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.
Long-suffering and longanimity imply extraordinary patience under provocation or trial. The former sometimes also suggests undue meekness or submissiveness.
The latter term more often than the former names a virtue, and so is chiefly found in abstract use.
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.
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.