable, I more fond or either of us, more happy. Depend upon it, whatever be the cause of your unkindness - whatever gives rise to these wayward fancies - that what you do not take the trouble to conceal from a Lover's eyes, will be frequently acted before those of a husband's.

I know as well, as if I were by your side at this moment, that your present impulse on reading this letter is one of anger - pride perhaps, or to use a word more current with your sex - 'spirit'. My dear girl, I have not the most remote intention of awakening any such feeling, and I implore you, not to entertain it for an instant.... I have written these few lines in haste, but not anger.... If you knew but half the ~ Charles Dickens

If it be true that men of strong imaginations are usually dogmatists
and I am inclined to think it is so
it ought to follow that men of weak imaginations are the reverse; in which case we should have some compensation for stupidity. But it unfortunately happens that no dogmatist is more obstinate or less open to conviction than a fool. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

[The Germans] so easily confuse obstinacy with energy, and rudeness with firmness. ~ Madame De Stael

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

Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

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

Venerable age had not, for him, arranged that derelict landscape against which it is privileged to sit and pick its nose, break wind, and damn the course of youth groping among the obstacles erected, dutifully, by its own hands earlier, along the way of that sublime delusion known as the pursuit of happiness.
Not to be confused with the state of political bigotry, mental obstinacy, financial security, sensual atrophy, emotional penury, and spiritual collapse which, under the name "maturity", animated lives around him, it might be said that Reverend Gwyon had reached maturity. ~ William Gaddis