"Destiny" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... commander-in-chief was still sleeping It seemed perfectly impossible that he, the illustrious strong-brained Caesar, could permit himself to be subjugated by the common petty need of human nature in these hours when every second's delay might decide the destiny of many thousands. This sleep could be no natural one; perhaps the emperor, exhausted by fatigue and mental excitement, had fallen into a stupor; perhaps he was sleeping never to wake again. They must see him, they must convince themselves. They called Roustan and asked him to take ...
— A Conspiracy of the Carbonari • Louise Muhlbach
... league from Geneva is the town of Carrouge, which at one period was in some degree its rival in trade, but is at present by no means in a flourishing state. Its future destiny remains to be decided along with those of more important states, at the approaching Congress of Vienna. The general opinion seems to be that the Carrougians wish to be reunited to France; but the King of Sardinia has invited them ...
— A tour through some parts of France, Switzerland, Savoy, Germany and Belgium • Richard Boyle Bernard
... ecclesiastical affairs. From my heart, I say: America, with all thy faults, I love thee still. Perhaps at this moment there is no nation on the face of the earth where the Church is less trammelled, and where she has more liberty to carry out her sublime destiny ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... classes are victims of the phrase. Phrases are rhetorical flourishes adapted to the pet notions of the time. They are artifices of suggestion. They are the same old tricks of the medicine man adapted to an age of literature and common schools. Instead of a rattle or a drum the operator talks about "destiny" and "duty," or molds into easy phrases the sentiments which are popular. It is only a difference of method. Solemnity, unction, and rhetorical skill are needed. Often the phrases embody only visionary generalities. "Citizenship," "publicity," "public policy," ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... that poor wretch.... I, who have surely the right, beg you to think of that poor wretch. Is it possible that such a luckless devil should be so tormented by blind and inscrutable destiny? For there is no other way to think of it. None. I have the right to say it, since for years he was my wife's lover, since he killed her, since he broke up all the pleasantnesses that there were in my life. There is no priest that has the right to tell me that I must ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... for the honor of mankind, fulfilling his destiny—this great prophet who still refuses to prophesy. He is entering the wedge for what he declines to admit the possibility of—yet there must be moments when that eye of power pierces the clouds of prejudice and ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... much to console her in that faith until her death from cancer in 1861. Margaret Fuller, though not possessed of much outward grace, was a prolific votary of the pen. I occasionally met her in society before she started on an European tour where she met her destiny in the person of the Marquis Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, to whom she was secretly married in 1847. Some years later she embarked with her husband and little boy upon a sailing vessel for America, and all were lost off the coast of New York in July, 1850. ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... literature Got out of it all the fun there was in it Greeting of great impersonal cordiality Grieving that there could be such ire in heavenly minds His remembrance absolutely ceased with an event Looked as if Destiny had sat upon it Man who may any moment be out of work is industrially a slave Pathos of revolt from the colorless rigidities Plain-speaking or Rude Speaking Pointed the moral in all they did Sometimes ...
— Widger's Quotations from the Works of William Dean Howells • David Widger
... warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own. This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads. Meantime, Queequeg's impulsive, indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly, or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be; and by this difference in the concluding blow producing a corresponding ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... abandon the system by which their ancestors had founded the greatness of Rome, to enter upon another system the results of which no one could foretell. It was one of those moments when calculation ceases, and when faith in men's own and in their country's destiny alone gives them courage to grasp the hand which beckons to them out of the darkness of the future, and to follow it no one knows whither. Long and seriously the senate deliberated on the proposal of the consuls to lead the legions to the help of the Mamertines; it ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... "Very well, Madame Destiny." Then turning to us: "What ought I to do for one who is willing to stoop from so high an estate to honor me ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... told, she lost all the fatal influence which she could now exercise over the queen's destiny; therefore she again resolved to ...
— The Queen's Necklace • Alexandre Dumas pere
... even of those who are exploiting and ruining the nation. Even the grasping, self-seeking politicians succumb to its fascination. Even the most mediocre of men when they are in power are gripped by the greatness of its Destiny: it lifts them out of themselves: the torch is passed on from hand to hand among them: one after another they resume the holy war against darkness. They are drawn onward by the genius of the people: willy-nilly ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... of civilization is a record of changing ideals, and ideals are best reared in the hearts of the world's young men. Inevitably, nations look toward the cradle for their future and intrust the care of their destiny to the hands of youth. "Tell me what are the prevailing sentiments that occupy the minds of your young men," declared Edmund Burke, "and I will tell you what is to be the character of the next generation." When the blood ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... be compelled to go out of this world, where are we to go to? This body and soul must soon part. What shall be the destiny of the former I know—dust to dust. But what shall be the destiny of the latter? Shall it rise into the companionship of the white-robed, whose sins Christ has slain? or will it go down among the unbelieving, who tried to gain ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... fair play. Ta-ta and so long," said Cortrelle, all unsuspecting of the future Destiny had built ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... does not decline, but increases and will endure. It was not his destiny to fill the greater office created by our Constitution, but with a distinction exceeding that of the majority of Presidents, he is enrolled, with Clay, Webster, and Seward, among the illustrious ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... phenomenal and imperfect shadow. And it can have nothing to do with personal vice or virtue, in the way either of condemning the one or vindicating the other; it can only treat them as elements in its picture—as factors in human destiny. For the notion commonly entertained that the practice of virtue gives us a claim upon the Divine Exchequer (so to speak), and the habit of acting virtuously for the sake of maintaining our credit in society, and ensuring our ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... GERN; will have the honor." Bride stept out, with blushes,—handsome we will hope; Majesty surveyed her, on the streets of Augsburg, having a human heart in him; and (says Fassmann, as if with insidious insinuation) "is said to have made her a present." She went her way; fulfilled her destiny in an anonymous manner: Friedrich Wilhelm, loudly named in the world, did the like; and their two orbits never intersected again.—Some forty-five miles south of Augsburg, up the Wertach River, more properly up the Mindel River, lies Mindelheim, once ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... rage. Short, hairy, black faced, with layers of grime and the thick sprouting of a wiry beard, a frost-bitten hand wrapped up in filthy rags carried in a sling, he accused fate of unparalleled perfidy towards the sublime Man of Destiny. Colonel D'Hubert, his long moustaches pendent in icicles on each side of his cracked blue lips, his eyelids inflamed with the glare of snows, the principal part of his costume consisting of a sheepskin coat looted with difficulty from the frozen corpse of a camp ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... the grand old Chamber of State. Between the years 1815 and 1820, an ash sapling might be seen in the topmost stone, and many of those who "clasped it in their hands wondered if it really were the twig of destiny, and if they should ever live ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... older; there was a glow in her heart as she thought that at last he really needed her. After all, if through life she were destined to be an old maid—and that, in the tragic moment of her youth that was now upon her, seemed her inevitable destiny—here was some one for whom at last ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... the carriage with this pretty girl, who had fallen on me as if from the clouds, I imagined I was intended to shape her destiny. Her tutelary genius must have placed her in my hands, for I felt inclined to do her all the good that lay in my power. But for myself; was it a piece of good or ill luck for me? I formed the question, but felt ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... seemed to promise that the storm after all might pass away. The conclave had elected as a successor to Clement a man who, of all the Italian ecclesiastics, was the most likely to recompose the quarrels in the church; and who, if the genius or the destiny of the papacy had not been too strong for any individual will, would perhaps have succeeded in restoring peace to Christendom. In the debates upon the divorce the Cardinal Farnese had been steadily upon Henry's side. He ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... before had been unknown to him. As he went, he reflected that he would rather enjoy being conductor himself just for that night. He felt a strange reluctance toward giving up the oversight of the young woman whose destiny for a few brief hours had been thrust upon him, and who was about to pass out ...
— The Mystery of Mary • Grace Livingston Hill
... doctrine of endless torture as the destiny of most of those who have lived, and are living, on this planet? I prefer to let another writer speak of it. Mr. John Morley uses the following words: "The horrors of what is perhaps the most frightful idea that has ever corroded human character,—the idea of eternal punishment." ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... upon a stage,—I was about to say as puppets in a show,—whose acts are quite outside of themselves, and whose voices express emotions not their own. They appear before the footlights of a fulfilled destiny; and their doubts, their weaknesses, are concealed, along with their temptations, beneath the paint and stage drapery lent them by the historian who, knowing beforehand the denouement toward which ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... 'farewell! Every happiness and prosperity! If, in the progress of revolving years, I could persuade myself that my blighted destiny had been a warning to you, I should feel that I had not occupied another man's place in existence altogether in vain. In case of anything turning up (of which I am rather confident), I shall be extremely happy if it should be in my power to ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... is, that human nature is about the same in all men, although some of them possess the faculty to a greater degree than others of concealing it. The first President I ever met to talk to was General Grant. I had always read of him as the Silent Man of Destiny; but he did about all the talking for all those about him the few moments ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... crotchets of this born dialectician was a theory as to the importance of Christian names in determining the future behaviour and destiny of the children to whom they are given; and, whatever admixture of jest there might have been in some of his other fancies, in this his son affirms he was absolutely serious. He solemnly maintained the opinion "that there was a strange kind of magic bias which good or bad names, ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... reprieved a space, Looked on the builder's blocks about his base And bared his wounded breast in sign to say: "Strike! 't is my destiny ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... I like the strong work of blacksmithing best. You see, I was born to be a great historian. But destiny has made me a blacksmith," he continued irrelevantly ... "do come out and work for me. I'm hungry for an intelligent helper who can talk history with ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... sugar-plum than his time—was essentially a cynicism in the exhausted-Don-Juan mood. Hence, Keats was almost doomed to fall in love with provocation rather than with what the Victorians called "soul." His destiny was not to be a happy lover, but the slave of a "minx." It was not a slavery without dignity, however. It had the dignity of tragedy. Sir Sidney Colvin regrets that the love-letters of Keats to Fanny were ever published. It would be as ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... of me that I would not flatter you. I have told you no falsehood as yet, and I have a right to claim your belief. As you look on me, so do I on you. I look up to you as one whose destiny must be high. To me there is that about you which forbids me to think that your path in the world can ever be other than conspicuous. Your husband, at least, will have to live ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... the ashes of Laom{)e}don, which were preserved in Troy on the Scoean gate. By him the Palladium was stolen from the same city; Rhesus, king of Thrace, killed, and his horses taken before they had drank of the Xanthus. These exploits involved in them the destiny of Troy; for had the Trojans preserved them, their city ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway
... door and opened it on her lover, standing still and calm, like a figure set there by destiny to conquer her. ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... Ulysses, and shall not fill my ears with wax, but listen to the song of the siren, even at the risk of perishing in the whirlpool of passion. Let us not impose upon ourselves any promises concerning the destiny of our hearts; but your position in the world is an entirely different question. As to this, I must make you promises, and swear that I shall fulfil them. You promise that you will serve me, enter into my plans, ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... extensive kingdom. It was principally from the north that danger threatened. There lived the nomads of Eastern Turkestan and Mongolia, savage, brave, and warlike horsemen. To them the Chinese wall was an insurmountable obstacle. But precisely on that account this wall has also affected the destiny of Europe, for the wild mounted hordes, finding the way southwards to China barred, advanced westwards instead, and in the fourth century, in conjunction with the Alans, ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... perform any act, that particular thing is ever afterward easier to do. We tend to do the things we have already done. By selecting the right things to do and always doing them, we actually are making our destiny. Each one of us has her character made by her habits. Habits are repeated acts, and we may choose what our habits should be by choosing our acts. As Scouts we choose to be happy, loyal, helpful girls. As we practice the Scout laws they become a ...
— How Girls Can Help Their Country • Juliette Low
... passed his latter days at the Court of the Prince of Hesse Cassel, and died at Plewig, in 1784, in the midst of his enthusiastic disciples, and to their infinite astonishment at his sharing the common destiny.] ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 2 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... were engaged in some weird incantation the voyageur overheard the dusky maiden impart a strange message to the paleface by her side. "From the stars I see in the firmament, the fixed stars that predominate in the configuration, I deduce the future destiny of man. 'Tis with thee. O Robert, to live always. This elixer which I now do administer to thee has been known to our people for countless generations. The possession of it will enable thee to conquer all thine enemies. Thou now beholdest, O Robert, the ground upon ...
— Reminiscences of Pioneer Days in St. Paul • Frank Moore
... embarrassment, to have seen her eyes droop before his, and hear a quiver in her voice. He wanted to realise that he was the natural head and protector, and she the woman, the weak, clinging creature, whose happy destiny it was to be the helpmeet of man; but as Cornelia herself would have phrased it, there was "no cling to her." It seemed ridiculous to think of protection in connection with a creature so ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... DESTINY had willed that Loisillon, fortunate always, should be fortunate in dying at the right moment. A week later, when houses were closed, society broken up, the Chamber and the Institute not sitting, his funeral train ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... existence, with its immeasurable secret ennui hidden beneath the jaunty cloak of a specious freedom—freedom to be bored, freedom to fret, and long and envy, freedom to eat ashes and masticate dust! He would marry her. Yes, he was saved, because he was loved. And he meant to be worthy of his regenerate destiny. All the best part of his character came to the surface and showed in his face. But he did not ask his heart whether he was or was not in love with Rachel. The point did not present itself. He certainly never doubted that he was seeing her with ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... night is gone at last, Silent and mute we gallop past And ride to our destiny. How keen the morning breezes blow! Hostess, one glass more ere we go, We go ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... return to my home, perhaps to be welcomed by a little circle of my own, for I hope to be received as a minister of the Protestant Church, and, as such, may look forward to a partner in my joys and troubles. Should Providence, however, shape my destiny otherwise, I shall have the poor and afflicted—always a numerous family—to bestow my affections upon. But, whilst much of my time is thus passed amongst the sorrowing and the sick, still there are hours of gaiety amongst the gloom—there are weddings, christenings, ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... and comprehended men without fully communing with them, as if, in spite of all its genial efforts at comradeship, it dwelt apart, saw its visions of duty where no man looked on. There is a very holy and very terrible isolation for the conscience of every man who seeks to read the destiny in the affairs for others as well as for himself, for a nation as well as for individuals. That privacy no man can intrude upon. That lonely search of the spirit for the right ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... assure the reader that this was a lesson which I never forgot; it was, however, succeeded by another variety of temptation, which might have proved more dangerous to a young and ardent spirit, had it not ended as it did, in changing the course of my destiny and throwing me into a new path of action. To this I shall ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... apothecary, a clerk in a government office, an actor, a reporter, or anything else that turned up—he was not particular. He was on familiar terms with two small Irish members, and got franks for everybody in the house. He felt convinced that his intrinsic merits must procure him a high destiny. He wore shepherd's-plaid inexpressibles, and used to look under all the ladies' bonnets as he walked along the streets. His manners and appearance reminded one ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... on the eve of a party; but Albinia, by representing that it would be wrong to disappoint Colonel Bury, and very hard on the unoffending Gilbert and Lucy, succeeded in prevailing on him to accept his melancholy destiny, and to allow her to remain at home with Sophy and the baby—one of the greatest sacrifices he or she had yet made. He was exceedingly vexed, and therefore the less disposed to be lenient. The more Albinia told him of Sophy's unhappiness, the more he hoped it would do her ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... better say seemed endangered. The Indians were really less to be feared than at any time before. They were weaker, and the whites were stronger. They were striving against destiny; and though their fate was sealed with the blood of their enemies, their fate was sealed. All the chances that had favored them had favored them in vain, and neither their wily courage nor their pitiless despair availed them against the ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... no delay. Is there one among us who is not looking with breathless anxiety for the next tidings which may arrive from the remote parts of the kingdom? Even while I speak, the moments are passing away, the irrevocable moments pregnant with the destiny of a great people. The country is in danger: it may be saved: we can save it: this is the way: this is the time. In our hands are the issues of great good and great evil, the issues of the life and death of the State. May the ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... this, and it is perhaps the reason why he is careful of every fact, and feels himself bound to express or to indicate its meaning at the risk of overmoralizing. In life he finds nothing insignificant; all tells for destiny and character; nothing that God has made is contemptible. He cannot look upon human life and declare this thing or that thing unworthy of notice, any more than the scientist can declare a fact of the material world beneath the dignity of his inquiry. He feels in every nerve the equality ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the reason that I declined to tamper with your destiny is that I should be irresistibly compelled ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 1, January, 1891 • Various
... foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny. For the rest, after his hours of work, a casual stroll or a casual spree on shore suffices to unfold for him the secret of a whole continent, and generally he finds the secret not worth knowing. The yarns of seamen have a ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... glance, which, while it intimated disdain for those to whom it was directed, spoke also of a dark and troubled spirit in himself. The man seemed to brook with scorn the degrading situation of a religious quack, to which some incontrollable destiny had doomed him. ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... would have computed you this distance at N, which is infinity: and so closed up the book. For what bridge shall cross the uncrossable, what ferryman ply for silver pounds on the Great Gulf? An image-breaking age; no doubt; but there are limits, in decency. No thread of destiny or clue of circumstance shall connect two Houses set upon the ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... footpath falls thus unobtrusively into its place, all natural forces seem to sympathize with it, and help it to fulfil its destiny. Once make a well-defined track through a wood, and presently the overflowing brooks seek it for a channel, the obstructed winds draw through it, the fox and woodchuck travel by it, the catbird and robin build near it, the bee and swallow make a high-road of ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... experiment; now it is understood to be a successful one.—Then, all that sought celebrity and fame and distinction expected to find them in the success of that experiment. Their all was staked upon it; their destiny was inseparably linked with it. Their ambition aspired to display before an admiring world a practical demonstration of the truth of a proposition which had hitherto been considered at best no better than problematical—namely, the capability ...
— Lincoln's Inaugurals, Addresses and Letters (Selections) • Abraham Lincoln
... a shower of balls, assisting the distressed, encouraging the valiant with praise, and the wavering by his fearful glance. Around and close by him his men were falling thick, and his own mantle was perforated by several shots. But avenging destiny this day protected that breast, for which another weapon was reserved; on the same field where the noble Gustavus expired, Wallenstein was not allowed to terminate his ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... his desponding servant. Half persuaded that a Superior Being did indeed call his beloved master to some extraordinary exertions for Scotland, Halbert bade him an anxious farewell, and then withdrew to commit him to the fidelity of the companions of his destiny. ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... Atma it was the symbol of a lost love. He looked on it listlessly. It seemed a long while since Moti died, for in his heart joy, and hope, and youth had died since. The immortal destiny of man, a belief dear to the Sikh, seemed a thing indifferent. Death might not be final, but it was yesterday he mourned, and of it he ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer
... the Queen upon Charles is the last strand in this tangled skein of human destiny brought out by Browning in the scene. The Parliament that Wentworth wants she is afraid of lest it should ask for a renewal of the persecution of the Catholics. The vacillating Charles, in an instant, is ready to repudiate his interview with Wentworth, and act ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... attire Of leisure clad, or the coarse frock of toil, And, lending life to the dead form of faith, Give human nature reverence for the sake Of One who bore it, making it divine With the ineffable tenderness of God; Let common need, the brotherhood of prayer, The heirship of an unknown destiny, The unsolved mystery round about us, make A man more precious than the gold of Ophir. Sacred, inviolate, unto whom all things Should minister, as outward types and signs Of the eternal beauty which fulfils The one great purpose ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... the ground, and yielded without further struggle to my evil destiny. What I suffered from thirst, hunger, and heat cannot be described. At last I fell into a sort of trance, during which images of various kinds seemed to flit before my eyes. How long I remained in this state I know not: but I remember that I was brought ...
— Murad the Unlucky and Other Tales • Maria Edgeworth
... the colony and the greed of the controlling class checked the progress of the commons, the people soon asserted their rights in open rebellion, and insured for themselves a share in the government and a chance to work out their own destiny, untrammelled by injustice and oppression. At the outbreak of the Revolution, the middle class was a numerous, intelligent and prosperous body, far superior to the mass of lowly immigrants ...
— Patrician and Plebeian - Or The Origin and Development of the Social Classes of the Old Dominion • Thomas J. Wertenbaker
... connected with this event serves to show us the spirit of fatalism with which the character of Napoleon I. was infected. "The Man of Destiny" believed in the destiny of man; he had faith in his star alone; and from the height of his greatness the new ruler, consecrated emperor and king by the Pope, beheld a presage of misfortune in a chance circumstance, insignificant ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... already rung up. Some dreadful scene was already prepared for them; the setting and stage were ready, the prompter, and who was he? was in the box ready to tell them the next line if any of them faltered. The prompter, surely he was destiny, fate, the irresistible course of events, with which no man can struggle, any more than the actor can struggle with or alter the lines that are set down for him. He may mumble them, he may act dispiritedly and tamely, ...
— The Blotting Book • E. F. Benson
... Pisa or from Florence they must change carriages for Siena. And indeed, for her history, it differs but little from that of other Tuscan towns within reach of a great city. Yet for Empoli, as her Saint willed, there waited a destiny. For after the rout of the Guelphs, and especially of Florence, the head and front of that cause at Montaperti, when in all Tuscany only Lucca remained free, and the Florentine refugees built the loggia in front of S. Friano, there the Ghibellines of Tuscany proposed to destroy utterly and for ever ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... yearned for the cleverness of Harry or the wit of Joe. What an ally either of them would be! That he was undertaking a task from which either of them would have shrunk in horror never occurred to him. Yonder, beyond the summit, lay his destiny—Johnstown—and this was the way toward it; it was a simple thing to Bull. He could no more vary from his course than a magnetic needle can vary from ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand
... time, I and my family and friends came to a right understanding; but my wife protested I should never go to sea any more; although my evil destiny so ordered that she had not power to hinder me, as the reader may know hereafter. In the meantime, I here conclude the Second Part ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... Mrs. Rathbone, like many widows of successful men, was "left poorly off." But she "managed." Once, five years before the scene on the park terrace, Mrs. Rathbone and James had encountered one another by hazard on the platform of Knype Railway Station. Destiny hesitated while Susan waited for James's recognition and James waited for Susan's recognition. Both of them waited too long. Destiny averted its head and drew back, and the relatives passed on their ways ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... baptism was instituted have we a commandment to baptize infants, and nowhere in all the evangelistic work of the apostles is there an instance of infant baptism recorded. If it is as important as some teach, even the child's eternal destiny depending upon it, do you not think there would have been some plain commandment in the teaching of Jesus and his apostles to that end? One command would be sufficient, but we have none. Infant baptism ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... equipped to write the history of the celebrated Gowdy Case, which grew out of these obscure circumstances in the lives of a group of pioneers in an Iowa township. Probably the writers of history will never set it down. Yet, it swayed the destiny of the county and the state in after years, when Gowdy had died and left his millions to be fought over in courts, in caucuses, in conventions, state and county. If it does not go into the histories, the histories will not tell the truth. If great ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... there is one thing Destiny admires in a man, it is his courage to defy her. She relentlessly crushes the supine spirit who acquiesces, but to him who snaps his fingers in her face she often extends a helping hand. In this case she did not ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... of an hour long past, when she was a happy queen—an hour when her mental eye descried the future, and the words of a beautiful and melancholy song aroused in her anxious forebodings, and seemed to her a prophecy of her own destiny. As she thought of those golden days, her eyes filled with tears, which rolled over her cheeks and trickled down on the bread in her hand. "Oh," she murmured, "now I shall be able to eat it; I am softening it with ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... lulled the pains of desire, held the flesh subservient to spirit. What is love, says the physiologist, but ravening sex? If so, in Piers Otway's breast the primal instinct had undergone strange transformation. How wrought?—he asked himself. To what destiny did it correspond, this winged love soaring into the infinite? This rapture of devotion, this utter humbling of self, this ardour of the poet soul singing a fellow-creature to the heaven of heavens—by what alchemy comes it forth from blood and tissue? Nature has no need ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... the obvious law of the thousandfold failures and perishings to prevail; men, not sufficiently noble to see the radically different grades of rank and intervals of rank that separate man from man:—SUCH men, with their "equality before God," have hitherto swayed the destiny of Europe; until at last a dwarfed, almost ludicrous species has been produced, a gregarious animal, something obliging, sickly, mediocre, the European ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Marseilles with the intention of embarking on board a Swedish frigate for Algiers, from whence he hoped to join Napoleon's expedition to Egypt, and cross from the banks of the Nile to the Persian Gulf and the vast regions of the East. This was the turning point of his destiny. The Swedish frigate never arrived; the English cruisers rendered it impossible to cross the Mediterranean, except in a neutral vessel; and after waiting with impatience for about two months, he set out for Madrid, in the hope of finding means in the Peninsula of passing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... profound principles. The dice had been thrown a second time, and Motley had not won a victory. The applause of the press was insufficient to the man, who felt that he had not yet struck the key-note of his destiny. To be counted the follower of Cooper was not the meet guerdon of an intellect to which the shapely monuments of ancient literature yielded the clue to their hieroglyphic labyrinths of knowledge, and that pierced with ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... stage they organize and agitate to produce "class consciousness." Why, one asks, does not the economic situation produce consciousness of class in everybody? It just doesn't, that is all. And therefore the proud claim will not stand that the socialist philosophy rests on prophetic insight into destiny. It rests on an hypothesis about human nature. [Footnote: Cf. Thorstein Veblen, "The Socialist Economics of Karl Marx and His Followers," in The Place of Science in Modern Civilization, esp. ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... effort to leave Peru, he was unsuccessful, for the viceroy had laid an embargo on the shipping.7 He remained in the country, therefore, and took service, as we have seen, though reluctantly, under Pizarro. It was his destiny. ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... with somewhat of the same death as the Epirote. Let me look again. "Beware," say the shining prophets, "how thou passest under ancient roofs, or besieged walls, or overhanging cliffs—a stone hurled from above, is charged by the curses of destiny against thee!" And, at no distant date from this, comes the peril: but I cannot, of a certainty, read the day and hour. Well! if my glass runs low, the sands shall sparkle to the last. Yet, if I escape this peril—ay, ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... institutional principle that are involved in the discrepancy. This is the state of the case as between the German people, including the Intellectuals, and the peoples against whom their preconceptions of national destiny have arrayed them. And the many vivid expressions of consternation, abhorrence and incredulity that have come out of this community of Intellectuals in the course of the past two years of trial and error, bear sufficient testimony to the rigorous constraint ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... Bombay was very inquisitive to-day about the origin of Seedis, his caste, and as he wished to know by what law of nature I accounted for their cruel destiny in being the slaves of all men, I related the history of Noah, and the dispersion of his sons on the face of the globe; and showed him that he was of the black or Hametic stock, and by the common order of nature, they, being the weakest, had to succumb to ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... is, however, a tradition that he who shall be deemed worthy to possess this treasure, and who shall have successfully performed all our commands, shall be endued with power to draw back the bolt—a feat which has been deemed impossible for many hundred years. But, as destiny often depends on circumstances which mortals consider trivial and insignificant, so in this case a combination of materials is requisite, by whose agency alone a sure and happy success can crown our hitherto prosperous ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... difficulties of fitting a gown: the small, ceaseless chatter of the poor half-witted creature who was so proud of her assistance, and so happy in her company—anything was welcome that shut her out from the coming future, from the destiny to which she stood self-condemned. That sorely-wounded nature was soothed by such a trifle now as the grasp of her companion's rough and friendly hand—that desolate heart was cheered, when night parted ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... leaders of thought in South Africa have had a task of like difficulty: that they worked just as hard to get the English colonists to co-operate loyally with a vanquished foe in whose hands the Union constitution has placed the destiny of South Africa. It could also be said with equal justice that the Boer leaders' task has been not less difficult, that it required their greatest tact to get the Boer majority — now in power — to deal justly with the English who had been responsible for the elimination of the ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... really worth doing was still uppermost with him. In a letter to Mary Agnew he says: "Sometimes I feel as if there were a Providence watching over me, and as if an unseen and uncontrollable hand guided my actions. I have often dim, vague forebodings that an eventful destiny is in store for me; that I have vast duties yet to accomplish, and a wider sphere of action than that which I now occupy. These thoughts may be vain; they spring only from the ceaseless impulses of an upward-aspiring spirit; but if they are real, and to be fulfilled, I shall the more ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... I set my teeth and drove blindly full tilt at Destiny when I thought you stood in peril! Do women do such things for ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... Bonaparte unable to resist the offer of sovereignty. Once crowned, and feeling himself still compelled to speak incessantly of the good of his country, his views of good will become debased. He will invest France with military glory, and sink into ruin by becoming a conqueror;—a vulgar destiny, in this age—a destiny which Alexander himself would probably scorn, if now born ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... for me, Caesar, is neither desirable nor possible. This favor I beseech of you in memory of your father,—that since Heaven gave me to Antony after him, I may also die with my lord. Would that I had perished on the very instant after Caesar's death! But since this present fate was my destiny, send me to Antony: grudge me not burial with him, that as I die because of him, so in Hades also ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. III • Cassius Dio
... distinct in years, and you can therefore readily believe that this attachment is not the moral relation of comparison and experience; no, it was reality which charmed me when present, and reflects a lustre in remembrance. Go on, then, my dear fellow, in the academic course with awakened hope. A high destiny awaits you. The joys of youth shall give spirit to the exertions of manhood, and the pursuits of literature yield a permanent felicity attainable only by the votaries of taste. Sweet are the attainments which accomplish the wishes of friends. Our reliance upon ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... literary ornament was wanted. A little savor of the Academy is not out of place in a brigand's cavern. M. Merimee was available. It was his destiny to sign himself "the Empress's Jester." Madame de Montijo presented him to Louis Bonaparte, who accepted him, and who completed his Court with this insipid but ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... some of them, being little stone pines themselves, have a great notion of growing upright, if they can; and this struggle of theirs to recover their straight road towards the sky, after being obliged to grow sideways in their early years, is the effort that will mainly influence their future destiny, and determine if they are to be crabbed, forky pines, striking from that rock of Sestri, whose clefts nourish them, with bared red lightning of angry arms towards the sea; or if they are to be goodly and solemn pines, with trunks like pillars ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... preoccupied with thoughts of love—and by love I mean a noble and sensuous passion, absorbing the energies of the soul, fulfilling destiny, and reducing all that has gone before it to the level of a mere prelude. And that afternoon in autumn, the eve of my twenty-first birthday, I was more deeply than ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... that Destiny played her second trump for Quin. It was in the form of a telegram that a bell-boy brought up from the office, and it announced that Madam Bartlett was not expected ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... as a—a man of destiny. I think fate has selected you as an instrument with which to do big things. That's why I'm always a ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... impotent malice of his enemies, who had left him happiness, since they had left him virtue. From the earth, Boethius ascended to heaven in search of the Supreme Good; explored the metaphysical labyrinth of chance and destiny, of prescience and free will, of time and eternity; and generously attempted to reconcile the perfect attributes of the Deity with the apparent disorders of his moral and physical government. Such topics of consolation so obvious, so vague, or so abstruse, are ineffectual to subdue the feelings ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... everlasting Turkey carpet (Turkey carpet being the ne plus ultra of carpetry in the Five Towns, when that carpet was bought, just as sealskin was the ne plus ultra of all furs)! The silken-polished sideboard, strange to the company, but worthy of it, and exhibiting a due sense of its high destiny! The sombre bookcase and corner cupboard, darkly glittering! The Chesterfield sofa, broad, accepting, acquiescent! The flashing brass fender and copper scuttle! The comfortably reddish walls, with their pictures—like limpets ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... autocracy, the Emperor. I don't care what I think; I feel autocracy and the Emperor simply not a human being to me. I read this and thought you would like it: 'Sow an act and you reap habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.'" ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff
... organism animated by a God, unique, eternal and almighty. Sometimes this God was identified with the destiny that ruled all things, with infinite time that regulated all visible phenomena, and he was worshiped in each subdivision of that endless duration, especially in the months and the seasons.[18] Sometimes, however, he was compared with a king; he was thought of as ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... every turn in our boasted free country, where all men are upon an equality. When I look around me, and see what I have made myself in spite of circumstances, and think what I might have been with the same heart and brain beneath a fairer skin, I am almost tempted to curse the destiny that made me what I am. Time after time, when scraping, toiling, saving, I have asked myself. To what purpose is it all?—perhaps that in the future white men may point at and call me, sneeringly, 'a nigger millionaire,' or condescend to borrow money of me. Ah! often, ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... and Chambers on the subject of astrology, he would have looked upon the scene with other eyes, and would have seriously endeavoured to discover from the respective positions of these luminaries their probable effects on the destiny of the new-born infant, as if the courses or emanations of the stars superseded, or at least were co-ordinate with, Divine Providence. Well, rest be with him! he instilled into me enough of knowledge for erecting a scheme of nativity, and ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... down-trodden and oppressed of Europe. Emerson, fifty years ago, in his essay on Fate noted the current exploitation of the immigrant: "The German and Irish millions, like the Negro, have a great deal of guano in their destiny. They are ferried over the Atlantic, and carted over America, to ditch and to drudge, to make corn cheap, and then to lie down prematurely to make a spot of green grass on the prairie." Indeed it would not be hard to show that there was always ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... search of buried treasure. Yet, in spite of all precaution, we might be torpedoed at any moment and go down with all hands, or strike a mine and be blown up. We knew that victory or defeat were hanging in the balance, and perhaps the destiny of nations. But while the magnitude of the venture has left no impression—I cannot recall that we ever spoke ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... pasture. The larger island is full of minerals and coal, of which the smaller island is almost destitute. These are the most salient features of the scene of English history, and, with a temperate climate, the chief physical determinants of English destiny. ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... paths are bent, Obedient, pure, and eloquent. In each emprise he wins success, And dying foes his power confess. Tall and broad-shouldered, strong of limb, Fortune has set her mark on him. Graced with a conch-shell's triple line, His throat displays the auspicious sign.(16) High destiny is clear impressed On massive jaw and ample chest, His mighty shafts he truly aims, And foemen in the battle tames. Deep in the muscle, scarcely shown, Embedded lies his collar-bone. His lordly steps are firm and free, His strong arms reach below his knee;(17) All fairest ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... men had entertained the same vision before him, and it had remained a vision, and no more; and the high hopes of Brian himself were fated to be driven upon the rocks of destiny before many ...
— Nuala O'Malley • H. Bedford-Jones
... the whole argument, unless the highest and final estate of woman is to be something else than a mere individual. It would also follow that if such be her destiny—that is, to be something else than a mere "individual being"—and if for that reason she is to be denied the suffrage, then man equally should be denied the ballot if his highest and final estate is to be something else than ...
— Debate On Woman Suffrage In The Senate Of The United States, - 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, And January 25, 1887 • Henry W. Blair, J.E. Brown, J.N. Dolph, G.G. Vest, Geo. F. Hoar.
... she found her condition much altered; for it was resolved, and her destiny had decreed it, for to set her apprentice in the school of affliction, and to draw her through that ordeal-fire of trial, the better to mould and fashion her to rule and sovereignty: which finished, Fortune calling to mind that the time of her servitude ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... know the past. The past survives in human institutions, in the temperament of races, and in the creations of ideal art; but only in the last is it immortal. Custom and law are for an age: race after race is pushed to the sea, and dies; only epic and saga and psalm have one date with man, one destiny with the breath of his lips, one silence at the last with them. Least of all does the past survive in the living memories of men. Here and there the earth cherishes a coin or a statue, the desert embalms some solitary city, a few leagues of rainless air preserve on rock and column the lost ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... provisions and stores for the use of the army, and an agreeable appendage to attend its marches and countermarches, I am ready to believe; but, Sir, the Secretary of the Navy has honored us with a higher destiny—we are intended to seek and to fight the enemy's fleet. This is the great purpose of the Government in creating this fleet; and I shall not be diverted in my efforts to effectuate it by any sinister attempt to render us subordinate to, or an appendage of, the army." It would be difficult ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... certainly he had the least right to claim them, and so the matter rested. But mother always believed they held the key to the discovery of the guilty party; and afterward she left them to me, with the charge that I should never suffer them to pass from my possession until they had fulfilled their destiny of witnessing against the murderer—for whatever Mr. Willcoxen might think, mother felt convinced that the writer of those letters and the murderer of Marian was the ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... too fine," said she. "I can make nothing of such a hand as that; almost without lines: besides, what is in a palm? Destiny is not written there." ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... atmosphere surrounding his youth was one of unlimited and audacious adventure. New institutions, a virgin continent, the ardent desire to be independent of the Old World, and a profound belief in the destiny of America, all combined to stimulate endeavor. What Peter Cooper said of himself as an apprentice was true of the typical young American of his time: "I was always planning and contriving, and was never satisfied unless I was doing something difficult—something that had never ...
— Peter Cooper - The Riverside Biographical Series, Number 4 • Rossiter W. Raymond
... to the platform of the gallows the Rev. Mr. Varella looking directly at Capt. Gilbert, said, "Spaniards, ascend to heaven." Don Pedro mounted with a quick step, and was followed by his comrades at a more moderate pace, but without the least hesitation. Boyga, unconscious of his situation and destiny, was carried up in a chair, and seated beneath the rope prepared for him. Gilbert, Montenegro, Garcia and Castillo all smiled subduedly as they took their stations on the platform. Soon after Capt. Gilbert ascended the scaffold, he passed over to where the apparently lifeless ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... which were so new to him, Maulear, under the influence of passion, had entered on the flowery route, at the end of which he caught a glimpse of happiness. In the delirium of passion, he had forgotten that a severe judge, that the imperious master of his destiny, that a father, with principles eminently aristocratic, like all fathers in 1768, awaited to absolve or acquit him, to receive or repel him, to unite or to sever—in one word, to make him happy or miserable. All these important ideas were at once ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... and with the demented idea that he was mounting upward. And now he stood very near the lowest depth of life—the very bottom. And he was so tired. Why not let himself sink yet a little further; why not let destiny run its course? There would be a seductive repose in the acts, after his crazy struggle against ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... shore of the St. Jago lake. We arrived in good time, dismissed our Indians, and having purchased two excellent mules, we proceeded on our journey, in company with the horse-hunters, surrounded by hundreds of their captives, who were loudly lamenting their destiny, and shewed their sense of the injustice of the whole proceeding by kicking and striking with their fore-feet at whatever might come within the reach of their hoofs. Notwithstanding the very unruly conduct of the prisoners, we arrived at ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... by the Lords of Destiny, whose caprice it is to affect remoteness from us and a lofty unconcern for our poor ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... me. Iras, on the contrary, is delighted with the opportunity to speak on subjects connected with the government of the country, and especially the ceaseless, momentous game with Rome and the men who guide her destiny." ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... obtain a port to put into; to that I have no objection; but I am determined that they shall not have two Gibraltars in one sea,—one at the entrance, and one in the middle." Nevertheless he was forced to yield to destiny stronger than his own iron will. Eleven years more found him in sad exile, and the British flag still waving ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Henceforth there is an atmosphere about her that never lifts—of horror for some, of tragedy for others, according to their temperament. There she stands lonely for all her days, with the seal set upon her that can never be broken, the consecration of an awful and tragic destiny. ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... Hector then had found his fate, But Jove and destiny prolong'd his date. Safe from the darts, the care of heaven he stood, Amidst alarms, and death, and ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... Wilton was of a different kind, but it was also very great. It was an epoch in man's destiny. His mind was naturally manly, powerful, and decided; but he was very young. The events of that night, however, swept away everything that was youthful or light from his character for ever. He had acted with vigour, and power, and determination, amongst men older, better ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... feels it incumbent upon himself to see Lady Ruth, and tell her where he is going. Nothing like beginning early, you know. She has already commenced to control his destiny. ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne
... 'that I have to call in Lamb's Conduit Street to buy something for my sister. I shall just be in time.' Baruch went as far as Lamb's Conduit Street with her. He, too, would have determined his own destiny if she had uttered the word, but the power to proceed without it was wanting and he fell back. He left her at the door of the shop. She bid him good-bye, obviously intending that he should go no further with her, and he ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... his return he was admitted to the bar and proved his forensic prowess by earning $600 in the first year of his practice, a degree of success which enabled him to unite his destiny with that of the Only Girl, and begin housekeeping in Summerville, a suburban village where living was cheap. For, though "Love gives itself and is not bought," there are other essentials of existence which are not ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... one's mind. But he meditated on the abysses that lie between the masculine and feminine intellects. That it should be possible for anyone to wish to see a movie idol leaping into second-story windows, or being pulled from beneath flying express trains, on this day of destiny, ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... in the neighbourhood at the time. Do you know, Rose, I should not be surprised if he accomplished his destiny ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... Paul, "it lieth there till it is taken away to another place. Where the soul falleth,—that is, whether in a state of grace or in sin,—there it will lie forever; but those who go to purgatory die in a state of grace, and so their eternal destiny is heaven—like those just souls who died before Christ; yet they are not fit for heaven immediately, for 'nothing defiled ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... Poland, Austria, or Romania, and ready to shout or howl in Yiddish as they were told,—men whose strange faces and eyes under their matted shocks of black or reddish hair suggested every here and there the typical history and tragic destiny of the race which, in other parts of the crowd, was seen under its ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... his servants and laborers, and all the men and women whom he would have under him—that their happiness and well-being would be his charge. And the thought swelled his heart, and it seemed that he was born to a great destiny. He—little lame Dickie Harding of Deptford—he would hold these people's lives in his hand. Well, he knew what poor people wanted; he had been poor—or he had dreamed that he was poor—it was all the same. Dreams and real life ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit
... it, and labor everywhere responds to this influence and produces more than before. In a change in this ratio—in a gain of per capita wealth in productive forms—lies one influence which has a great power over human destiny and is one main cause of weal or woe for coming generations. Method as it improves is related in two ways to this critical change in the ratio of capital to population. It is a prominent cause of the increase of capital. ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark
... hours. Love, marriage, suffering, trouble, are crises full of romance and destiny, but I question whether any man ever passed through an experience more thrilling than the hour in which he stands at the Charing Cross or Waterloo Station in London or in the great station in Paris and watches the ...
— The Blot on the Kaiser's 'Scutcheon • Newell Dwight Hillis
... in the forests, and not infrequently in some distant barn with the horse and ox for my auditors. It is to this early practice in the art of all arts that I am indebted to the primary and leading impulses that stimulated me forward, and shaped and molded my entire destiny." ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... for whom I hitherto have sighed — Of those so many — have kept faith with me, All with ingratitude, or falsehood dyed I deem not, I accuse my destiny. Many there are, and have been more beside Unmeriting reproach: but if there be, 'Mid hundreds, one or two of evil way, My fortune wills that I should be ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... good harvests or bad, on the other, they are not 'flies on the wheel.' The powers confided to them are great for good or ill. They may hasten or retard material progress, and guide, if they cannot create, the current of national destiny. It is impossible to imagine what different course the Dominion would have taken had there been no Macdonald and no Laurier ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... really did not matter what I said. He could not understand. I can only hope and pray that none of the readers of the "Pioneer" will ever see that portentous interview. The man made me out to be an idiot several sizes more drivelling than my destiny intended, and the rankness of his ignorance managed to distort the few poor facts with which I supplied him into large and elaborate lies. Then, thought I, "the matter of American journalism shall be looked into later on. At present I will ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... being some barbaric court of justice. But everything else was unchanged, so sudden had been the interruption. The sunset gold still glowed on the lawn, and the bittern still boomed as announcing some small but dreadful destiny. ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hopes for a still higher destiny in the distant future. But we are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with the truth as far as our reason allows us to discover it. I have given the evidence to the best of my ability; and we must acknowledge, as it seems to me, that ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... recently she had watched two piping orioles flutter about their weaving, hung now the silent, pendant nest. No pipe, no bird, no motion. It seemed as though here were the stage of Perrault's fairytale; only 'twas a Prince within who had pricked his destiny with a leaden bullet, and a ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... government. There were, of course, many isolated cases of incendiarism, but the city did not suffer from any general and organized conflagration, as was the fate of Philadelphia and St. Louis and New Orleans. The destiny of the metropolis was decided in a different way; already it had passed into the keeping of ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... musing, losing his way among uncertain thoughts. There is nothing that so apes the external bearing of free will as that unconscious bustle, obscurely following liquid laws, with which a river contends among obstructions. It seems the very play of man and destiny, and as Otto pored on these recurrent changes, he grew, by equal steps, the sleepier and the more profound. Eddy and Prince were alike jostled in their purpose, alike anchored by intangible influences in one corner of the world. Eddy and Prince were alike useless, starkly useless, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... little childish, infinitely womanly and devoted and fine—and I see now how pathetic. But I could not afford to succumb to her. I wanted to follow my own leading, to see things clearly, and this reassuring pose of a high destiny, of an almost terribly efficient pursuit of a fixed end when as a matter of fact I had a very doubtful end and an aim as yet by no means fixed, was all too ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... one beware who marries her,' exclaimed Minetta, promptly. 'I have read his destiny in the stars. He will speedily die. ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... The tide began to go out that day at about one o'clock in the afternoon. Shandon from the top of the poop was looking at the crowd with uneasy eyes, trying to read the secret of his destiny on one of the faces. But in vain. The sailors of the Forward executed his orders in silence, looking at him all the time, waiting for orders which did not come. Johnson went on preparing for departure. The weather was cloudy and the sea rough; ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... of following, their own destiny do not get let off thus lightly in the wild. The pheasant had not gone a hundred yards, when a most intolerable blast, an almost unbearable blast, of shrill, nerve-racking noise throbbed through his head. The bird ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... who knows in winter tramp, Or the midnight of the camp, What revealings faint and far, Stealing down from moon and star, Kindled in that human clod Thought of destiny and God? ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... sounded to Laura's excited perceptions like the tread of something dreadful coming. Perhaps she was in a state of heightened emotion owing to her nearly approaching marriage, and that made her unduly impressionable, but she did experience a queer, helpless sense of destiny approaching such as you ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... up in a light manner at the end of a grave paper. Will woman ever learn to throw a stone? There it is. The future is inscrutable. We only know that whereas they did not whistle with approval, now they do; the prejudice of generations gradually melts away. And woman's destiny is not linked with that of the hen, nor to be controlled by a proverb—perhaps not ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... churches were not the same, which really means, you of course understand-"all churches are not of my denomination." And so, in spite of her regard for the printer, she could not bring herself to link her destiny with one whose eternal future was so insecure, and whose life did not chord with that which was to her, the one great keynote of the universe, the church. And then, too, does not the good book say: "Be ye not unequally yoked with unbelievers." ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... natural of modern novels" is an early symptom of this revulsion to the past; and it exercised a charm on Scott as well as on Mrs. Radcliffe and her school. The Castle of Otranto is significant, not because of its intrinsic merit, but because of its power in shaping the destiny of the novel. ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... his heart with gladness. The poet's song has become incorporated with the poor man's nature. You may see that it fills his eyes with tears; but they are not of sorrow. His cheek is flushed with hope, and a radiant expectation, founded on experience, which seems to illuminate and gild his future destiny. Marvellous, indeed, are the influences of a true song; and while they are rare, they are by fashion rarely appreciated. In it are embodied the best thoughts in the best language. By it the best of every class in every clime are swayed. In it they find expression for sensations, which, but for ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... punishment he moves nor can even guess what fitting one is decreed. But the time is surely appointed and the place. Poor trifler with Destiny, who ever had ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany
... the moment for action came. He was reputed to be good-hearted, capable, swayed by generous and noble thoughts, a silent man of strong and tenacious will; he was very brave, too, scorning danger with the scorn of the fatalist for whom destiny has no fears; but in critical moments a fatal lethargy seemed to overcome him; he appeared to become paralyzed in presence of results, and powerless thereafter to struggle against Fortune should she prove adverse. And Maurice asked himself if his were not ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... after all, were old offenders; their faults and idiosyncrasies had been reviewed often. The occasion demanded a new scapegoat; and we determined to find him. We looked across the broad expanse of veld and bitterly reflected on a destiny that circumscribed our freedom within the barriers of a town; that denied us even the wild freshness of morning uncontaminated by the miasma of city streets. In this frame of mind we easily drifted into speculation on first causes. We began to ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... reflecting upon the singular contretemps that had so interfered with his plans of life, and changed, as it were, his very destiny. He could now only entertain but one hope and wish, and that was that the fortress of Acapulco should be taken as soon as possible: since upon that event being completed, Morelos had promised to grant him leave of absence ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... she could at any rate make new caps for her, new lace fichus and bows, which caused Mrs. Colwyn occasionally to remark with some complacency that Janetta had been quite wasted at Miss Polehampton's school: her proper destiny was ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... my destiny's over, And the star of my fate hath declined, Thy soft heart refused to discover The faults which so many could find; Though thy soul with my grief was acquainted, It shrunk not to share it with me, And the love which my spirit hath painted It never ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... a danger both to group loyalty and to the militant spirit. Cynicism for other reasons is also a menace. It means loss of faith in the collective ego, in the traditions, shibboleths, symbols, and destiny of the group. Fighting groups cannot be tolerant; nor can they harbor cynics. Tolerance and cynicism are at once causes and results of group decay. They portend dissolution or they foreshadow new groupings for struggle over other issues on ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... storm currents. Nevertheless, of this lean conformation, which is better within than the world without is in general willing to admit, is Smooth particularly proud. In manner, Smooth is piquant; and being an acknowledged member of the fast school—that is, a disciple of manifest destiny in particular and Model Republics in general—he accepts the mission so kindly proffered him by his unfortunate friend, Mr. General Pierce, and has no objection to giving the world and kingcraft (the latter rudderless, and drifting on ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... Court!" he snorted. "I can rout the senate with a gesture! I will fill my court with gladiators! I can change my ministers as often as I please—aye, and my mistress too," he added, glaring at her. "Out with the names of these new conspirators who have set you trembling for my destiny!" ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... misery, like hers, exceeds An age of common earthly suffering; And when at last she hears the unvarnish'd truth, 'Twill but perplex her more. Oh destiny! Why am I thus a blood-stain'd guilty man In early years? still yearning towards virtue, Yet ever falling in the snares of vice! Now do I loathe the amorous Serafina, Who sacrifices all—her fame—her honour, ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... consequences of it. Man, as a reasoning animal, must always have doubted of his immortality and plan of conduct; in all the results of faith, there is immediate submission to a divine will, which we are sure is good. We may compare the destiny of man in this respect to that of a migratory bird; if a slow flying bird, as a landrail in the Orkneys in autumn, had reason and could use it as to the probability of his finding his way over deserts, across seas, and of securing his food ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... detect the woman who had been his friend; then the purpose of his coming gradually faded from his mind, and he stood with folded arms and absorbed eyes watching the other, the Mrs. Halliday, on the sofa, setting about the fulfilment of a purple destiny. ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... "Had my destiny caused me to pass immediately from my grandmother's control to that of a husband, or of a convent, it is possible that, subjected always to influences already accepted, I should never have been myself. But it ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various |
