patience

patience, long-suffering, longanimity, forbearance, resignation can all mean the power to endure or a capacity for enduring without complaint something which is disagreeable or requires effort.

Patience stresses calmness or composure, not only under suffering or under provocation, but in awaiting an outcome that seems unduly or inordinately delayed, or in performing a task that makes severe demands upon one's attention

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upon the heat and flame of thy distemper sprinkle cool patience—Shak.

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he gathered . . . that he had been either a man of saintly patience, a masochist or a deaf-mute— Theodore Sturgeon

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bred to patience . . . she had cultivated and perfected a vast cowlike calm— Pynchon

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Long-suffering and longanimity imply extraordinary patience under provocation or trial. The former sometimes also suggests undue meekness or submissiveness

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it shows much long-suffering in you to put up with him, and keep him in your employ— Hardy

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the long-suffering type on whose bosom repentant tears always eventually fall— Warren

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The latter term more often than the former names a virtue, and so is chiefly found in abstract use

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in Isaac such simplicity, such longanimity in Jacob— Hooker

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the second window was to be devoted to longanimity, symbolized ... by the passionflower and the heavenly crown for long-suffering— Killackey

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Forbearance (see also under FORBEARING) adds to long-suffering the implication of restraint in the expression of one's feelings or in exacting punishment or one's due; it therefore often suggests toleration, for the sake of peace, of something that merits censure or castigation

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my lord Kew has acted with great forbearance and under the most brutal provocation— Thackeray

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Resignation implies a submission to suffering or evil or an acceptance of it because it must be endured or cannot be escaped; it sometimes connotes patience arising from submission to what is believed to be the Divine Will, but often it implies a stoical or fatalistic rather than a religious attitude

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resignation superadds to patience a submissive disposition . . . ; it acknowledges both the power and the right of a superior to afflict— Cogan

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a last-ditch fighter by nature . . . her philosophic resignation struck the girl as extremely suspicious— Wouk

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for a modern American or Englishman, waiting is a psychological torture. An Indian accepts the blank hours with resignation— Huxley

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Analogous words: perseverance, persistence (see corresponding verbs at PERSEVERE): *fortitude, backbone, pluck, grit, sand, guts: *equanimity, composure

Antonyms: impatience