Obstinacy

“ They are all the more exasperated by blows and constraint. And he that made the story of the woman who, in defiance of all correction, threats, and bastinadoes, ceased not to call her husband lousy knave, and who being plunged over head and ears in water, yet lifted her hands above her head and made a sign of cracking lice, feigned a tale of which, in truth, we every day see a manifest image in the obstinacy of women. And obstinacy is the sister of constancy, at least in vigour and stability. ”

“ Sullenness, or obstinacy, is perhaps a worse fault of temper than either of the former, and, if indulged, may end in the most fatal extremes of stubborn melancholy, malice, and revenge. The resentment which, instead of being expressed, is nursed in secret, and continually aggravated by the imagination, will, in time, become the ruling passion; and then, how horrible must be his case, whose kind and pleasurable affections are all swallowed up by the tormenting as well as detestable sentiments of hatred and revenge? ”

“ I know you think me the most provokingly obstinate man in the world, but there is reason in my obstinacy, and you will acknowledge as much when you awake to-morrow morning refreshed by a good night's rest. ”

“ The people are right in accusing you of obstinacy, even if the name be not a pretty one. Do you forget that you are not alone in the world, and that this resolution of yours makes your sick mother's life and illness still more bitter? What possible grounds can you have for casting aside each honest hand which stretches itself out to assist you and her? Answer me, Lauretta? ”

“ Obstinacy, therefore, must never be victorious. Yet, it is well known that there, sometimes, occurs a sullen and hardy resolution, that laughs at all common punishment, and bids defiance to all common degrees of pain. Correction must be proportionate to occasions. ”

“ Furthermore, God taketh special note and feeleth an especial weariness of sin that is mixed with obstinacy. [267] Oh how obstinate some men are! They will be damned; there is no helping them; they seem as if they would leap the Alps to reach perdition, and swim through seas of fire that they may destroy their souls. ”

“ But strong and pertinacious tempers, of which, perhaps, obstinacy is the leading vice, under skilful management, often turn out steady and sterling characters; while, from softer clay, a firm and vigorous virtue is but seldom produced. Pertinacity is often principle, which wants nothing but to be led to its true object; while the uniformly yielding, and universally accommodating spirit, is not seldom the result of a feeble tone of morals, of a temper eager for praise, and acting for reward. ”

“ Obstinacy.—Obstinacy is ever most positive when it is most in the wrong.—Madame Necker.
People first abandon reason, and then become obstinate; and the deeper they are in error the more angry they are.—Blair.
An obstinate man does not hold opinions, but they hold him.—Pope.
Most other passions have their periods of fatigue and rest, their suffering and their cure; but obstinacy has no resource, and the first wound is mortal.—Thomas Paine.
[Pg 196] Narrowness of mind is often the cause of obstinacy; we do not easily believe beyond what we see.—La Rochefoucauld. ”

“ Indeed, if a fault could be found in face or figure, it was that the former for a woman told of too much firmness and resolution, qualities which circumstances might very readily develop into obstinacy, and even into cruelty. ”

“ that obstinacy and contention are common qualities, most appearing in mean souls; ”

“ The very corpse lying there ought to convince you that your duty is to live!’ When pressed to eat or to live, no one listens unwillingly, and the lady, thirsty after an abstinence of several days, finally permitted her obstinacy to be overcome ”

“ Darcy then consider the rashness of your original intention as atoned for by your obstinacy in adhering to it?” ”

“ I found also that I didn't like it so much as that came to, or that the pleasure at all events was far from being the cause of my conviction. My obsession, as I may really call it and as I began to perceive, refused to be elbowed away, as I had hoped, by my sense of paramount duties. If I had a great deal to do I had still more to think about, and the moment came when my occupations were gravely menaced by my thoughts. I see it all now, I feel it, I live it over. It's terribly void of joy, it's full indeed to overflowing of bitterness ”

“ We would react to a naïve obscenity with the same indignation felt toward a real obscenity, were it not for the fact that another factor saves us from this indignation and at the same time furnishes the more important part of the pleasure derived from the naïve. ”

“ It becomes more important to him than business, home, wife, children, reputation, or character; and before he knows it he finds that his will is undermined, reason is dethroned, affection is dead, appetite has become his master, and he has become its beastly and degraded slave.
Total abstinence the only sure defense.—This vice of intemperance is so prevalent in the community, so insidious in its approach, so degrading in its nature, so terrible in its effects, that the only absolutely and universally sure defense against it is total abstinence. ”

“ XXXII. From all this we may learn, (as was observed above) that abstinence as to eating and drinking, is but a small part of Christian self-denial: it being full as dangerous to indulge any evil temper, as to live in gluttony and intemperance.
*You think it shameful to be an epicure, or to be fond of liquor. You are very right: but then proceed a step further, and think it as shameful to be fond of dress, or delighted with yourself, or to be fond of dainties: and that it is as great a sin, to please any corrupt temper, as to please your palate. ”

“ Tell a man intoxication will kill him, cause him to believe this, and possibly it will deter him from listening to this lie of personal sense, viz., that there is pleasure in intoxication; but is he reformed? Abstinence, if it cherishes the desire for intemperance, is not reformation ”

“ A part of the amusement they yielded came, I daresay, from my exaggerating them—grouping them into a larger mystery (and thereby a larger "law") than the facts, as observed, yet warranted; but that is the common fault of minds for which the vision of life is an obsession. The obsession pays, if one will; but to pay it has to borrow. After dinner, but while the men were still in the room, I had some talk again with Long, of whom I inquired if he had been so placed as to see "poor Briss." ”

“ Who can tell the countless temptations to evil which flow in from a neglected, disordered, deranged nervous system,—temptations to anger, to irritability, to selfishness, to every kind of sin of appetite and passion? ”

“ Causes of the Habit.—It is needless to recapitulate all the causes of unchastity which have previously been quite fully dwelt upon, nearly all of which are predisposing or exciting causes of solitary as well as of social vice. Sexual precocity, idleness, pernicious literature, abnormal sexual passions, exciting and irritating food, gluttony, sedentary employment, libidinous pictures, and many abnormal conditions of life, are potent causes in exciting the vile practice; but by far the most frequent causes are evil associations, wicked or ignorant nurses, and local disease, or abnormality. ”

“ Abstinence involves many obligations, e.g., keeping the belly without food and drink, and guarding the eye from lustful looks, and the ear from listening to evil speech about anyone in his absence, and the tongue from vain or foul words, and the body from following after worldly things and disobedience to God. One who acts in this manner is truly keeping his fast, for the Apostle said to a certain man, “When you fast, let your ear fast and your eye and your tongue and your hand and every limb;” and he also said, “Many a one has no good of his fasting except hunger and thirst.” ”

“ Thy abstinence is consumed by the ravenous fire of gluttony, thy humility is drowned in the slough of the flesh, thy word no longer avails against the lies of the world, the flowers of all the virtues have fallen from thee. ”

“ Therefore any attempt to satisfy that desire, short of complying with the true demand, will result in begetting false action, which will tend to overtax and disease some part of his organism, creating an unnatural demand in that department, which, instead of bringing satisfaction and content, will bring restlessness and disquiet, calling for still further gratification. Thus lust, when it is conceived, bringeth forth a violation of the normal or healthy condition, which is sin ”

“ My private perversity, as I here glance at it, has had its difficulties—most of all possibly that of one's addiction, in growing older, to allowing a supreme force to one's earlier, even one's earliest, estimates of physical felicity; or in other words that of the felt impulse to leave the palm for good looks to those who have reached out to it through the medium of our own history. ”

“ The cumulative tendency of the stimulant vice may be resisted, but only by constant vigilance, constant self-denial, constant struggles with the revivals of a morbid appetency, all of which might be saved by the total renunciation of all abnormal stimulants whatever, for only in that sense is it true that “abstinence is easier than temperance.” ”

“ There can be no question that abstinence was a fundamental part of his system, yet certain modern critics—little in sympathy with so practical a manifestation of the higher life, or, indeed, with self-denial of any kind—have sometimes affected either to doubt the fact or to pass it by in contemptuous silence, thus ignoring what for the after ages stands out as by far the most important residuum of Pythagoreanism. ”

“ If you are bred up in temperance and modesty, where there are no great temptations to gluttony, drinking, sports, or wantonness, you may think a while that your natures have little or none of this concupiscence, and so may walk without a guard: but when [Pg 55] you come where baits of lust abound, where women, and plays, and feasts, and drunkards are the devil's snares, and tinder, and bellows, to inflame your lusts, you may then find to your sorrow, that you had need of watchfulness, and that all is not mortified that is asleep or quiet in you. ”

“ This thought produces a mental panic, the blood mounts to his head, he becomes incapable of coherent thought or speech, and the task of finishing his dinner would now be beyond his power even if he had not lost all taste for it.
Such illustrations of obsession in daily life, by no means rare, could be multiplied indefinitely, and may be perhaps better appreciated than the text-book illustration of the man who neglected to flick off with his whip a certain stone from the top of a wall, and who could not sleep until he had returned to the spot and performed the act. ”

“ The more abstemious a person is in food, clothing, housing, the easier it is for him to be free from the sin of greed, the lust for power, sexual lust. Satisfied with little, he does not need possessions, abstinence helps with conquering sexual lust, and, having little needs, he has no reasons to fight. ”

“ We have heard of the parlour-maid who fainted because the dining-table had ‘ceder legs,’ but never before that a ‘switching’ was ‘obscene.’ We do not envy the unwholesomeness of a mind so watchful for obscenity. ”

“ Pride, lust, anger, impatience, malice, envy, gluttony, drunkenness, concupiscence, robbery, lying, perjury, idle talking, scurrility, ignorance, negligence, and other pests have overthrown me, and all the vices like ravening beasts have devoured my soul. ”

“ The doctor cast about.
“There is no such greater desire,” said Sir Richmond. “You cannot name it. It is just blind drive. I admit its discontent with pleasure as an end—but has it any end of its own? At the most you can say that the rage in life is seeking its desire and hasn’t found it.”
“Let us help in the search,” said the doctor, with an afternoon smile under his green umbrella. “Go on.” ”

“ Endued with a mind powerful but perverted, a temper careless but impetuous, and feelings kindly but irritable, he, by the early association with depraved companions, rendered himself, by one false step, induced by a too ready compliance, an outcast, excluded from the pale of orderly society, and condemned to herd with the very refuse of mankind. ”

“ The senses and curiosity war with pride and one another, the motives suggested to us fall into conflict with this element or that of our intimate and habitual selves. We find all our instincts are snares to excess. Excesses of indulgence lead to excesses of abstinence, and even the sense of beauty may be clouded and betray. ”

“ He will examine the family history of this woman and perhaps will give us the answer: "The people who develop obsessions are those in whose families similar and other psychic disturbances have repeatedly occurred." In other words, if this lady develops an obsession she does so because she was predisposed to it by reason of her heredity. ”

“ You see, she had wanted to kill him for so long—had gone over the manner of it so often in her silent vigils—that when at last her conscious mind became unbalanced the resisted desire took its revenge by becoming a subconscious obsession, which announced itself an accomplished fact. ”

“ Thus, obsessions and phobias have their origin, according to Freud, in sexual life. The obsession represents a compensation, a substitute for an unbearable sex idea, and takes its place in consciousness. ”

“ It is conceivable that a nation or a community may, by the prevalence of excess in past generations, be characterized by so strong a tendency to intemperance [pg 176] as to render general abstinence a prerequisite to general temperance.
Abstinence may also become a duty, if to many around us our example in what we may enjoy innocently would be ensnaring and perilous. The recreation, harmless in itself, which by long abuse has become a source of corruption, it may be our duty to forego. The indulgence, safe for us, which would be unsafe for our associates, it may be incumbent on us to resign. ”