Quotes & Sayings About Being Stubborn

I would never give up on you, Alex. Never."
"Then why are you being such a
"
"What?" His voice dropped low. "I'm being what?"
Infuriating. Stubborn. Thick-skulled. Freaking sexy. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

Being stubborn has helped, being selfish is not a bad thing. — Herbie Mann

Y-naga: "That's the thing ... It's like trying to find a guy who's a kid at heart but still a responsible adult, so he can be counted on when I find myself in a pinch, somebody who's a little wild at times but normally lets me have my way even when I'm being selfish and just says, "well, if you insist," a guy who's not too full of himself but understands what clothes suit his body type best ... "
S-hara: "What I'm saying is the pretty ones are stupid! The ones who have it all together are all so, so stubborn that they never do things my way! — Fumi Yoshinaga

You have told yourself that you have found your knight in shining armor, my brother Rick. Isn't that the truth? You met him and he fit the bill, so you have told yourself a wonderful story and, stubborn brat that you are, you have been clinging to it ever since. After all, what could be more appropriate than for Francesca Cahill, reformer extraordinaire, to fall in love with my reform-minded Republican brother? But wait! Being as this is a love story, there has to be an unhappy middle and the perfect hero isn't quite so perfect after all. For he is married. Oh, wait! It isn't that bad, after all, for as it turns out he is a man of virtue, and he really loves you, while he despises his wife! And did I forget to mention that she is vile and evil? So the story can limp along, and true love might survive after all! Does this sound at all familiar, Francesca?"
"I almost hate you," she whispered. And she felt a tear sliding down her cheek. — Brenda Joyce

Sylvia had given him a scalding lecture, the gist of it being that whatever a woman enjoyed wearing was feminine and anything she didn't enjoy wearing wasn't, and if he was too stubborn and old fashioned to understand that, he could go and soak his head in a bucket of cold water. He hadn't quite forgiven her yet for saying they would have to look hard to find a bucket big enough to fit his head in to, but he admired the sass behind the remark. — Anne Bishop

Being stubborn is not a bad thing, it shows determination. — Joshua Wright

Puffballs of vanity when they're not being absurdly violent; wretchedly unhappy in their mental prisons and too stubborn to open the door and escape. — Deepak Chopra

Don't tell me there's no place for innocent hearts in this world. Don't tell me I need to accept what I don't believe in. I respect it. Don't confuse my values for my stubbornness, although I am stubborn. Don't confuse my positive attitude for being naive. Allow me to wrap my heart around you for a moment. Listen to this. Innocent hearts may not belong anywhere in this world but they are big enough for any heart in this world. Innocent hearts belong in innocent hearts. Innocent hearts belong in the hearts of those who genuinely want happiness. — Najwa Zebian

The sun was up, the neighborhood waking. I wiped my face clean with the back of my sleeve, the warming air soft on my wet cheeks. A prayer welled up within me, a new kind of prayer. I was done begging God to forgive me for being too bitter, too needy, too egotistical, too tired. Repenting one day for being too much, the next for not being enough.

Now I clearly understood my real offence against heaven: the stubborn refusal that every failing that I had - from the first - had been forgiven. — Bethany Pierce

I love you enormously. I'm spending a little time away from you - quite absurd and contingent. I would so like to see you, my stubborn little thing, and tell you my stories and hold your hand. You are my love, you good little being. Far from you I measure the nothingness of the flesh, and I am not having much fun. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Oh stop being so stubborn! You want him to be right, I can tell, I can read you, child. Because if he's right and Imogen's a liar that means you can jump back on that Italian sausage straight away. — Billy London

I remember having to read 'The Old Man and the Sea,' and I didn't want to read it; I didn't want to like Ernest Hemingway. I was being a stubborn teenager. — Dree Hemingway

I'm basically stubborn. If anyone disapproved of my being influenced by comics, I simply ignored them. — Gilberto Hernandez Guerrero

Man is the being who has built controllers for every stubborn element, but he has not been able to build one for his Ego. — Muhammad Atta-ullah Faizani

Gibson Goode to Archy: You're just being stubborn now. Stubbornness in the service of a mistaken notion is a vanity and a sin. — Michael Chabon

I grab her by the hips and pull her closer. "The only difference between falling in love and being in love is that your heart already knows how you feel, but your mind is too stubborn to admit it." Then I whisper in her ear. "But take all the time you need. I have nothing but patience for you. — Colleen Hoover

You don't scare me," Tyler said, leaning in. "Stop being so damn stubborn. I'm good for you."
- "What if I'm bad for you? — Jamie McGuire

The art of conversation is to be prompt without being stubborn, to refute without argument, and to clothe great matters in a motley garb. — Benjamin Disraeli

depopulates it. Nothing exists outside of his stubborn project; therefore nothing can induce him to modify his choices. And having involved his whole life with an external object which can continually escape him, he tragically feels his dependence. Even if it does not definitely disappear, the object never gives itself. The passionate man makes himself a lack of being not that there might be being, but in order to be. And he remains at a distance; he is never fulfilled. — Simone De Beauvoir

Coach Noll had always told me, Being stubborn is a virtue when you're right; it's only a character flaw when you're wrong. — Tony Dungy

From my mom and dad, because they're happily married for a long time: Just listen. Listen to him. I'm so independent and driven and stubborn. Just let him talk. It's about not being so stubborn and having to win every argument. My parents set a great example. They love each other and take care of each other so much. — Erin Andrews

We see that substance addictions are only one specific form of blind attachment to harmful ways of being, yet we condemn the addict's stubborn refusal to give up something deleterious to his life or to the life of others. Why do we despise, ostracize and punish the drug addict, when as a social collective, we share the same blindness and engage in the same rationalizations? — Gabor Mate

Teenagers are complicated and at times stubborn, yes, but we are not dumb. We see the world in a different light than the rest do, and sometimes, we're misunderstood because of it. And that's alright. That must be the definition of 'human being': Misunderstood. But neither of us should tolerate degradation in any of it forms. — Pamela Nicole

I was an older brother. So I had to do a lot of things first. My father was a self-made man, and he would beat me senseless. But he was a Scotsman, and stubborn. I'm his son, and I'm stubborn, too. I go on being stubborn. — Harry Hay

It was the task of industrial society to destroy all of that. All that "community" implies -- self-sufficiency, mutual aid, morality in the marketplace, stubborn tradition, regulation by custom, organic knowledge instead of mechanistic science -- had to be steadily and systematically disrupted and displaced. All of the practices that kept the individual from being a consumer had to be done away with so that the cogs and wheels of an unfettered machine called "the economy" could operate without interference, influenced merely by invisible hands and inevitable balances and all the rest of that benevolent free-market system guided by what Cobbett called, his lip curled toward Hume and James Steuart and Adam Smith, "Scotch Feelosophy. — Kirkpatrick Sale

The stubborn of a captive mentality can be clearly seen in the formulation of national development plans in most developing nations where the fundamental meaning and criteria of knowledge and development, modernization and reform, progress and change, happiness, tolerance, pluralism and their respective antonyms - such as under-development and corruption - are all derived from Western frameworks. Sometimes the strangest phenomenon surfaces - such as when the methodology of understanding and teaching indigenous religions is regarded as being uncritical and less objective if it does not utilize the methods developed by Western scholars in the understanding and teaching Western religions and religious texts. — Wan Mohd Nor Wan Daud

She wanted to yell at him, to beat his chest with her fists and accuse him of being addled and stubborn and blind. — Melanie Dickerson

The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Quentin had grown up with that; the mere names were interchangeable and almost myriad. His childhood was full of them; his very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth. He was a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts still recovering, even forty-three years afterward, from the fever which had cured the disease, waking from the fever without even knowing that it had been the fever itself which they had fought against and not the sickness, looking with stubborn recalcitrance backward beyond the fever and into the disease with actual regret, weak from the fever yet free of the disease and not even aware that the freedom was that of impotence. — William Faulkner

He raised an eyebrow. "I have to get closer? I don't remember damsels being so stubborn about leaping into a knight's arms. — Melissa Jagears

Being stubborn won't make you fluent. Practicing will! The more mistakes you make, the more you'll learn not to. — Thanhha Lai

Laziness is always dignified, it is always reposeful. Philosophical laziness, we mean. The kind of laziness that is based upon a carefully reasoned analysis of experience. Acquired laziness. We have no respect for those who were born lazy; it is like being born a millionaire: they cannot appreciate their bliss. It is the man who has hammered his laziness out of the stubborn material of life for whom we chant praise and allelulia. — Christopher Morley

In all of our experiences together, there always was that moment that I could have turned back and I never ever did. Even if it scared me to the core, to the very soul and fiber of my being, I still went forward into the unknown. Some may call that brave. I don't think I'd call it that. Stubborn beyond repair seemed more fitting. — Karina Halle

The body may be the home of the soul and the pathway of the spirit, but it is also the perversity, the stubborn resistance, the malign contagion of the material world. Having a body, being in the body, is like being roped to a sick cat. — Margaret Atwood

Survival requires a dose of madness - what cynics call "hoping against hope" - just like art does; you conjure your future from white space, locate the hidden person, yourself, against this unfamiliar background, peering through grief and loss at something greater. "Survivors are more urgently rooted in life than most of us," observed one Holocaust expert. "Their will to survive is one with the thrust of life itself, as stubborn as the upsurge of spring. A strange exultation fills [their] soul, a sense of being equal to the worst. — Mark Matousek

You know what she's made of."
"Yeah, good stock, good breeding, a hard head and a hunger to win." She flashed him a smile as they approached the kitchen door. "I've been told that describes me. I'm half Irish, Brian, I was born stubborn."
"No arguing with that. A person might make the world a calmer place for others by being passive, but you don't get very far in it yourself, do you?"
"Look at that. We have a foundation of agreement. Now tell me you like spaghetti and meatballs."
"It happens to be a favorite of mine."
"That's handy. Mine, too. And I heard a rumor that's what's for dinner." She reached for the doorknob, then caught him off guard by brushing a light kiss over his lips. "And since we'll be joining my parents, it would probably be best if you didn't imagine me naked for the next couple of hours."
She sailed in ahead of him, leaving Brian helplessly and utterly aroused. — Nora Roberts

My experience is that inventors come in all sizes, all nationalities, all ages. The only thing I'm sure of is that inventors are always stubborn. — Robert Dilts

Certainly, I am writing as a 21st-century woman, so I am much more inclined to view her as a three-dimensional woman. I think we keep coming up with this stubborn problem of a woman being judged by her appearance rather than her accomplishments. We are much more inclined to ask: was Cleopatra beautiful? — Stacy Schiff

That's amusing." Ardon was offended. "Why is it amusing?" "Because you're so pure and stainless you'd cross the street to keep from walking close to one of those women, and now God chooses one of them to save your life." "I don't think of it like that. As a matter of fact, maybe we made a mistake. I felt we were doing wrong just by being in her house." "From what you said there wasn't any other choice." "I should have found a better way." Ariel shook her head. "You're a stubborn man, brother. One of these days you're going to have to learn how to change your mind. Well, I can get a better story from Othniel than from you. — Gilbert Morris

Being stubborn can be a good thing. Being stubborn can be a bad thing. It just depends on how you use it. — Willie Aames

...being in love. It was not an emotion that could be willed away when it became too arduous to bear. It clung tight with the tenacity of a stubborn clam, forcing its victim to face the pain (Adam Ashworth). — Cynthia Wicklund

Fine." I glared at him and shook my head. Stubborn idiot.
"But at least try to look a little more raider-ish, okay? We don't want to attract attention."
Zeke's snort sounded suspiciously like laughter. "Allie, you're a beautiful, exotic-looking vampire girl with a katana. Trust me, if anyone is going to attract attention, it's not going to be me."
I didn't answer as we crossed the flimsy, creaking bridge into the lair of the vampire king. If Zeke had asked, I would've said that I was thinking of how to find everyone, but that wasn't entirely true. I was thinking of the others and how I was going to get them out alive ... but I kept being distracted by the thought that Zeke had called me beautiful. — Julie Kagawa

Good sense avoids all extremes, and requires us to be soberly rational. This unbending and virtuous stiffness of ancient times shocks too much the ordinary customs of our own; it requires too great perfection from us mortals; we must yield to the times without being too stubborn; it is the height of folly to busy ourselves in correcting the world. — Moliere

Petronius would take his free bread buns and run. I happened to know that since Petro had been elected to the watch he had never cast a vote. He believed a man on a public salary should be impartial. I didn't agree but I admired him being so stubborn in his eccentricities. Aufidius Crispus would be an unusual politician if he had allowed for such morality in the voters he was courting. — Lindsey Davis

It had not been a very cheerful journey, not the least for the western excursion into Outlander territory, where a stubborn and pompous old man had refused to listen to the truth; but Corlath had expected what he found and-she thought-saw no use in being discouraged. — Robin McKinley

Grandfather was well known for being stubborn in his ideas. For instance ... you had to go to sleep facing east so that you would be ready to greet the sun when it returned. — Michael Dorris

I have a few different managers, and one of them hit me up today and was like 'I'm going to set you up with these guys doing beats and such ... ' I was like cool, as long as I can do what I do. Just because kids are going like this now, I'm not going to do that because I am not 18 years old. I'm not going to rap like I'm in grade three because it's popular. I'm just not going to do that. It's not because I'm being stubborn, and I definitely not that guy that is getting older and does not understand the younger generation. — Shane Bunting

My youth was the most stubborn, peremptory part of myself. In my most relaxed moments, it governed my being. It pricked up its ears at the banter of eighteen-year-olds on the street. It frankly examined their bodies. It did not know its place: that my youth governed me with such ease didn't mean I was young. It meant I was divided as if housing a stowaway soul, rife with itches and yens which demanded a stern vigilance. I didn't live thoughtlessly in my flesh anymore. My body had not, in its flesh, fundamentally changed quite so much as it now could intuit the change that would only be dodged by an untimely death, and to know both those bodies at once, the youthful, and the old, was to me the quintessence of being middle-aged. Now I saw all my selves, even those that did not yet exist, and the task was remembering which I presented to others. — Susan Choi

She was a former Texan - proud, loud and stubborn. But you can't really be a former Texan. You can only move out of Texas. To be a former Texan would be like growing up in Italy, moving out and being formerly Italian. — Jeffrey Michelson

I started out with nothing in the world but a kind of passion, a driving desire. I don't know where it came from, and I don't know why - or why I have been so stubborn about it that nothing could deflect me. But this thing between me and my writing is the strongest bond I have ever had - stronger than any bond or any engagement with any human being or with any other work I've ever done. — Katherine Anne Porter

God begins the process of perfecting us from the moment we are converted from unbelief to faith in Christ. The Holy Spirit regenerates us. He give us a new heart with a new set of holy desires (Ezek. 36:26). He transforms our stubborn wills. He opens our hearts to embrace the truth rather than reject it. He enables us to believe rather than doubt. He gives us a hunger for righteousness an a desire for Him. And thus the new birth transforms the inner person. From that point on, everything that occurs in our lives - good or bad - God uses to move us toward being like Christ (Rom. 8:28-30). — John MacArthur Jr.

In Boston I got to a point where I thought I was putting out fires more than being a baseball coach. And some of it was my fault. I was getting stubborn. My fuse was a little shorter than it needed to be. And that helps nobody. — Terry Francona

Women are hard and proud and stubborn-hearted,
Their heads being turned with praise and flattery;
And that is why their lovers are afraid
To tell them a plain story. — William Butler Yeats

We are surrounded by the absurd excess of the universe. By meaningless bulk, vastness without size, power without consequence. The stubborn iteration that is present without being felt. Nothing the spirit can marry. Merely phenomenon and its physics. An endless, endless of going on. No habitat where the brain can recognize itself. No pertinence for the heart. Helpless duplication. — Jack Gilbert

Morgan glanced over his shoulder to where Dougie walked behind him. "Dougie, you're lookin' a bit worn. Are you needin' to stop and, um, rest a bit?"
Dougie looked at him as if he'd lost his mind. "Rest? Are you daft?"
Morgan glared at him and gave a jerk of his head toward Amalie, who struggled on determinedly before him.
Dougie winked. "Och, aye, I am a bit weary."
In no time, word had gotten up and down the line that Amalie needed to rest but was being too stubborn to admit it. And suddenly Morgan was besieged with whispered pleas to stop, his men whining of sore feet, headaches, and aching backs.
Then Connor appeared at his side, looking fashed.
"What in God's name has come over the men? They're complainin' like old wom - — Pamela Clare

A spring evening. The air punctuated with scattered sounds. The voices of children playing in the streets coming from varying distances as if to show that the whole expanse is alive. And this vast expanse is Russia, his incomparable mother; famed far and wide, martyred, stubborn, extravagant, crazy, irresponsible, adored, Russia with her eternally splendid, and disastrous, and unpredictable adventures. Oh, how sweet to be alive! How good to be alive and to love life! Oh, the ever-present longing to thank life, thank existence itself, to thank them as one being to another being. — Boris Pasternak

I counter whatever 'doesn't work' in love with the affirmation of what is worthwhile. This stubbornness is love's protest: for all the wealth of 'good reasons' for loving differently, loving better, loving without being in love, etc., a stubborn voice is raised which lasts a little longer: the voice of the intractable lover — Roland Barthes

Pride is not your friend.
He would have you think he is, that he affords you strength and courage, but in truth he robs you of your health and by slow, diluted degrees steals your might. He is a crafty and cunning liar who would have you think that stubborn, unapologetic, superior, boastful, and popular are admirable traits. Pride would convince you that being right is more crucial than being kind. He would have you sever relationships, even turn your back on family and friends rather than utter a humble apology. To do so is beneath you, pride would say. He would have you fight like a raptor and gnash your teeth while jutting out an inflexible jaw to defend and protect him, regardless of who is hurt in the process. He would use and demean you in order to puff up and fortify himself. He would destroy your life and every meaningful association before casting you aside without a hint of remorse.
Again, Pride is not your friend. — Richelle E. Goodrich

I try not to confuse roles and traits in my own life. Being the Perl god is a role. Being a stubborn cuss is a trait. — Larry Wall

If you don't watch it people will force you one way or the other, into doing what they think you should do, or into just being mule-stubborn and doing the opposite out of spite. — Ken Kesey

You can't keep failing. You can't keep being defiant and stubborn. You have to make changes. You need to turn your life around. — Khali Raymond

There is no particular merit in fighting for your own skin when you know that it is fight or die, but there is considerable merit in being prepared to die when you know you can escape quite easily. Put at its lowest, there is a certain stubborn foolhardy heroism in that. — M.M. Kaye

For someone who's had a life like mine, living beyond sixty is just being stubborn. — Daniel Galera

I don't know how you persist in being so stubborn-"
"It's a superpower. I was bitten by a radioactive mule. — Shannon Hale

I'm trying to tell
MiSSSisss WaSShington
about our ceremony for Father.
But it takes time to
match every noun and verb,
sort all the tenses,
remember all the articles,
set the tone for every s.
MiSSSisss WaSShington says
if every learner waits
to speak perfectly,
no one would learn
a new language.
Being stubborn
won't make you fluent.
Practicing will!
The more mistakes you make,
the more you'll learn not to.
They laugh. — Thanhha Lai

A tree in the middle of a giant rock may grow up if it is stubborn like hell! Sometimes to be successful in life is simply made up of being stubborn as a mule! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

When a bull is being lead to the slaughter, it still hopes to break loose and trample its butchers. Other bulls have not been able to pass on the knowledge that this never happens and that from the slaughterhouse there is no way back to the herd. But in human society there is a continuous exchange of experience. I have never heard of a man who broke away and fled while being led to his execution. It is even thought to be a special form of courage if a man about to be executed refuses to be blindfolded and dies with his eyes open. But I would rather have the bull with his blind rage, the stubborn beast who doesn't weigh his chances of survival with the prudent dull-wittedness of man, and doesn't know the despicable feeling of despair. — Nadezhda Mandelstam

Now you're just being stubborn, and I am not going to sit here and tell you what you already know, when you know you know it, and I know you know it, and you know that I know you know it.: — Mercedes Lackey

Perhaps the earliest memories I have are of being a stubborn, determined child. Through the years my mother has told me that it was fortunate that I chose to do acceptable things, for if I had chosen otherwise, no one could have deflected me from my path. — Rosalyn Sussman Yalow

Forget being 'discovered.' All you can do is write. If you write well enough, and are stubborn enough to embrace failure, and if you happen to fall into the narrow categories that the book market recognizes, then you might make a little money. Otherwise, it's a struggle. A gorgeous struggle. — Jess Walter

What then are the benefits of being mentally flexible? Imagine a storm brewing. Intense winds are blowing hard. Stiff trees are breaking under the pressure while softer more flexible trees are bending and will rise again when the strong winds subside. Now turn this image onto human beings. People who are narrow minded, opinionated, stubborn and bullheaded are more likely to crack under pressure than people who take up a more flexible attitude towards life. It is the difference between bending and breaking under pressure. — Gudjon Bergmann

Like my father told me, if at first you don't succeed, try again. And again. And again. But after that, give up. It's no good being stubborn. — Bryce C. Anderson

Anyway, there are two tentative solutions for getting rid of selfishness - both involving a stoic casting - off of the thin tenuous little identity which I love and cherish so dearly - and being confident that, once on the other side, I shall never miss my own little ambitions for my conceited self, but shall be content in serving the ambitions of my mate, or of a society, or cause. (Yet I will not, I cannot accept any of those solutions. Why? Stubborn selfish pride. I will not make what is inevitable easier for my-self by the blinding ignorance-is-bliss "losing-and-finding" theory. Oh, no! I will go, eyes open, into my torture, and remain fully cognizant, unwinking, while they cut and stitch and lop off my cherished malignant organs.) So much for selflove: I carry it with me like a dear cancerous relative - to be disposed of only when desperation sets in. — Sylvia Plath

I am not a perfect being ... I have more faults than I know what to do with. I have a naughty temper. I am stubborn, impatient of hindrances and of stupidity. I have not in the truest sense a Christian spirit. I am naturally a fighter. I am lazy. I put off till tomorrow what I might better do today. I do not feel that I have been compensated for the two senses I lack. I have worked hard for all the senses I have got, and always I beg for more. — Helen Keller

The only difference between falling in love and being in love is that your heart already knows how you feel, but your mind is too stubborn to admit it. — Colleen Hoover

They were uncertain, resentful, and somewhat ill at ease. This they hid by pretending an elaborate relief at being out of the army, and by assuring each other that military discipline should never again rule their stubborn, liberty-loving wills. Yet, as a matter of fact, they would have felt more at home in a prison than in this newfound and unquestionable freedom. — F Scott Fitzgerald

That's just stupid, Tory! Quit being so damn stubborn!"
"Not a chance! You've got some kind of death wish! We can't even trust our power lately. They're too erratic for a public heist."
Ben thumped the steering wheel in frustration. "Maybe for you."
I glowered at Ben from the backseat. I'd given Hi shotgun, having sensed this argument was inevitable. I didn't want to be close. The urge to slap might become overpowering.
"Why don't we all use our friendly words?" Hi suggested. "Let's take five, and everyone can say something we like about each other. I'll start. Shelton, you're super at - "
"Shut up, Hi!" Ben and I shouted, the first thing we'd agreed upon all morning. — Kathy Reichs

During a visit to California, when a friend of my grandmother's told my parents that I must be deaf because I was not responding to sounds, my father was absolutely convinced that I was simply being stubborn. — Marlee Matlin