The right merchant is one who has the just average of faculties we call common sense; a man of a strong affinity for facts, who ma...kes up his decision on what he has seen. He is thoroughly persuaded of the truths of arithmetic. There is always a reason, in the man, for his good or bad fortune ... in making money. Men talk as if there were some magic about this.... He knows that all goes on the old road, pound for pound, cent for cent--for every effect a perfect cause--and that good luck is another name for tenacity of purpose.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am actually not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a ...conquistador--an adventurer, if you want it translated--with all the curiosity, daring, and tenacity characteristic of a man of this sort.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The very presence of guilt, let alone its tenacity, implies imbalance: Something, we suspect, is getting more of our energy than w...arrants, at the expense of something else, we suspect, that deserves more of our energy than we're giving.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The daily arguments over putting away the toys or practicing the piano defeat us so easily. We see them coming yet they frustrate ...us time and time again. In many cases, we are mothers and fathers who have managed budgets and unruly bosses and done difficult jobs well through sheer tenacity and dogged preparation. So why are we unable to persuade someone three feet tall to step into six inches of water at bathtime?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If it is not a tragical life we live, then I know not what to call it. Such a story as that of Jesus Christ,--the history of Jerus...alem, say, being a part of the Universal History. The naked, the embalmed, unburied death of Jerusalem amid its desolate hills,--think of it. In Tasso's poem I trust some things are sweetly buried. Consider the snappish tenacity with which they preach Christianity still. What are time and space to Christianity, eighteen hundred years, and a new world?--that the humble life of a Jewish peasant should have force to make a New York bishop so bigoted. Forty-four lamps, the gift of kings, now burning in a place called the Holy Sepulchre; a church-bell ringing; some unaffected tears shed by a pilgrim on Mount Calvary within the week.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We had got a loaf of home-made bread, and musk and water melons for dessert. For this farmer, a clever and well-disposed man, cult...ivated a large patch of melons for the Hooksett and Concord markets. He hospitably entertained us the next day, exhibiting his hop-fields and kiln and melon-patch, warning us to step over the tight rope which surrounded the latter at a foot from the ground, while he pointed to a little bower at one corner, where it connected with the lock of a gun ranging with the line, and where, he informed us, he sometimes sat in pleasant nights to defend his premises against thieves. We stepped high over the line, and sympathized with our host's on the whole quite human, if not humane, interest in the success of his experiment. That night especially thieves were to be expected, from rumors in the atmosphere, and the priming was not wet. He was a Methodist man, who had his dwelling between the river and Uncannunuc Mountain; who there belonged, and stayed at home there, and by the encouragement of distant political organizations, and by his own tenacity, held a property in his melons, and continued to plant. We suggested melon seeds of new varieties and fruit of foreign flavor to be added to his stock. We had come away up here among the hills to learn the impartial and unbribable influence of Nature. Strawberries and melons grew as well in one man's garden as another's, and the sun lodges as kindly under his hillside,--when we had imagined that she inclined rather to some few earnest and faithful souls whom we know.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shad...es to the last grain. He is as tough as catgut and as evanescent as a butterfly's bloom.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »