Word Finder - firmness

definition

The state of being firm; strength; permanence; stability; hardness; resolution.

Dean surprised himself with the firmness of his answer.

She said it with a firmness that left little room for arguing.

Claire tried to muster a schoolmarm firmness that didn't work.

After that Anna Pavlovna led up to the courage and firmness of the King of Prussia, in order to draw Boris into the conversation.

Deidre felt herself breathless and consumed before the end of their first kiss, yielding to the intensity of his kiss and the firmness of his touch.

It bears adhesive organs that are either suckers or hooks, and may develop into the most varied outgrowths in order to give increased firmness of attachment to its host.

His character, admirable as it is for firmness, for intensity, for inexorable will, for iron devotion to what he thought the service of mankind, yet offers few of those softening qualities that make us love good men and pity bad ones.

The political ineptitude of James is clear; he often showed firmness when conciliation was needful, and weakness when resolution alone could have saved the day.

Cleveland's first term was uneventful, but was marked by firmness, justice and steady adherence on his part to the principles which he deemed salutary to the nation.

Nor must we overlook Wellington's unswerving determination to co-operate with Blucher at all costs, and his firmness on June 18; or the invincible steadiness shown by the British troops and those of the King's German Legion.

The sulci are emphasized because the subcutaneous fat, which is copious in order to pad the skin for the purpose of firmness of holding„ being restricted to the intervals between the lines along which the skin is tied down, makes these intervals project, and these are the monticuli.

It took Prince Albert four years of firmness and diplomacy before in 1845 he was able to bring the queen's home under the efficient control of a master of the household.

The diet met the crisis with dignity and firmness.

Alongside of such want of firmness as this were, however, to be found such measures of ill-timed repression as the order given in 1860 to the agricultural society not to discuss the question of the settlement of the peasants on the land.

In 1893 the question of Siam came near to causing serious trouble with France, but by the exercise of a combination of firmness and forbearance on Lord Rosebery's part the crisis was averted, and the lines were laid down for preserving Siam, if possible, as a buffer state between the English and French frontiers in Indo-China.

In 1451 he was sent to Germany and the Netherlands to check ecclesiastical abuses and bring back the monastic life to the original rule of poverty, chastity and obedience - a mission which he discharged with welltempered firmness.

He was perhaps wanting in firmness of character, and the undue influence exercised over him by unscrupulous ministers, or by the seductions of fairer but no less ambitious votaries of statecraft, led him to make concessions which tarnished the glory of his reign, and were followed by baneful results for the welfare of his empire.

The same quality, combined with sympathy and firmness, stood him in good stead in all his dealings both with native chiefs and European officials.

When Lord Curzon became viceroy in 1898, he reversed the policy on the north-west frontier which had given rise to the Tirah campaign, withdrew outlying garrisons in tribal country, substituted for them tribal militia, and created the new North-West Frontier province, for the purpose of introducing consistency of policy and firmness of control upon that disturbed border.

He seems not to have had the firmness of character nor the frugality of Walid; but he was very severe against the looseness of manners that reigned at Medina, and was highly religious.

Jackson was very successful in collecting old claims against various European nations for spoliations inflicted under Napoleon's continental system, especially the French spoliation claims, with reference to which he acted with aggressiveness and firmness.

Landing at Reggio di Calabria he hastened to Monza, where he conducted with firmness and tact the preparations for the burial of King Humbert and for his own formal accession, which took place on the 9th and nth of August 1900.

A revolt headed by Procopius in the second year of his reign, and backed up by the public opinion of Constantinople and the sympathy of the Gothic princes and chiefs on the Danube, seemed so alarming to him that he thought of negotiation; but in the following year the revolt collapsed before the firmness of his ministers and generals.

The virtue of the hazel wand was supposed to be dependent on its having two forks; these were to be grasped in the fists, with the fingers uppermost, but with moderate firmness only, lest the free motion of the opposite end downwards towards the looked-for object should be interfered with.

The thread spun by the jenny could not, however, be used except as weft, being destitute of the firmness or hardness required in the longitudinal threads or warp. Arkwright supplied this deficiency by the invention of the spinning-frame, which spins a vast number of threads of any degree of fineness and hardness.

His firmness in thwarting the activities of Edmond Charles Edouard Genet, minister from France, alienated the partisans of France; his suppression of the "Whisky Insurrection" aroused in some the fear of a military despotism.

His firmness was heroic, his sagacity profound and far-seeing; he supported good and evil fortune with equal dignity; and his fall was on both occasions due to revolutions beyond his control.

In the intervals of these journeys he governed Tours with great firmness, repressing disorders and reducing the monks and nuns to obedience.

The characters by which qualities of jute are judged are colour, lustre, softness, strength, length, firmness, uniformity and absence of roots.

His versatility, firmness combined with tact, width of view, and painstaking struggle for accuracy were largely responsible for the maintenance of its high standard.

Through the firmness of the Transvaal delegates, supported by the Progressives, the principle of equal rights was retained; the concession made to the Cape was the abandonment of proportional representation, while one-membered constituencies were substituted for three-membered constituencies.

Between A and B the loose cellular tissue of which the leaf is partly built up is seen in section, and at C the vertical palisade cells which give firmness to the upper surface of the leaf.

The soul of the sage, thought the Cynics, should be strained and braced for judgment and action; his first need is firmness (Ebrovia) and Socratic strength.

After some weeks' negotiation, in the course of which the firmness and moderation of "the Great Commoner," as he had come to be called, contrasted favourably with the characteristic tortuosities of the crafty peer, matters were settled on such a basis that, while Newcastle was the nominal, Pitt was the virtual head of the government.

Fabius Maximus, in his descriptions of the unshaken firmness and calm courage shown by the fathers of the state in the hour of trial, Livy is at his best; and he is so largely in virtue of his genuine appreciation of character as a powerful force in the affairs of men.

To us, therefore, they are valuable not only for their eloquence, but still more as giving us our clearest insight into Livy's own sentiments, his lofty sense of the greatness of Rome, his appreciation of Roman courage and firmness, and his reverence for the simple virtues of older times.

He was a man of varied culture, of large breadth and liberality of views, of generous impulses, of great gentleness and courtesy of manner, combined with equal firmness of purpose and energy of action.

In November of that year the Royal Society, of which he had become a fellow in 1803, and acted as secretary from 1807 to 1812, chose him as their president, but his personal qualities were not such as to make him very successful in that office, especially in comparison with the tact and firmness of his predecessor, Sir Joseph Banks.

In the administration of that city he showed great firmness and severity.

A careful sifting of the available evidence would rather tend to represent Periander as a ruler of unusual probity and insight, and the exceptional firmness and activity of his government is beyond dispute.

In other respects Rhodes's native policy was marked by combined consideration and firmness.

The execution was as excellent as the conception, and if we reflect that it was begun in the midst of that momentous war which raised England to her climax of territorial greatness in East and West, we may easily realize how the task of describing these portentous and far-reaching events would be likely to strengthen Burke's habits of wide and laborious observation, as well as to give him firmness and confidence in the exercise of his own judgment.

The delicate duties attached to this office he discharged with tact and energy; and in the "syncretistic" controversy, by which Protestant Germany was so long vexed, he showed an unusual combination of firmness with liberality, of loyalty to the past with a just regard to the demands of the present and the future.

At one of the great Manchester meetings he said, "Da not suppose, because I counsel firmness and decision at the right moment, that I am of that school of statesmen who are favourable to a turbulent and aggressive diplomacy.

Ineligible, like all the members of the Constituent Assembly, for the Legislative Assembly, he became president of the criminal tribunal of Paris, but failed through lack of firmness.

It is by their recognition of the duty of living consistently by theory instead of mere impulse or custom, their sense of the new value given to life through this rationalization, and their effort to maintain the easy, calm, unwavering firmness of the Socratic temper, that we recognize both Antisthenes and Aristippus as " Socratic men," in spite of the completeness with which they divided their master's positive doctrine into systems diametrically opposed.

No doubt it depended on the innate force and firmness' of a man's soul whether his reason was effectually exercised; but moral responsibility was saved if the vicious act proceeded from the man himself and not from any external cause.

The tendency of this provision to lower the value of all property was partly, but only partly, neutralized by the firmness of the land judge.

A great council of churchmen and nobles, held to settle the matter, advised Anselm to submit to the king, but failed to overcome his mild and patient firmness.

With equal firmness and success he vindicated his rights, whether against the indirect attacks of the papacy on his independence, or the claims of the ecclesiastical courts which, in principle, he made subordinate to the jurisdiction of the crown; whether in episcopal elections, or in ecclesiastical reforms which might possibly imperil his power or his revenues.