"Tenacity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ever been noted for their tenacity of purpose. Their works have not been flung off from minds aglow with genius, but have been elaborated and elaborated into grace and beauty, until every trace of their efforts has been obliterated. Bishop Butler worked twenty years incessantly ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... lower portion of the stem, and were in a perfectly healthy state. When it is remembered that all this happened in the dry atmosphere of a museum, it will be apparent how exceptional Cactuses are in their manner of growth, and in the wonderful tenacity of life they exhibit under conditions which would destroy the majority of plants in a very short time. We sometimes find, when examining the bases of Cactus stems, that decay has commenced; this ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... lines; a brooding sublimity haunts them; the spirit of the great writer moves over the face of the page. In life there seems to have been the same peculiar strength that his works suggest to us. His moral tenacity is amazing: he took his own course, and he kept his own course; and we may trace in his defects the same characteristics. "Energy and ill temper," some say, "are the same thing;" and though this is a ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... like—The lap of luxury, Part and parcel, A sea of troubles, Passing through the furnace, Beyond the pale, The battle of life, The death-warrant of, Parrot cries, The sex-war, Tottering thrones, A trail of glory, Bull-dog tenacity, Hats off to, The narrow way, A load of sorrow, A charnel-house, The proud prerogative, Smiling through your tears, A straight fight, A profit and loss account, The fires of martyrdom, The school of life—are ...
— Tract XI: Three Articles on Metaphor • Society for Pure English
... What gave most cause for alarm in these reports, usually unworthy of much attention, was the fact that all of them were agreed on one point—Georges Cadoudal had disappeared. Since this man, formidable by reason of his courage and tenacity of purpose, had declared war without mercy on the First Consul, the police had never lost sight of him. It was known that he was staying in England, and he was under surveillance there; but if it was true that he had escaped ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... answer to such an appeal as that, who shall venture to say that the Fixed Period shall be carried out with all its startling audacity? The tenacity of purpose which distinguishes our friend here is known to us all. The fame of his character in that respect had reached my ears even among the thick-lipped inhabitants of Central Africa." I own I did wonder whether this could be true. "'Justum et tenacem ...
— The Fixed Period • Anthony Trollope
... affair and good-naturedly show him his folly, but for some reason I can't. He affects me very strangely. While I feel a strong repulsion, I am beginning to fear him—to become conscious of his intensity and the tenacity and power of his will. I didn't understand him at first, and I don't now, but if he were an ordinary, impulsive young fellow he would not impress me ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... to the action Flore dictated to him; but he insisted that the investment in the Funds, producing fifty thousand francs a year, should stand in Flore's name as holding a life-interest only, and in his as owner of the principal. The tenacity the old man displayed in the domestic disputes which this idea created caused Max a good deal of anxiety; he thought he could see the result of reflections inspired by the sight of ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... all the world over, cling with varying degrees of tenacity to the views and practices which have come to them from their fathers. Jeremiah said, "Pass over the isles of Chittim, and see; and send unto Kedar, and consider diligently, and see if there be such a thing. Hath ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... batteries Porter had three of his vessels disabled and twenty-nine men killed and wounded. The capture of that last Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi was a severe and tedious task, but General Grant, with that bulldog tenacity for which he was famous, held on until the 4th of July, 1863, when General Pemberton, the Confederate commander, surrendered his whole garrison of more than 20,000 men. In thus opening the Mississippi all the way to the Gulf the navy rendered invaluable ...
— Dewey and Other Naval Commanders • Edward S. Ellis
... years: poor old grandmother, too, shall find it a welcome refuge while she lives. I have never felt that I could see the home of my birth pass to other hands; my heart still clings to it, and its hallowed associations, with all the tenacity of former days. The first of May will, in future, have special charms for me, for from this day, 1878, dates my claim to that spot of earth which to me is dearer ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... his imagination hummed. He had almost decided to bid Dona Ignacia an abrupt good-night, pleading fatigue, which his pallor indorsed, when the door of the dining-room was thrown open to the liveliest of fiddling, and a white hand with a singular suggestion of tenacity both in appearance and clasp took possession of ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... the doubtful and embittered tribesmen as could be caught were collected in Omdurman, where they were compelled to drill regularly, and found it prudent to protest their loyalty. The strength and tenacity of the ruler were surprisingly displayed. The Khalifa Sherif, who had been suspected of sympathising with the Jaalin, was made a prisoner at large. The direst penalties attended the appearance of sedition. A close cordon around the city, and especially towards the north, ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... heat and strife neared its close. Neither Northern tenacity nor Southern fire could win, and the sun began to droop over the field piled so thickly with bodies. As the twilight crept up the battle sank in all parts of the peninsula. McClellan, who had lost those two ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler
... of the Albano station for the train that should take him back to Rome. He was not, however, presenting the spectacle of the murderer fleeing from his crime. He was quite calm. The heat and cruelty of the Tor di Rocca blood flared in him, but it burned with no steady flame. He had not the tenacity of his forefathers; and so, though he might kill his brother, he would not care to torment him during long years. Hate palled on him as quickly as love. He was content to leave the lives of Jean Avenel and of Olive on the knees ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... aristocratic figure, and beautiful hands. For a woman, to see him was to lose her head for him; do you understand? to conceive one of those desires which eat the heart, which are forgotten because of the impossibility of satisfying them, because women in Paris are commonly without tenacity. Few of them say to themselves, after the fashion of men, the "Je Maintiendrai," of the ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... as usual in a close group, now at a distance of about three miles. Ned could not keep from shuddering. They were as implacable as fate. Night, the storm and bullets did not stop them. They could not shake them off in the immense spaces of plain and desert. A kind of horror seized him. Such tenacity must triumph. Was it possible that Obed and he would fall victims after all? At least it seemed sure that in the end they would be overtaken, and Ned began to count the odds in a fight. Anything seemed ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... grace of line, yet with no sense of over-weighting in its tender curves, an expression of nervous energy underlying her fragile litheness of form, a look of strength—not muscular nor the strength of bulk or weight, but the strength of fibre, will, tenacity—seemed to mark her out as something ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... of missions in China has shown that it requires more time to convert a Chinese to Christianity than some other heathen, but that he can be converted and that when he is converted, he holds to his new faith with a tenacity and fortitude which the most awful persecution seldom shakes. The behaviour of the Chinese Christians under the baptism of blood and fire to which they were subjected in the Boxer uprising eloquently testified ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... that government be well administered than that it be administered by one set of men or another. The weakness of this group, aside from its small size, was its impatience and impracticability. By nature the Independent was an individualist, forming his own opinion and holding it with tenacity. In such a body there could not be long-continued cooperation or singleness of purpose; each new problem caused new decisions resulting in the break-up of the group and the formation of new alignments. The Independent group, ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... with Louis the year after Kaiser Karl had utterly lost hold of the Crown of Spain; and had not the least chance to clutch that bright substance again. But he held by the shadow of it, with a deadly Hapsburg tenacity; refused for twenty years, under all pressures, to part with the shadow: "The Spanish Hapsburg Branch is dead; whereupon do not I, of the Austrian Branch, sole representative of Kaiser Karl the Fifth, claim, by the law of Heaven, whatever he possessed in Spain, by law of ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... as soon as rain falls, wee white rootlets sprout out from the under side of the fragment as it lies, and it grows before long into a fresh small sedum plant. Thus, what seem like destructive agencies themselves, are turned in the end by mere tenacity of life into a secondary means ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... houses. She turned to meet the eyes of the pale-faced loungers in the lighted entrance of the St. James's restaurant, "Jimmy's," as she called it. But her mind was preoccupied. A problem had fastened upon it with the tenacity of some vampire or strange clinging creature of night. Cuckoo was wrestling with an angel; or was it a devil? And often, when she stopped on the pavement and exchanged a word or two with some casual stranger, she scarcely knew what she said, or to what kind of man she was ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... facts, dates, names, places, accompanied with narrations, anecdotes, reflections and arguments, until the matter was thoroughly sifted and laid bare in all its parts and properties, to the understanding of the most casual observer. The tenacity and correctness of his memory was proverbial. Alas, for the man who questioned the correctness of his statements, his facts, or dates. Sure discomfiture awaited him. His mind was a perfect calendar, a store-house, ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... incarnation of every quality and every principle which he most abhorred. Cato was upright, unselfish, incorruptibly pure in deed and word; but he was a fanatic whom no experience could teach, and he adhered to his convictions with the more tenacity, because fortune or the disposition of events so steadily declared them to be mistaken. He would have surrendered Caesar to the Germans as a reward for having driven them back over the Rhine. He ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... On higher slopes the tired army held the fire-trenches, with its faces and rifles still turned bravely landward and upward. Above them the Turks hung to the extremities of their territory with the same tenacity that we should show in defending Kent or Cornwall. Behind the Turk ran the silver Narrows, the splendid trophy of the present tourney. And, as I had been reminded that afternoon, far away the German armies were battling ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... his men, wrote naturally to the holy and orthodox emperor, "dominus semper suus." In the midst of barbarities scarce conceivable,[5] the finest characters were trained by the simple verities of the Catholic faith, to which they clung with an extraordinary tenacity. Nor is this anywhere more strongly shown than in the history of the Franks. Of the meaning of the great struggle of Catholicism against Arianism, and of its immense personal value, the histories afford many instances. There is an eloquent ...
— The Church and the Barbarians - Being an Outline of the History of the Church from A.D. 461 to A.D. 1003 • William Holden Hutton
... fellows, which he thought, quite absurdly, that he had forfeited. So far as he could see, there was only one way that he could justify his existence at Sanford; that was to win one of the dashes in the Sanford-Raleigh meet. He clung to that idea with the tenacity of ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... loose upon him; master and mistress and subordinate members of the family rush after him, armed with saucepans, tongs, shovels, and broomsticks. The affrighted Mujik runs all round the stage bellowing fearfully; the bull-dog seizes him by the nether extremities and hangs on with the tenacity of a vice. Round and round they run, Mujik roaring for help, bull-dog swinging out horizontally. The audience applauds; the master flings down his broomstick and seizes the dog by the tail; the old woman seizes master by the skirts of his coat; and all three ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... would most certainly have caused them to rise to eminence. Into the fierce and blood-stained turmoil of their lives there entered something unknown to any other pirates: this was religious fanaticism—a fanaticism so engrained in character, a belief held to with such passionate tenacity, that men stained with every conceivable crime held that their passage to Paradise was absolutely secure because of the faith which they professed. Tradition, sentiment, discipline, were summed up in ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... suffering. She was largely different from her friend: the religious opinions of the latter—they were in reality rather metaphysical than religious, and bad either way—though she clung to them with all the tenacity of a creature with claws, occasioned her not an atom of mental discomposure: perhaps that was in part why she clung to them! they were as she would have them! She did not trouble herself about what God required of her, beyond holding the ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... the conductors of the press at first affected to treat the threats of prosecution. More noteworthy than anything else, however, is the view given of the deliberate manner in which Cooper began these suits, and the relentless tenacity with which he followed them up. The "Evening Journal," of which Thurlow Weed was then the head, partly from the political skill of its editor, and partly from its being the organ of the party at ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... the left, and the first plaything he demands is a hammer. So, where a family have been traders, will the offspring naturally discover an aptness for bargaining and commerce. This is illustrated in the instincts of the Jews, a people of extraordinary brain and wonderful tenacity of purpose. Five thousand years since, a small fragment of the Semitic race, residing in Mesopotamia between the waters of the Euphrates and the Tigris, consisting of two families, came into the land of Canaan, in Asia Minor; from them ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... the escape seemed almost miraculous. John recurred, with a kind of trembling tenacity, to the old saying in our house, ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... such a proposal left her mentally gaping; but that there must have been some preliminaries of meeting and courtship became obvious to her. Mary also listened to his remarks in a stupor. Was there no possibility at all of getting away from the man? A tenacity such as this seemed to her malignant. She had the feeling of one being pursued by some relentless and unscrupulous hunter. She heard him speaking through a cloud, and the only things really clear to her were the thoughts which she knew her ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... significance from my imagination, plunged me deeper into the bitter despondency which had closed over my head. I saw the General, with his little, alert bloodshot eyes, like the eyes of an intelligent bulldog, with that look of stubbornness, of tenacity, persisting beneath the sly humour that gleamed in his face, as if he were thinking always somewhere far back in his brain, "I'll hang on to the death, I'll hang on to the death." His figure, which, because of that legendary glamour I had seen surrounding it ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... desperate footing. They, With hearts courageous whom hope did anoint, Despite their tar and tan, Worn of the wind and spray, Seem more to me than man, With their unconquerable spirits.—Mountains may Succumb to men like these, to wills like theirs,— The Puritan's tenacity to do; The stubbornness of genius;—holding to Their purpose to the end, No New-World hardship could deflect or bend;— That never doubted in their worst despairs, But steadily on their way Held to the last, trusting in God, who filled Their souls with fire of faith that helped ...
— An Ode • Madison J. Cawein
... (and these latter are as large as a huge shield), they let the fish go. The moment it is freed, it attacks, with the rapidity of an arrow, the fish or turtle, on some part exposed from the shell, covering it with the pouch-like skin, and attaching itself with such tenacity that the only way to pull it off alive is by rolling a cord round a pole and raising the fish out of the water, when contact with the air causes it to drop its prey. This is-done by some of the fishermen who throw themselves into the water, and hold it above the surface, until their ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... conically of poles, with a hole in the top for the smoke to escape, and often set up a little from the ground on a timber foundation, they are as pleasing to the eye as a Chinese or Turkish dwelling. They may be cold in winter, but blessed be the tenacity of barbarism, which retains this agreeable architecture. The men live by hunting in the season, and the women support the family by making moccasins and baskets. These Indians are most of them good Catholics, and they try to go once ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... to which they were exposed the Canadians held their ground with a magnificent display of tenacity and courage; and it is not too much to say that the bearing and conduct of these splendid troops averted a disaster which might have been attended ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... sounds which, since the captivity of the Jews in Babylon, and the destruction of their temple, 606 B.C., and in consequence of musical instruments being afterwards forbidden, they have clung to with increased tenacity, preserving their ancient melodies, and bequeathing them by memory from one generation to another with the same jealous care that a miser would his treasure, and as the last melancholy relics of a ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... roar of traffic which ordinarily enveloped Paris day and night. It was not exactly like Paris on Sunday—except in the rue de la Paix—as I remembered Paris Sundays. No, it was something quite new—the physical expression of that inner silence, of that tenacity of mute will which I read in all the faces that passed me. Paris was living within, or beyond—la-bas, all along those hundreds of miles of earth walls from Flanders to the Vosges, where for nine months their men had ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... most interesting of the phenomena to be noted by the student of historical houses is the tenacity of tradition. People may be told again and again that a story attributed to a certain site has been proven untrue, but they still look with veneration on a place which has been hallowed many years, and refuse to give up any alluring name by which they have known it. A notable example of ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... to allow some force to Muratori's fragment as to the person of the evangelist who is least favourable to St. Peter; and was puzzled at the zeal of the Speaker's commentator as to the second epistle of the apostle. He held to the epistles of St. Ignatius with the tenacity of a Caroline prelate, and was grateful to De Rossi for a chronological point in their favour. He rejected the attacks of Lucius on the most valued passages in Philo, and stood with Gass against Weingarten's argument on the ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... exclusive of the Soveraigns Right to the use of the same. From whence it commeth to passe, that the Soveraign Power, which foreseeth the necessities and dangers of the Common-wealth, (finding the passage of mony to the publique Treasure obstructed, by the tenacity of the people,) whereas it ought to extend it selfe, to encounter, and prevent such dangers in their beginnings, contracteth it selfe as long as it can, and when it cannot longer, struggles with the people by strategems of Law, to obtain little summes, which not sufficing, he is fain at last ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... band of men, a hundred perhaps, entered the woods along the slopes of the Massanuttons. They were the remains of the Invincibles. Throughout those fatal hours they had fought with all the courage and tenacity for which they had been famous so long and so justly. In the heat and confusion of the combat they had been separated from the other portions of Early's army, and, the Northern cavalry driving in between, they had been compelled to take refuge in the forest, under cover of darkness. They might have ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... and heard, of the most contradictory character. In nine cases out of ten, we find in the Bible just what we bring to it; and thus the most pious and best educated see the most contradictory doctrines in the same passages of Scripture and fight for them with the greatest tenacity, all in the name of conscience. And the saddest thing about it all is that all these people show by their consecrated lives that they love God and are sincerely trying to serve him. In politics, we see the same pitiable ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... sanctity with a ring wall of fire. Reverence the voice of the land for right and order. We have exploded forever, let us trust, the notion of 'the right divine of kings to govern wrong.' We must cling, therefore, with tenfold tenacity to the right divine of Law, the Sacred Majesty ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... of native life under the governorship of Colonel Juan Menendez and I began to consider his story from a new viewpoint. Seemingly rendered restless by his reflections, he stood up and began to pace the floor, a tall but curiously graceful figure. I noticed the bulldog tenacity of his chin, the intense pride in his bearing, and I wondered what kind of menace had induced him to seek the aid of Paul Harley; for whatever his failings might be, and I could guess at the nature of several of them, that this thin-lipped ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... being good, but as being less bad than any other. Its strongest merits seem to be: first, that the citizens of a democracy have a sense of proprietorship and responsibility in public affairs, which in times of crisis may add to their tenacity and endurance. The determination of the Federals in the American Civil War, and of the French and British in the four years' struggle against Germany, may be legitimately adduced as arguments for democracy. When De Tocqueville says ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... order them off, while ordering would have been of any use; and in affairs of this nature, the squatter who hesitates is lost. The time comes when grass-loafers will stand a lot of ordering off; in extreme cases, such as the one under review, they are about equal in tenacity to the Scythians or ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... right acting. "He that keepeth the law, happy is he;" "There is nothing sweeter than to take heed unto the commandments of the Lord;"—that is the Hebrew [146] notion of felicity; and, pursued with passion and tenacity, this notion would not let the Hebrew rest till, as is well known, he had, at last, got out of the law a network of prescriptions to enwrap his whole life, to govern every moment of it, every impulse, every action. The Greek notion of felicity, ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... of his age, the pensiveness and composure of that expression were indeed almost unnatural, and they combined with a calm firmness and immobility of feature, which promised, I know not what of resolution and tenacity of purpose. It was not gravity, much less sternness, or sadness, that lent so powerful an expression to that young face; nor was there a single line which indicated coldness or hardness of heart, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... that he knew how to fight like a white man. This was true; he had that sort of courage—the courage in the open, I may say—but he had also a European mind. You meet them sometimes like that, and are surprised to discover unexpectedly a familiar turn of thought, an unobscured vision, a tenacity of purpose, a touch of altruism. Of small stature, but admirably well proportioned, Dain Waris had a proud carriage, a polished, easy bearing, a temperament like a clear flame. His dusky face, with big black eyes, was in action expressive, and ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... was the fact that the bar closed at eleven. And a rough passage added to his labors. No Henley this voyage, no comfy loafing about the main-deck in the sunshine. A busy, miserable, dejected young man, who cursed his folly and yet clung to it with that tenacity which makes ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... joined in the chase—not all, however, to catch Gogles, but rather to impede his pursuers, and to give him a better chance of escape. Although he had not an over allowance of wits, he was very active, and had great tenacity of grip—qualities more valuable to skylarking midshipmen, ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... He was very happy to be there, because he liked society, and because he knew Jerrie was coming; and Ann Eliza was very glad because she felt it an honor to be at Grassy Spring, and because she knew Tom was coming, and when he came she fastened upon him with a tenacity which he could not well shake off; and when croquet was proposed she was the first ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... wisdom and everything else we could get at Antietam—leadership, tenacity and the willingness to die," said Dalton, the sober young Virginia Presbyterian. "Boys, we were in the deepest of holes there, and we had to lift ourselves out almost ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler
... and was destined to become the fundamental law of all civilized communities. But even in connection with this private law, where the originality of Rome is uncontested and her preeminence absolute, recent researches have shown with how much tenacity the Hellenized Orient maintained its old legal codes, and how much resistance local customs, the woof of the life of nations, offered to unification. In truth, unification never was realized except in theory.[7] ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... sometimes easier to put up with a thing than to try to put it down. An exacting, arbitrary mind perhaps might evolve a set of resolutions that even the most intolerant would hesitate to violate, but for an easygoing, trouble-dodging brain like my own there is no such thing as tenacity of purpose, unless it be in the direction of an obfuscated tendency to maintain its own pitiful equilibrium. I try to keep an even ballast in my dome of thought and to steer straight through the sea of circumstance, a very difficult ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... granddaughter. Time had intensified the keen eagerness of her mind. She had been disappointed, cruelly, bitterly, in the ambition of her youth. She had been made to drink the cup of shame and humiliation. But to this ambition of her old age she held with even greater tenacity. God help her if she should be ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... case, inquired if the family desired to leave, informing them that Major Burke, of 'The Times-Democrat,' has sent the 'Susie' up for that purpose. Mrs. Taylor said she thanked Major Burke, but she would try and hold out. The remarkable tenacity of the people here to their homes is beyond all comprehension. Just below, at a point sixteen miles from Troy, information was received that the house of Mr. Tom Ellis was in danger, and his family were all in ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the fingers held it with irresistible tenacity. "Indeed, these are very sensible fingers," exclaimed Napoleon; "they do not give up what they ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... without a model, with a tenacity which kept him standing before the canvas until it was dark. Sometimes, when the servant entered at nightfall, he found the luncheon untouched on the table. In the evening the master ate in silence in the dining-room, from ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... which Jefferson held the gates by main force, which was relaxed by the war under Madison and the fusion of parties under Monroe, but which swelled again into a furious torrent as the later parties took form. John Quincy Adams adhered, with the tough tenacity of his father's son, to the best principles of all his predecessors. He followed Washington, and observed the spirit of the Constitution in refusing to remove for any reason but official misconduct or incapacity. But he knew well what was ...
— American Eloquence, Volume IV. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... addressing the Battalion on parade on August 25th, said: "I have read with great pleasure and pride the report of the General commanding your Division, telling of the arduous work which you recently did in the neighbourhood of Hooge. By your boldness, tenacity, and gallantry, you did work of very great importance. Perhaps you do not know that not only did your action have an important bearing on that particular bit of line, but on the whole campaign, because of the political reason for holding the Salient. The ...
— The Sherwood Foresters in the Great War 1914 - 1919 - History of the 1/8th Battalion • W.C.C. Weetman
... imminent, and so I advised Bee; but there was not time to send General Wharton to him after I reached Polignac's camp. Bee had two thousand horse and four batteries, and, after several days to examine and prepare his ground, might well be expected to hold it with tenacity. ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... St. Vincent, who, besides his aversion from the war in general, was distinguished rather by tenacity and resolution in meeting difficulties and dangers, when forced upon him, than by the sanguine and enterprising initiative in offensive measures which characterized Nelson. Writing to the latter on the 8th of January, 1798, he says: "I am much at a loss to ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... account the emotional and sentimental side of man, were incomplete and ineffectual. This higher side of his nature showed itself in his lively affections, his intense love of home and wife and children, his lifelong tenacity of friendship, and his overflowing sympathy for the poor, the abject, ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... had long thought out an answer as firm and as definite as it was moderate and in a sense subtle. He had, moreover, a quality of heart which, as it seemed to those near him, the protraction of the conflict, with its necessary strain upon him, only strengthened. In him a tenacity, which scarcely could falter in the cause which he judged to be right, was not merely pure from bitterness towards his antagonists, it was actually bound up with a deep-seated kindliness towards them. Whatever rank may be assigned to his services ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... the river to exchange congratulations with the navy upon our joint victory. At that time I found that many of the citizens had been living under ground. The ridges upon which Vicksburg is built, and those back to the Big Black, are composed of a deep yellow clay of great tenacity. Where roads and streets are cut through, perpendicular banks are left and stand as well as if composed of stone. The magazines of the enemy were made by running passage-ways into this clay at places where there ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... "The passionate tenacity of hunters, woodmen, early risers, cultivators of gardens and orchards and fields, he says, the love of healthy women for the manly form, seafaring persons, drivers of horses, the passion for light and the open air, - all is an old unvaried sign of the unfailing perception of beauty, and ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... spot on which they are born; the farmer will keep on the farm his ancestors tilled before him for ages, and if offered a better farm, if it be far removed from his home and that of his fathers he will reject it; with the same tenacity the labourer clings to his cottage and the little bit of land he has always delved. But it is with the landed proprietor that one finds the most powerful example of the durability of their adhesion to the cradle of their birth. ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... two flights of steps, an enclosed porch forming a central feature to the main entrance; the basement windows are shewn in the elevation above the ground line. The walls were substantially built of black slate rock peculiar to Quebec and must have taken much time in the erection judging from its tenacity, and the hardness of the material still remaining. No doubt the walls, as was the practice in those days, were built of dry masonry, a few feet at a time, and then grouted with mortar in a thin semi-fluid state, composed of quicklime and fine sand poured into ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... week's pay to see the grins on their brown puckered faces and hear their husky contented salaams as they were lifted from the train. Blankets, top-coats, pillows, and other items belonging to the State were gaily abandoned, but every man clung with tenacity to his tunic and his water-bottle, for was there not a collection of trophies in those bulging pockets and sea-water in those battered bottles? Real salt sea-water, for the taste and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 19, 1917 • Various
... conceive why nature did not give you a bulldog's head, for you have all a bulldog's tenacity," ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... Barrie about "Peter Pan." It was a curious commentary on the man's tenacity of interest and purpose that, although he made nearly seven hundred productions in his life, the play of the "Boy Who Would Never Grow Up" tugged most at his heart. Nor did Barrie ever weary of telling him how the play began as a nursery tale for children; ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... caring most for the cure of physical suffering, as Marat went on caring most for it. It is out of these real differences that real things can be made, such as the modern French democracy. For by such tenacity everyone sees at last that there is something in the other person's position. And those drilled in party discipline see nothing either past or present. And where there is nothing ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... aged Ormond, now arrived at the period usually allotted to the life of man, returned to Ireland, with the rank of Viceroy. During the ensuing seven years, he clung to power with all the tenacity of his youth, and all the policy of his prime; they were seven years of extraordinary sectarian panic and excitement—the years of the Cabal, the Popish plot, and the Exclusion Bill, in England—and of fanatical conspiracies and explosions almost as ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... rooters urge them on to renewed efforts. Columbia seemed to have thrown up a stone wall in front of her goal lines, and no matter what strenuous plays were called off they were met with a stubborn tenacity that ...
— The Boys of Columbia High on the Gridiron • Graham B. Forbes
... friendship. He would not demean himself by asking for the slightest explanation; to drive the other away with contumely he did not think prudent—as yet, at any rate. So much assurance staggered him. Who could tell what there could be in it, he thought? His regard for Captain Whalley had the tenacity of a disinterested sentiment, and his practical instinct coming to his aid, he ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... ruminating animals. The most formidable of the tribe is the Black Rhinoceros of Equatorial Africa, which is particularly dangerous when it turns to Bay. Though dull of eye and ear, this ponderous beast will follow a scent with wonderful tenacity, and the promptness with which it makes its tremendous charges has earned for it, among European hunters, the sobriquet of the "Ready Rhino." The fact that the Black Rhinoceros is armed with two horns, while most of the white ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870 • Various
... marble, and where a slight depression usually marks the temples his swelled boldly out, rounding the entire outline of the splendidly developed brow. He wore neither moustache nor beard, and every line of his handsome mouth and finely modelled chin indicated the unbending tenacity of purpose and imperial pride which had made him a ruler even in his cradle, and almost a ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... admire the splendid tenacity displayed by our infantry in holding on to their trenches during so many long hours of heavy shell fire, and the skill with which they so gloriously repulsed with bomb and rifle the ...
— The Story of the "9th King's" in France • Enos Herbert Glynne Roberts
... gave rise to bitter animosities. The churches of Africa were rent by their implacable feuds, and on so small a matter,—even as the ranks of the reformers under Luther were so soon divided by the Anabaptists. In proportion to the unimportance of the shibboleth was tenacity to it,—a mark which has ever characterized narrow and illiberal minds. It is not because a man accepts a shibboleth that he is narrow and small, but because he fights for it. As a minute critic would cast out from the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... must not only find the central idea as early as possible, but he must hold it with a firm grip. Both of these things require much tenacity of purpose. In following the order of an author's presentation, considerable detail may have to be traversed before the main thought begins to dawn in the student's mind, and temptations to forget about the main issue and to become absorbed ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... logs up to 50 feet long by 22 inches square. It is proof against white ants, has great strength and tenacity, and is much valued ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... Critique de l'Ecole des Femmes on the boards of his theater five months after the hostile reception of L'Ecole des Femmes, Hauptmann gives us a naturalistic tragedy and, at the same time, its criticism and defense. His tenacity to the ideals of his youth is impressively illustrated here. In his own work he has created a new idealism. But let it not be thought that his understanding of tragedy and his sense of human values have changed. The charwoman may, ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... her arm in his, and clung to him with the fond tenacity of a woman who loves heart and soul, poor ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... the events of the year, but this illustration of the character of the little people whose tenacity and courage put their mark on European history during the subsequent three years will help to give significance to the story. Without being undiplomatically frank, on the one hand, or attempting to conceal his rle on the other, the Prince allowed me to see that everything depended ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... dissolve. When the division on the sugar duties was taken, ministers were beaten (May 19) by a majority of 36, after fine performances from Sir Robert, and a good one from Palmerston on the other side. The cabinet, with, a tenacity incredible in our own day, were still for holding on until their whole scheme, with the popular element of cheap bread in it, was fully before the country. Peel immediately countered them by a vote ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... undertaking and try to work good for your countrymen in another way. The undertaking needs another man than you for its execution, because to carry it out will not only require money and care, but, in our country, self-denial, tenacity and faith are also needed. The land is not ready for it; it has been sown ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal
... rapidly. The change was so confusing, and events had chased one another so unceremoniously, that she must be pardoned if she grasped new ideas with more tenacity than accuracy. It is what all of us are doing day ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... that are in their own nature essentially intellectual. Yet even the most splendid successes of life will often be found to be due much less to extraordinary intellectual gifts than to an extraordinary strength and tenacity of will, to the abnormal courage, perseverance, and work-power that spring from it, or to the tact and judgment which make men skilful in seizing opportunities, and which, of all intellectual qualities, are ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... corridor wore its old quietude; the striped curtain in the wing window, and the yellow placard in the suspicious window at the top, still kept their places with provoking tenacity; and I could never, with all my art, seduce the good-natured abbe into any bugbear story about the occupant of the dim chamber ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... lapse of centuries, this mere game has survived, when so many things of far greater importance have either passed away from the memories of men, or still exist only in the dusty pages of the chroniclers. It owes, of course, much of its tenacity of existence to the amazing inexhaustibility of its nature. Some chess writers have loved to dwell upon the unending fertility of its powers of combinations. They have calculated by arithmetical rules the ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird
... furnished conservative patience, persistent effort, indomitable tenacity of purpose, and cool, determined courage. These qualities have won glorious victories on both sides of the Atlantic, not only in the conflicts of war, but in the contests of peace, and who can doubt that they are destined to win still greater ones ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... appeal in the bloodshot eyes, a desperate tenacity in his clutch. He looked at me as if he dared look nowhere else. Some horror seemed pressing upon his confused and weakened brain, and I thought I could ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... medicine, at the University of St. Andrew's, as soon as he had obtained his ordinary degree at Cambridge. And having once insisted, nothing could turn him from his purpose, for he possessed English tenacity grafted upon Scotch originality, with a good deal of the strength of ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... an omen of ultimate success, and Dick took heart. No, they'd never beat the grim, unconquerable tenacity of the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... industry, the inventiveness, the stout enterprise, the free government, the wise and equal laws, the noble literature, of this fortunate island and its majestic empire beyond the seas, and the discretion, valour, and tenacity by which all these great material and still greater intangible possessions had been first won, and then kept, against every hostile comer whether domestic or foreign, sent through Macaulay a thrill, like that which the thought of Paris and its heroisms moves in ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley
... timber, considered by him suitable for wood-engraving purposes, obtained in a defile of Mount Wellington. It seems to be the young wood of Pittosporum bicolor, formerly in high estimation amongst the Aborigines of Tasmania, on account of its combined qualities of density, hardness, and tenacity, as the most suitable material of which to make ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... under its short thick thatch of dark rough hair, and in her sturdily-built little frame, there lurked the tenacity of a bulldog. Once she had taken an idea firmly into her mind, Beatrice Miller would never relinquish it until she had got her own way. Herbert, in the dingy solitude of his untempting chambers, might despair and look upon life and its aims as a hopeless ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... is reasonably certain. This was the reflection which cheered the traveller when he began to search for Senez, an ancient city of the Romans which was christianised in the early centuries and enjoyed the rank of Bishopric until the Revolution of '89. In spite of this dignified rank and the tenacity of an ancient foundation, it lies so far from modern ken that even worthies who live fifty miles away could only say that "Senez is not much of a place, but it doubtless may be found ten—perhaps fifteen—or even twenty ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... Her inborn obstinacy, her sturdy refusal to yield her ground, whatever it should be, her stubborn power of resistance, her tenacity of her chosen course, came to her aid as she drew swiftly near to the spot whereon the battle would be fought. Mentally she braced herself, holding back with all her fine, hard-tempered, native strength. No, she would not yield the life to the Enemy; no, she would not give up; no, ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... bonds is not logical, nor penetrative into the dark mystery of soul, nor is he the poet's friend. Nor is he a friend who assumes that the poet, because a poet, moves in eccentric paths rather than in concentric circles. Hold with all tenacity to the poet's sanity. He is superior, and lives where the eagles fly and stars run their far and splendid courses; but he is still man, though man grown tall and sublime. To the truth of this view of the great poet bear witness Aeschylus, and ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... concluded that the scare had been forgotten. We found, to our chagrin, that the dreaded 'Fever Valley' had lost none of its terrors. The valley had a bad name in Marco Polo's day, in the thirteenth century, and its reputation has clung to it ever since, with all the tenacity of Chinese traditions. The Chinaman of the district crosses the valley daily without fear, but the Chinaman from a distance knows that he will either die or his wife will prove unfaithful. If he is compelled to go, the usual course is to write to ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... The doctor felt sure, by the expression which passed over his features from time to time, that something was worrying and oppressing him; something which he wished to communicate, and had not the force, or the tenacity of purpose, to make perfectly clear. His eyes often wandered to a certain desk, and once he had found strength to lift his emaciated arm and point to it. The doctor went towards it as if to fetch it to him, but he slowly ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... recovering from the shock, which the loss of her Ophir inflicted on her; more liberal notions are gaining ground in Iberia; and it is by no means impossible, that, backed by France, she may yet resume her power in America. Look at the tenacity with which, amidst all her reverses, she has held on ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... too quick for them, too formidable, too wise. He avoided tight places and always backed out of it when they bade fair to surround him. While, as for getting him off his feet, there was no dog among them capable of doing the trick. His feet clung to the earth with the same tenacity that he clung to life. For that matter, life and footing were synonymous in this unending warfare with the pack, and none knew it ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... as a joke, and treated the matter very lightly, but later on she observed that the fly-paper stuck to her feet with great tenacity of purpose. Those who have never seen the look of surprise and deep sorrow that a cat wears when she finds herself glued to a whole sheet of fly-paper, cannot fully appreciate the way Dr. Mary Walker felt. She did not dash wildly ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... devoting herself to her work with taciturn tenacity; when now and then she raised her head to regulate her cotton and met Gabriel's glance, a faint smile ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... danger from all passengers and at the same time persuade—and if it was not sufficient, compel—women and children to take to the boats, it might result in their all being saved. He could not foresee the tenacity of their faith in the boat: there is ample evidence that he left the bridge when the ship had come to rest and went among passengers urging them to get into the boat and rigorously excluding all but women and children. Some would ...
— The Loss of the SS. Titanic • Lawrence Beesley
... shot with the little Fletcher rifle at the temple, exactly in front of the point of union of the head with the spine. The jaws clashed together, and a convulsive start followed by a twitching of the tail led me to suppose that sudden death had succeeded the shot; but, knowing the peculiar tenacity of life possessed by the crocodile, I fired another shot at the shoulder, as the huge body lay so close to the river's edge that the slightest struggle would cause it to disappear. To my surprise, this shot, far from producing a quietus, gave rise to a series of ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... meet great conquerors on their own domain—who do not want the stimulus of friends and home, but who sufficiently hear and feel their own dear land in the shouts and cheers of another—and who strive to the last with a desperate tenacity that makes the beating of them a new feather in the proudest cap. Gentlemen, you agree with me that such a defeat is a great, noble part of a manly, wholesome action; and I say that it is in the essence and ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... on, "all the ascertained veracities are immutable. One holds to them, or, rather, they hold to one, with an indissoluble tenacity. But convictions are in the region of character and are of remote origin. In their safety one indulges one's self in expectations, in tolerances, and these rather increase with the lapse of time. We should say that your theory of the stiffening tastes is applicable to the earlier ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... but because they stood for some quality desirable in the generation of mankind. Thus we find that some animals—the bull because of its strength and aggressive nature, the snake, perhaps because of its form or of its tenacity of life,—were male representatives of phallic significance. Likewise the fish, the dolphin, and a number of other aquatic creatures came to be female representatives. This may be shown over and over again by reference to the antique emblems, coins, and engravings ...
— The Sex Worship and Symbolism of Primitive Races - An Interpretation • Sanger Brown, II
... to close he had clung to the support of Desmond's presence with the tenacity of an exhausted body and a fevered brain;—a tenacity which could not fail to touch the older man's heart, and which had made it difficult for others to take their due share in the nursing. Thus the slow weeks ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... century had passed, or were passing, away, Francis II stood somewhat low among the mediocrities on whom fell the strokes of destiny. He was a poor replica of Leopold II. Where the father was supple and adroit, the son was perversely obstinate or weakly pliable. In place of foresight and tenacity in the pursuit of essentials, Francis was remarkable for a more than Hapsburg narrowness of view, and he lacked the toughness which had not seldom repaired the blunders of that House. Those counsellors ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... satisfactorily define—a woman's beauty—would have objected that her face was too wide, and her chin too square. Her hair, which was of a bright brown, grew with a singular strength and crispness round a brow which was serene and square. In her eyes there shone the light of tenacity, and a steady purpose. A student of human nature must have regretted that the soul looking out of such eyes should have been vouchsafed to a woman. For strength and purpose in a man are usually exercised for the good of mankind, while in a woman such qualities ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... the luck changed. The bull-dog tenacity and splendid condition of Sayers were proof against these violent shocks. The sun was out of his eyes, and there was not a mark of a blow either on his face or his body. His temper, his presence of mind, his defence, ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... oils, are expelled along with the moisture; and other changes may occur affecting the accuracy of the work. The last traces of moisture are removed with difficulty from a substance, being mechanically retained by the particles with great tenacity. When very accurate dry matter determinations are desired, the substance is dried in a vacuum oven, or in a desiccator over sulphuric acid, or in an atmosphere of ...
— Human Foods and Their Nutritive Value • Harry Snyder
... of this statement in his note-book, with the view of communicating it to the club, as a singular instance of the tenacity of life in horses under trying circumstances. The entry was scarcely completed when they reached the Golden Cross. Down jumped the driver, and out got Mr. Pickwick. Mr. Tupman, Mr. Snodgrass, and Mr. Winkle, who had been anxiously ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... sonorosities that are the stock-in-trade of all solemn old-fashioned frauds. The young man listened with his wonted attentive courtesy until the dolorous appeal disguised as fatherly counsel came to an end. Then in his blue-gray eyes appeared the gleam that revealed the tenacity and the penetration of ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... like that. Now, smitten to earth by the 500-page novel which he has just completed, I think I understand better. The Just Steward, from one standpoint, makes the labours of Gustave Flaubert in Salaambo seem trivial. It is known with what passionate tenacity and surprising ardour the French master studied the subject of ancient Carthage, grubbing like the lowliest archseologist to get at his fingertips all those recondite allusions so necessary if he were to move with lightness, assurance and consummate art through the scenes of his novel. ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... estuaries into the greater rivers, thence extended to the brooks and lakes, and finally migrated to the ponds, puddles, swamps and marshes, whence it took at last, by tentative degrees, to the solid shore, the plains, and the mountains. Certainly the tenacity of life shown by pond animals is very remarkable. Our own English carp bury themselves deeply in the mud in winter, and there remain in a dormant condition many months entirely without food. During ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... in their great struggle against Philip II., seemed to find a stimulus in the very exhaustions of war. The protesting ideas for which they fought drew fresh tenacity from the soil, wet with blood and tears, into which generous passion and resolution sank with every death. Here it is plain that a milder conflict, carried on by intrigue and diplomatic forms alone, for peaceable ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... accounted one of the most redoubtable commanders of his age. If the story is true, certainly the Marquis de Montcalm did not carry out the splendid promise of his boyhood. He lived to fight the battles of his country with unflinching courage, with a tolerable amount of military skill, and with a tenacity of purpose that often achieved success against tremendous odds. But, unlike the great general to whom, during the last few weeks of his life, it was his fortune to be opposed, he never gave any evidence of possessing an original ...
— Canadian Notabilities, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... though outnumbered in men and guns, determined that the Austrians should pay a staggering price for every yard of ground they gained. They fought as must have fought their ancestors of the Roman legions. And, thanks to their tenacity and pluck, they held their opponents on the five-yard line. Then, just in the nick of time, the whistle blew. The game was over. The Austrians had to hurry home. They had staked everything on a sudden and overwhelming onslaught by which they hoped to smash the Italian ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... the great actor his play of William Tell—Caius Gracchus had been produced in November, 1823—there were passages of writing in it that stopped the course of action, and, says Macready, "Knowles had less of the tenacity of authorship than most writers," so that there was no difficulty about alterations, Macready having in a very high degree the tenacity of actorship. And so, in 1825, Tell became another ...
— The Hunchback • James Sheridan Knowles
... become law, and if England should be over-run by the charming people of Connaught, the brutal Saxon will be interested to observe some of the ancient customs to which they cling with a touching tenacity. Marriage with the Connaught folks is entirely a matter of pecuniary bargain. The young folks have no act or part in the arrangements. The seniors meet and form a committee of ways and means. How much money has your son? How much has your daughter? The details ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... weakness which are often mingled in one character, like the iron and clay in the image of the prophet's vision, make the most surprising of the many strange paradoxes of human life. Fenton was sensuous, selfish, yielding, yet he possessed a tenacity of purpose, a might of will, which nothing could shake. He looked across the table now, at his sweet-faced, clear-eyed wife, with a dreadful sense of her purity, her honor, her remoteness; it cut him to the quick to think that the breach of trust he had in view would fill her mind with loathing; ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... Jones, who had already given evidence, not only of that desperate courage and unyielding tenacity which had marked him as among the most notable of sea officers the world has seen,—lacking nothing but opportunity to have equalled, if not surpassed a Nelson—but of consummate seamanship and great executive ability as ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... numerous ravines in our front; but the batteries at Fairview pour a heavy and destructive fire of shell and case into their columns as they press on. Every inch of ground is contested by our divisions, which hold their footing at Fairview with unflinching tenacity. ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... an unforeseen event. That is Monk, sire, of whom perhaps, you have never heard—of whom, perhaps, you did not even know the name before your brother Charles II., who knows what he is, pronounced it before you. He is a marvel of depth and tenacity, the two only things against which intelligence and ardor are blunted. Sire, I had ardor when I was young, I always was intelligent. I may safely boast of it, because I am reproached with it. I have ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... was to be long—for with the tenacity of purpose he had always exhibited Constantine readjusted himself to the narrow realm of four walls. His former tyranny toward the business world was now exercised toward his daughter and son-in-law, his sister and ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... and which not only prove the natural impulses of all who enjoy the birthright of British citizens, but demonstrate the convictions of a people who, by the knowledge they have acquired of the political institutions of the world, cling with a tenacity and firmness never to be shaken, to the constitution which their fathers moulded, and under which they experience now the blessings of freedom and the tranquillity of order, beneath the sceptre of a Gracious Ruler, whose Throne is revered ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell
... the grisly bear scorns to fly from before the face of man. His ferocity, when wounded, is terrible, and his tenacity of life is such that, however many mortal wounds one may give him, he will retain life and strength long enough to kill his assailant before he himself dies, unless he is shot dead at once by ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... as interpreter with a Scottish regiment, relates with amazement how the Highlanders go into action, "as if they were going to a picnic, with laughing eyes and, whenever possible, with a cigarette between their lips. Their courage is a mixture of imperturbability and tenacity. One must have seen their immovable calm, their heroic sang-froid, under the rain of bullets to do it justice." Then he goes on to describe how a handful of Scots were selected to hold back a large ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick
... proprietor of the Ship and of Mrs. Susanna Verstage, was a dull, obstinate man, slow of thought and of speech, withal kindly. Like many another dull man, if he did a stupid thing he stuck to it; and the stupider the thing done, the greater the tenacity with which he held to the consequences. His mind was chiefly occupied with a small farm acquired out of the sand waste, hedged about, dressed and cultivated, and increasing annually in value. In this was his interest and pride; he cared nothing for the ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... only business; he was equally adept in buying and selling timber-lands and the hiring of men. When he was successful—and he was generally successful—his gains were never less than fifty per cent; less than that would have spelled failure in his eyes. For in Bergstein's veins ran the avaricious tenacity of the Pole and the insincerity of the Irishman. The former he inherited from his father, a peddler, the latter from his mother, the keeper for many years of a rough dive for sailors along the quay in Montreal. Both had died when he was a child and ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... Trevethick believed in "Knockers" and "Buccas," spirits who indicate the position of good lodes by blows with invisible picks; and, as these had more immediate connection with his own affairs than the nautical phenomena, he clung to his creed with even greater tenacity than before. So fierce was their contention that it was with difficulty that Richard could put in an inquiry as to whence these spirits came who thus interested themselves in the ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn |
