Tenacious Quotes
More Tenacious Quotes
As it spoke I discerned, obscurely, a child's face looking through the window. Terror made me cruel; and finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bed-clothes: still it wailed, "Let me in!", and maintained its tenacious grip, almost maddening me with fear.
emily brontë— Mr. Lockwood (Ch. III).
Given a man full of faith, you will have a man tenacious in purpose, absorbed in one grand object, simple in his motives, in whom selfishness has been driven out by the power of a mightier love, and indolence stirred into unwearied energy.
alexander maclaren— P. 220. (Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895))
Against a tenacious enemy, this young commodore bequeathed a legacy of combat leadership to future generations of naval officers.
oliver hazard perry— David Curtis Skaggs and Gerald T. Altoff, in A Signal Victory (1997)
Impenetrable in their dissimulation, cruel in their vengeance, tenacious in their purposes, unscrupulous as to their methods, animated by profound and hidden hatred for the tyranny of man it is as though there exists among them an ever-present conspiracy toward domination, a sort of alliance like that subsisting among the priests of every country.
Denis Diderot— "On Women" (1772), as translated in Selected Writings (1966) edited by Lester G. Crocker
There have been politicians more successful, or more subtle; there have been none more tenacious or more tolerant...He is one of that small band of statesman whose service to humanity is greater than their service to their time or their people.
— William the Silent By C.V. Wedgwood, introduction-C.V. Wedgwood
You all very well know what deference I always pay, and ever will, to that part of the office of a jury which properly belongs to them. In regard to the law, I have always been as tenacious of the proper function of a Judge, as I have been of that of the jury. I never will, while I have the honour of executing the office of a Judge, attempt to controul or influence their minds in respect of damages; but only submit to them such observations as occur to me upon the evidence.
— Wilmot, L.C.J., Wilkes v. Lord Halifax (1763), 19 How. St. Tr. 1410.
The absolute scholar is in fact a rather uncanny being. He is instinct with Nietzsche's finding that to be interested in something, to be totally interested in it, is a libidinal thrust more powerful than love or hatred, more tenacious than faith or friendship — not infrequently, indeed, more compelling than personal life itself. Archimedes does not flee from his killers, he does not even turn his head to acknowledge their rush into his garden when he is immersed in the algebra of conic sections.
George Steiner— "The Cleric of Treason"
