These words refer to a voluntary self-control, restraint or passivity that helps one to endure waiting, provocation, injustice, suffering or any of the unpleasant vicissitudes of time and life. Patience is almost exclusively positive in tone. Most often it refers to a willingness to wait without becoming disgruntled or anxious: showing great patience while waiting to learn the outcome of the election. More generally, the word can suggest a kindly tolerance for other people’s shortcomings, including a particular ability to remain unperturbed by someone else’s slowness or other quirks: the patience with which she went over the lesson until the dullest student in the class could understand it; responding with a kind of blank patience to his roommate’s noisy comings and goings. Whereas patience implies little difficulty in putting up with annoying situations, forbearance specifically indicates a determined struggle against giving vent to intense feelings that beset one. Thus, the word’s stress is on self-controlled abstinence from hasty or ill-tempered action, whatever the provocation: answering with such forbearance that only his flushed face showed how angry he really was. In this sense, the word is positive in tone, more strongly so than the blandness of patience and its implications of passivity. But forbearance can refer less positively to an attitude that is disposed to put up with or endure annoyance or actual harm: a wife no longer willing to meet her husband’s bullying with docile forbearance .

Sufferance and long-suffering both suggest the passive endurance of pain or wretchedness, and as such both emphasize passive submission. This attitude can as easily be presented as a positive virtue or as a failure of nerve. Of the two words, sufferance suggests a more conscious choice in indicating the ability, possibly learnt, to endure pain or evil that might destroy someone else: their sufferance of the scapegoat’s role through centuries of maltreatment. More often, the word may suggest a generous tolerance for the foibles of others – or an immoral or permissive failure to take a stand in the face of evil: pragmatic in his good-humoured sufferance of his student’s pranks; the average citizen’s apathetic sufferance of the régime’s repressive laws against the Jews. Long-suffering is more informal and less wide-ranging in usage, referring to the patience with which injuries or misfortunes are endured, especially over a great period of time: facing his wife’s invalidism with grimness and long-suffering . The word can also be negative when it suggests a person who glories self-pityingly in his own unhappiness at great length and with much verbal ado, but without attempting to alter the situation: the tedious long-suffering with which she recounted every failing of her husband.

Stoicism and resignation refer to a more profound and abiding general life-view than do the previous words. Stoicism most specifically names the philosophy originated by Zeno , who advised men to be superior to all life’s passions – joy, grief, pleasure, pain. In general use, the word is taken to refer mainly to the ability to endure physical pain or mental anguish. Unlike long-suffering , even the popular sense of stoicism emphatically stresses the enduring of pain without complaint or comment of any sort and usually with complete equanimity: the stoicism of Mohicans who could be tortured to death without their once crying out for mercy. Only in ethical or philosophical discussion can the word take on a critical tone, suggesting a sterile attitude in which evil is accepted as inevitable rather than actively opposed: an invidious stoicism that allowed otherwise decent citizens to tolerate fundamental affronts to their own self-respect. Resignation is much more likely than stoicism to be ambiguous in tone. In pointing to unresisting acquiescence and surrender to the inevitable, especially to misfortune, the word can suggest a noble or dignified response to tragedy – or a craven acceptance of an ignoble or degrading situation: the stark resignation with which she stood beside her husband’s coffin; railing at the resignation with which most ratepayers viewed the patent land-development machinations of the local council. The word can also be less charged with emotion, like patience , when force or compulsion is present: hopeless resignation to his fate after twenty years of incarceration in the Bastille.

Masochism is related to the other words here in that it refers to the enduring of pain, but it is in sharp contrast to them by indicating a neurotic willingness to suffer or even the conscious or unconscious seeking out of painful experiences: the masochism inherent in drug addiction. The word is drawn from psychiatric terminology, where it is sometimes compounded with its opposite in the term sado-masochism because of the intimate connection between the neurotic pleasures of inflicting and suffering pain. But masochism is used widely outside the clinical context for any tendency towards assuming a martyr’s role, enjoying one’s own miseries, or exposing oneself to needless pain: Only a streak of masochism in her could have permitted her to marry such a brutal man.