"Fatalism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... artlessly indignant I fear, with the college authorities, barbarously irresponsible, as it struck me; for when I broke out about them to poor Mother she surprised me (though I confess she had sometimes surprised me before), by her deep fatalism. "Oh, I suppose they don't pretend not to take their students at the young people's own risk: they can scarcely pretend to control their affections!" she wonderfully said; she seemed almost shocked, moreover, that I could impute ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... would be the one surviving art if anarchy should come,—just as it would be certain to die slowly if socialism should succeed. The self-subordination of socialism would be as deadening as the self-surrender of fatalism to that will-power which must ever be the mainspring of a play to move the multitude. Altho it cannot formulate what it feels, the multitude has no relish for extreme measures; it may be making up its mind to turn toward either anarchy or socialism; but it means to move very slowly ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... subsequent events. But when I speak of Causes and Effects, I speak of the obvious and important agency of one fact upon another, and not of remote and fancifully infinitesimal influences. I am aware that, on the other hand, the reproach of Fatalism is justly incurred by those, who, like the writers of a certain school in a neighbouring country, recognise in history nothing more than a series of necessary phenomena, which follow inevitably one upon the other. But when, in this work, I speak of probabilities, I speak of human probabilities ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... the head with a wooden mallet. I was stunned. Even when I found myself in a small room full of bureaus and wardrobes and had nearly walked into a double full-length mirror, I still felt stunned. He wondered if we were going to die out, did he. And he assumed, with a blood-freezing fatalism, that we both had a depraved taste in women. I looked round helplessly for a wash-stand and caught sight of a bath-room beyond a blue portiere. A natural tendency towards the lower-middle class, if you please! And I was just on the point of telling him about my sweetheart in Genoa! ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... the two men looked into each other's eyes and the knowledge of death leaped into Ibraheim Omair's. With the fatalism of his creed he made no resistance, as, with a slow, terrible smile, the Sheik's left hand reached out and fastened on his throat. It would be quicker to shoot, but as Diana had suffered so should her torturer die. All the savagery in his nature rose uppermost. Beside the pitiful, ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... hands of God here as elsewhere,' I answered, with some flash of my father's fatalism. 'I have done what I promised to do, and the rest ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... out of joint. As a revolutionary, Julian presented ideas of character which could not but passionately attract the Norwegian poet. His attitude to his emperor and to his God, sceptical, in each case, in each case inspired by no vulgar motive but by a species of lofty and melancholy fatalism, promised a theme of the most entrancing complexity. But there are curious traces in Ibsen's correspondence of the difficulty, very strange in his case, which he experienced in forming a concrete idea of Julian in his own mind. He had been vaguely drawn to the theme, and ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... between them, both silent, both aware, each in his own way, of the importance of the passing minutes. Babalatchi's fatalism gave him only an insignificant relief in his suspense, because no fatalism can kill the thought of the future, the desire of success, the pain of waiting for the disclosure of the immutable decrees ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... my commission—just after I saw you." He paused, and added drily: "Whisky." His deep rich voice filled the taxi with the resigned philosophy of fatalism. ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... Were not penances imposed on him in the confessional for every default? Luther is said to have been led into still deeper gloom by his study of the doctrine of predestination. True, but even this study did not lead Luther off into fatalism. It terrified him, because he studied that profound doctrine without a true perception of divine grace and the meaning of the Redeemer's work. However, this study did not at any time permanently affect his vigorous striving ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... This fatalism, the certainty that nothing good can be expected now, the conviction that even the powerful god Shiva himself can neither appear nor help them are all deeply rooted in the minds of the old generation. As for the ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... The doctrine of Fatalism seems at first sight to be bound up in the acceptance of Lombroso's theory: but such is not the case. Lombroso himself declares that the type belongs to the born criminal only, and that the born criminal can be ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... hard, as if to clear a knot out of his scrawny throat. But he had made up his mind. Something was compelling him, and he would go in. Slowly the gloom engulfed him, and once again the whimsical spirit of fatalism had chosen a trivial thing to work out its ends in the romance ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... all over but the shouting, I suppose?" Again she shrugged. The fatalism of her training spoke in that shrug, and the necessity for taking everything as it comes—since ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... a straight part. He umpah umps with the conventional trombone fatalism. Whatever the tune, whatever the harmonies, trombone umpah umps regardless. Umpah ump is the soul of all things. Cadenzas, glissandos, arpeggios, chromatics, syncopations, blue melodies—these are the embroidery of sound. From ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... the mediaeval prelate that he longed to set sail for this golden gleam. Be the old legend true or false, it is certain that to this day the northern Mujik shows an even more marked religious enthusiasm than his brother of the central governments. Fanaticism, mysticism, and fatalism go ever hand in hand in Northern Russia. The Empire of the Tsars being so vast in area and so embracive of races affords space for all forms of belief, or want of belief, within her boundaries. All creeds are represented, ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... to inaction, watching the useless efforts of this other from the vantage ground of a wonderful fatalism,—as the North had watched him. The Indian plodded doggedly on, on, on. He entered the circle of the little camp. Dick raised his rifle and pressed its muzzle against the ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... to a clear exhibition of our special subject, is the doctrine of predestination, the unflinching fatalism which pervades and crowns this religion. The breath of this appalling faith is saturated with fatality, and its very name of Islam means "Submission." In heaven the prophet saw a prodigious wax tablet, called the "Preserved Table," on which ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... spirit of vengeance, and, what was worse, made the execution of the vengeance a pretext for satisfying their own savageness, greed, and envy: the men who sanctioned with the name of Christ a barbaric and blundering copy of pagan fatalism in taking the words "His blood be upon us and on our children" as a divinely appointed verbal warrant for wreaking cruelty from generation to generation on the people from whose sacred writings ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... Tomb of Mano Tomb of Sayid On the Death of His Mistress On Avarice The Battle of Sabla Verses to My Enemies On His Friends On Temper The Song of Maisuna To My Father On Fatalism To the Caliph Harun-al-Rashid Lines to Harun and Yahia The Ruin of Barmecides To Taher Ben Hosien The Adieu To My Mistress To a Female Cup-bearer Mashdud on the Monks of Khabbet Rakeek to His Female Companions Dialogue by Rais To a Lady Weeping On a Valetudinarian On a Miser To Cassim Obio Allah ...
— Oriental Literature - The Literature of Arabia • Anonymous
... tendency of Mahometanism, as such, to foster those very faults in the barbarian which keep him from ameliorating his condition. Here something might be said on what seems to be the acknowledged effect of its doctrine of fatalism, viz., in encouraging a barbarian recklessness of mind both in special seasons of prosperity and adversity, and in the ordinary business of life; but this is a point which it is difficult to speak of without a more intimate knowledge of ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... germ of its own decay, and perhaps a civilisation is no sooner alive than it begins to contrive its end. Gradually the symptoms of disease become apparent to acute physicians who state the effect without perceiving the cause. Be it so; circular fatalism is as cheerful as it is sad. If ill must follow good, good must follow ill. In any case, I have said enough to show that if Europe be again at the head of a pass, if we are about to take the first step along a new slope, the historians of the new age will ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... the immolation only by escaping into a house; and in an Irish one, that some shipwrecked sailors incurred a similar danger. Such barbarities must, in the nature of things, be practised every where under a reign of terror, however humane or christianized the people may be—even the fatalism of the Turk would not be proof against it. In Spain they have been enacted in all their horrors (thanks to the quarantine laws) upon the unfortunate victims of yellow fever;[33] and we shall soon see them repeated ...
— Letters on the Cholera Morbus. • James Gillkrest
... primitive safety webs that held one in place by sheer tensile strength. Taking a ship like that into space was an open invitation to suicide. A man needed a combination of foolhardy bravery and incredible fatalism to blast off in a can like this. He had the stimulus, but the knowledge of what he would face troubled him more than he cared to admit. More and more, as he understood the ship, he was amazed at the courage of the ancients who had blithely leaped into hyperspace in these flying coffins ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... an old fellow, with the face of Henri Quatre, eagle nose, beard, and all, sat with his head sunken on his chest in mournful contemplation, and a fine-looking, black-haired, dragoon kind of youth with the wildest of eyes clung like grim death to a German helmet. The same expression of resigned fatalism ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... for the doctrine of future rewards and punishments. And accordingly, D'Holbach, Comte, and Atkinson describe man as if he were the mere creature of circumstances, and deny that his character could possibly have been different from what it is. But even when it is not associated with fatalism, the theory, which denies the distinct existence of the soul as a substantive being, has a tendency to shake our belief in the doctrine of a "future retribution," properly so called, since that doctrine rests on the assumption of our continued personal identity, ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... The unshakable fatalism which hitherto had kept them on their difficult path was shattered; the masses would no longer allow themselves to be held down in stupid resignation. Men who all their lives had plodded their accustomed way to and from their work now stood ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... main works 'On Fate,' or whatever name they bear, are written. They tell of the turning of the wheel of Fortune, and of the instability of earthly, especially political, things. Providence is only brought in because the writers would still be ashamed of undisguised fatalism, of the avowal of their ignorance, or of useless complaints. Gioviano Pontano ingeniously illustrates the nature of that mysterious something which men call Fortune by a hundred incidents, most of which belonged to his own experience. The subject is treated more humorously by Aeneas Sylvius, in ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... Karma be inscrutable were men to work in union and harmony instead of disunion and strife. For our ignorance of those ways—which one portion of mankind calls the ways of Providence, dark and intricate, while another sees in them the action of blind fatalism, and a third simple Chance with neither gods nor devils to guide them—would surely disappear if we would but attribute all these to their correct cause. With right knowledge, or at any rate with a confident ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... my temperament, I have never been a fatalist. I have saved my life more than once by acts of volition—by presence of mind and adroitness. The knowledge of this has freed me from the superstitions of fore-ordination and fatalism; and therefore, when not too indolent, ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... now sought to continue its malefic purpose by a system of education "so bad that if England had wished to kill Ireland's soul when she imposed it on the Sister Isle she could not have discovered a better means of doing so" (M. Paul Dubois). And the same authority ascribes the fatalism, the lethargy, the moral inertia and intellectual passivity, the general absence of energy and character which prevailed in Ireland ten or twelve years ago to the fact that England struck at Ireland through her brain and sought to demoralise ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... tribes lived, to acquire "merit," with no other company than that of their own pious contemplations. We did not believe in its existence, still we were searching for that monastery, driven onward by the blind fatalism which was our only guide through all these endless wanderings. As we were starving and could find no "argals," that is fuel with which to make a fire, we walked all night by the light of the moon, driving between ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... Since then a vague sympathy has remained in me for that man, who was lacking in genius, but whose mind was affectionate and beautiful, and who carried through great adventures a simple courage and a gentle fatalism. Then he is sympathetic to me because he has been combated and insulted by people who were eager to take his place, and who had not, as he had, in the depths of their souls, a love for the people. We have seen them in ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... adventure, now it was the symbol of mystic revelation. It was not only the motif for all other decoration upon the walls and minor elements of the temple; it was the emblem of the trinity, deep, holy, significant of the mystery of the universe and the hereafter. There was something deeper than mere fatalism; behind all was the fact- rooted faith ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... unquestionably a real social and political progress. And yet the Roman people, had they chosen, could have given a different direction to the developments of their constitution. There was Providence in the course of events, but no fatalism. ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... The chapel and the minister's house sank into the deepening night as into water. The longer the omen tarried, the more she wanted it to come. Then fatalism reasserted itself, and she relapsed into her usual ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... use the brains and hands which God has given thee, and then pray to Him to bless thy work? In all things do the best of thy understanding and means, and then say Min Allah, for the end is with Him!' There is not a pin to choose in fatalism here between Muslim and Christian, the lazy, like Mohammed and Suleyman (one Arab the other Copt), say Min Allah or any form of dawdle you please; but the true Muslim doctrine is just what Yussuf ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... self-renunciation. She wanted to do the best for him, and had not even the consolation of the knowledge that she had sacrificed herself for his advantage. All had been taken out of her hands! Yet with characteristic fatalism she did not feel rebellious. If it were ordained that she should, for fifty, perhaps sixty years, repent in sterility and ashes that first error of her girlhood, rebellion was, none the less, too far-fetched. If she rebelled, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... that destiny never degenerates into mere blind and helpless fatalism," responded the Afghan. "To do the right now suffices to give absolute trust in God for the hereafter. That is the key of destiny, and each man holds it in his ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell
... iron, and is the worst of all, although it began with the heroes. Zoroastrian Mazdeism also admits this theory of the four ages, and we find it expressed in the Bundehesh,[51] but under a form less nearly akin to the Indian conception than was Hesiod's, and without the same spirit of crushing fatalism. Here the duration of the universe is fixed at 12,000 years, divided into four periods of 3000. In the first all is pure; the good God Ahuramazda reigns over his creation, in which as yet evil has not appeared; in the second, ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... arrogance and lack of 'sweet reasonableness.' It claims no attention from the student of English literature, neither would Warburton himself were it not for his association with Pope. Allusion has been already made to Crousaz's hostile criticism of the Essay on Man (1737) on the ground that it led to fatalism, and was destructive of the foundations of natural religion. Warburton, who had previously denounced the 'rank atheism' of the poem, now endeavoured to defend it, and how effectually he did so in Pope's judgment is seen in his grateful acknowledgment of the critic's labours. ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... enemy's line had been reinforced. Who knows? The best laid plans are often thwarted by the merest trifles,—an insignificant puddle, a jingling canteen. This game of war is a hit or miss game, after all. A certain fatalism is bred thereby, and it is well to set out with a stock of that article. So our resolute advance became a forced reconnaissance, greatly to the chagrin of the younger and more ardent spirits. We found out exactly where the enemy was, and declined to have anything further ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... makes its house, but afterward the house confines the spirit.' This leaves no room for the coward, who declines to work out his salvation, even with fear and trembling. It summons all men to clear away the brush and dry leaves of a perverted fatalism, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... disciple of Ravaisson and the author of a rather important philosophical work Du fondement de l'Induction (1871), who in his view of things endeavoured "to substitute everywhere force for inertia, life for death, and liberty for fatalism."[Footnote: Lachelier was born in 1832, Ravaisson in 1813. Bergson owed much to both of these teachers of the Ecole Normale Superieure. Cf. his memorial address on Ravaisson, who died in ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... speaking of the fatalism of the Turks, says that they always and everywhere leave the world as they found it. According to their own proverb, no grass grows again where the ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... such curiosity by the rest of the world. The curse had entered her very soul; autocracy, and nothing else in the world, has moulded her institutions, and with the poison of slavery drugged the national temperament into the apathy of a hopeless fatalism. It seems to have gone into the blood, tainting every mental activity in its source by a half-mystical, insensate, fascinating assertion of purity and holiness. The Government of Holy Russia, arrogating to itself the supreme power to torment ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... that too, sometimes," said Charlie, sitting down on the rock beside his companion, and looking at him in some perplexity, "but does not the view you take savour somewhat of fatalism, and seek to free us from responsibility in regard to what ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... the absolute reality with itself, is but the foundation, but a moment in the determination of God as spirit. Hence, principally, arises the reproach which is directed against philosophy—to wit, that philosophy, to be consistent with itself, is necessarily Spinozism, and consequently atheism and fatalism. But at the beginning we have not yet determinations distinguished one from another as aye and nay. We have the ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... . and to say that it could not have been otherwise is to lose the right to talk of equity, of morality, of progress; it is to lose the right to talk of God. Providence disappears to give place to the grossest fatalism." ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... airy fatalism of one who nails his banner to the mast, "if my father is going to lose two millions because you and I set an old man free, then father is going to lose ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis
... reviling. Not in the slightest degree did she even attempt to deceive herself; with set, tearless eyes, and without a sigh of regret, she simply faced the naked truth. She had made the mistake herself; now she must bear the burden of discovery. It was not the dull inertia of fatalism, but rather the sober decision of a woman who had been tried in the fire, who understood her own heart, and comprehended the strength of her own will. Personal suffering and sacrifice were no new chapters ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... these two volumes, Mr. Abdullah has gathered the Pell Street stories of New York's Chinatown which have appeared in American magazines during the past few years. As contrasted with Thomas Burke's "Limehouse Nights," these stories reflect the oriental point of view with its characteristic fatalism and equability of temper. Four of these stories are told with the utmost economy of means and a grim pleasure in watching events unshape themselves. "A Simple Act of Piety" seemed to me one of the best short stories of 1918. The other volume is of more uneven quality, and ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... a good deal of fatalism seeking to pass as faith. People say we must have faith in God; let things take their course and they will come out all right. The church long commended the slothful who let things drift, and called their laziness ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... in the position of a reckless man with no more possible losses to suffer, anxious by any expedient to postpone the day of payment in the hope that something would turn up in his favour. That anything should turn up seemed in reason impossible, but Oriental fatalism despises reason; and in this case Oriental fatalism was right judged by ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... period, that a predominant social conservatism held them aloof from all that was intellectually aggressive and theologically rationalistic. They had outgrown Tritheism, as it had been taught for generations in New England; they had refused to accept the fatalism that had been taught in the name of Calvin, and they had rejected the ecclesiastical tyrannies that had been imposed on men by the New England theology. But they had advanced only a little way in accepting modern thought as a basis of faith, and in ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... to Stella Fregelius. However this may be, for if Morris saw the resemblance there were others who could not agree with him; doubtless although not an Eastern, ancient or modern, she was tinged with the fatalism of the East, mingled with a certain contempt of death inherited perhaps from her northern ancestors, and an active, pervading spirituality that was all her own. Yet her manners were not gloomy, nor her air tragic, for he found ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... seems always to have had some floating ideas of fatalism in his mind, remarked that two of his comrades, Demasis and Philipeau, had peculiar influence on his destiny. Philipeau had emigrated, and was the engineer employed by Sir Sydney Smith to construct the defences of Acre. We have seen that Demasis ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... script of nervousness or of hesitation. He had carried out his Orders, he saw clearly that the path which he had trod was leading him to the end of his journey, but he made no complaint. He was a Latin, and to the last possessed that loftiness of spirit wedded to sombre fatalism which is the heritage of the Latins. He was at war with his kindred of Italy and France, and with the English among whom he had been brought up, and whom he loved. He was their enemy by accident of birth, but though he might and did love his foes better than his German ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... thinks himself, either by divine or human right, vested with an absolute power of destroying his fellow-creatures; or who, without inquiring into his right, lawlessly exerts that power. The most excusable of all those human monsters are the Turks, whose religion teaches them inevitable fatalism. A propos of the Turks, my Loyola, I pretend, is superior to your Sultan. Perhaps you think this impossible, and wonder who this Loyola is. Know then, that I have had a Barbet brought me from France, so exactly like the Sultan that he has been mistaken for ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... chiefly with persons in the middle and poorer classes of society because, like Wordsworth, though with very different emphasis, he feels that in their experiences the real facts of life stand out most truly. His deliberate theory is a sheer fatalism—that human character and action are the inevitable result of laws of heredity and environment over which man has no control. 'The Return of the Native' (1878) and 'Far from the Madding Crowd' (1874) are among ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... 'mechanical' premises suggested by Hume. 'They let loose instinct as an indiscriminatory bandog to guard them against (his) conclusions': 'they tugged lustily at the logical chain by which Hume was so coldly towing them and the world into bottomless abysses of Atheism and Fatalism. But the chain somehow snapped between them, and the issue has been that nobody now cares about either—any more than about Hartley's, Darwin's, or Priestley's contemporaneous doings in England.'[505] ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... shooting one ghastly old scaly villain in a tank near Ryseree. He had made this tank his home, and with that fatalism which is so characteristic of the Hindoo, the usual ablutions and bathings went on as if no such monster existed. Several woman having been carried off, however, at short intervals, the villagers asked me to try and rid them of their ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... nerving himself for another scene a faire. Well, it would be less trying than the first one. If his sense of form, his flair for fatalism, still persisted, ease was out of the question ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... anything from happening. This attitude of the Viennese court and its vast machinery of functionaries slowly affected other classes, until the people of Vienna as a body seem to refrain from anything that means action. It is this passive fatalism which has hampered the intellectual development of Vienna. Oldest in culture among the German-speaking cities of Europe it has never been and is not likely ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... reasoning by which he startled the world; and his efforts to save his most ingenious theories from absurdity resembled, to use his own emphatic words applied to the philosophy of Leibnitz, "a contrivance against Fatalism," for though his genius has given a value to the wildest ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... be quiet. He never will show off when I want him. Sometimes he goes at a pace which surprises me. Sometimes, when I most wish him to make the running, the brute turns restive, and I am obliged to let him take his own time. I wonder do other novel-writers experience this fatalism? They MUST go a certain way, in spite of themselves. I have been surprised at the observations made by some of my characters. It seems as if an occult Power was moving the pen. The personage does or says something, and I ask, how the dickens did he come ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... discipline of life, and will generally be found with men in whose thoughts God is not, or to whose conceptions he is the distant, inactive Deity, not the near and ever-working Controller. I cannot admire the conduct of that man who when the bolt of sorrow falls, receives it upon the armor of a rigid fatalism, who wipes scarcely a tear from his hard, dry face, and says, "Well, it cannot be helped; things are so ordered." Below all this there is often a sulky, half-angry sentiment, as though the victim felt the ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... the truth was told him, and he received it with that high magnanimity, or it may be fatalism, which at times he was capable of showing. Never in all his days of exile did he say one word against her. Possibly in searching his own soul he found excuses such as we may find. In his will he spoke of her with great affection, and shortly before his death he said ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... surcease of a certain sort. In the Gallic blood there is ever a trace of fatalism; the shrug is its expression. It was generations back to the D'Aubignes, yet now and then some remote ancestor would reach up out of the shadowy past to lay a compelling finger on the latest daughter of his race. Her word was passed, beyond honorable recall. Somewhere and in some ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... the Medici—those ennobled pawnbrokers of the middle ages, whose parvenu taste engendered the fantastic gilding of the renaissance, which they naturalized in the Tuileries and at Fontainbleau, in common with the stiletto and acqua tofana of their poisoners, and the fatalism of their judicial astrology. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... The meek acceptance of Kultur in our books and schools had stiffened what was once a free country with a German formalism and a German fear. By a queer irony, even the same popular writer who had already warned us against the Prussians, had sought to preach among the populace a very Prussian fatalism, pivoted upon the importance of the charlatan Haeckel. The wrestle of the two great parties had long slackened into an embrace. The fact was faintly denied, and a pretence was still made that no pact: ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... read without the twitching of a facial muscle. He shrugged his shoulders, accepting the inevitable with the fatalism of ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... shortly afterwards professor at the Virginia Military Institute of Lexington. Here he was known as a rigid Presbyterian, and a "fatalist," if it be fatalism to believe that "what will be will ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... had abandoned me so much as to make me miserable about it; but still I had never tried to shelter under it, and stay there faithfully, as the best of people do. And even now I was not brought to such a happy attitude, although delivered by these little gleams of light from the dark void of fatalism, into which so many bitter blows had ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... whose power of life lies in their depravation. She tells us that these horrors weighed upon her, and caused her to try various solutions of the ills that are, and are permitted to be. She was never tempted to become an atheist, never lost sight of the Divine in life, yet the necessity of a terrible fatalism seemed to envelop her. With her numerous friends, she sought escape from the dilemma through various theories of social development; and they often sat or walked half through the night, discussing the fortunes of the race, and the intentions of God. With ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... and so again when their burthen becomes the transience of all things human. The sultan, too, feels that Islam is doomed, and, as messenger after messenger announces the success of the rebels, his fatalism expresses itself as the growing perception that all this blood and all these tears are but phantoms that come and go, bubbles on the sea of eternity. This again is the purport of the talk of Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, who evokes for him a vision of Mahmud II capturing ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... unsaid,—not even imagining in the least what the result of it was to be. He was but a voice, but an instrument,—the passive instrument through which an almighty will was to reveal itself; and the sublime fatalism of his faith made him as dead to all human considerations as if he had been a portion of the immutable ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... more thoroughly have unfitted the modern youth for getting on: it hardly needed the scribbled pages on the desk to complete the hopelessness of Ralph Marvell's case. He had accepted the fact with a humorous fatalism. Material resources were limited on both sides of the house, but there would always be enough for his frugal wants—enough to buy books (not "editions"), and pay now and then for a holiday dash to the great centres of art and ideas. And meanwhile there was the world ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... got at present an England of ignoramuses who are also cowards and slaves, and extremely proud of it at that, because in school they are taught to submit, with what they ridiculously call Oriental fatalism (as if any Oriental has ever submitted more helplessly and sheepishly to robbery and oppression than we Occidentals do), to be driven day after day into compounds and set to the tasks they loathe ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... Hauptmann's incomparable projection of simple men and women. Here, in Dryden's phrase, is God's plenty: the morose pathos of Beipst (Before Dawn); the vanity and faithfulness of Friebe (The Reconciliation); the sad fatalism of Hauffe (Drayman Henschel); the instinctive kindliness of the nurse and the humorous fortitude of Mrs. Lehmann (Lonely Lives); the vulgar good nature of Liese Baensch (Michael Kramer); the trivial despair of Pauline and the primitive passion of Mrs. John ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... charms the poet describes at length in a rather imitative rhapsody. The shepherd then falls asleep; a serpent approaches and is about to strike him when a gnat, seeing the danger, stings him in time to save him. But—such is the fatalism of cynical fable-lore—the shepherd, still in a stupor, crushes the gnat that has saved his life. At night the gnat's ghost returns to rebuke the shepherd for his innocent ingratitude, and rather inappropriately remains to rehearse at great length the tale of ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... clerk, his companion a shop-girl, rather than a Prince disguised as Calander esquiring a Princess dedicated to Fatal Enchantment—that Kismet was a quaint fallacy, one with that whimsical conceit of Orient fatalism which assigns to each and every man his Day of Days, wherein he shall range the skies and plumb the abyss of his Destiny, alternately ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... the Marxist teaching is this, that it carries the conception of a necessary economic development to the pitch of fatalism, it declares with all the solemnity of popular "science" that Socialism must prevail. Such a fatalism is morally bad for the adherent; it releases him from the inspiring sense of uncertain victory, it leads him to believe ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... sick Hottentot lashed to a donkey; the man died when we halted, and we buried him with Christian honours. As his comrades said, he died because he had determined to die—an instance of that obstinate fatalism in their mulish temperament which no kind ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... dozen efforts and discouragements one day, merely by chance, he saw her alive, breathing. She whirled past in a limousine. She disappeared into the haze of a city street in summer. Whereupon he thought, "I was not mistaken; it's inevitable." He accepted the fatalism of his Arab friends, who believe that every ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... Longfellow, Emerson, Hawthorn, Bryant, Lowell, Whittier, and Whitman were dead. His memory was failing, and he forgot some of his own characters; but Elsie Venner he remembered perfectly and he woke to full animation when I objected to the fatalism of heredity as being about as paralysing to effort as the fatalism of Calvinism. As a medical man (and we are apt to forget the physician in the author) he took strong views of heredity. As a worker among our destitute children, I considered ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... population of the west midlands and the north of England, possibly of the whole of it, have been made up of the same elements. It cannot be explained by language—nearly one half of the Welsh people speak no Welsh. Some attribute it to the inexorable laws of geography and climate, others to the fatalism of history. Others frivolously put it down to modern football. But no one who knows Wales is ignorant ...
— A Short History of Wales • Owen M. Edwards
... both. Past events have unnerved me; and all I can now do is to make life an amusement, and look on while others play. After all, even the highest game of crowns and sceptres, what is it? Vide Napoleon's last twelve-month. It has completely upset my system of fatalism. I thought, if crushed, he would have fallen, when 'fractus illabitur orbis,' and not have been pared away to gradual insignificance; that all this was not a mere jeu of the gods, but a prelude to ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... human nature and the laws of the physical world, against the rage of the winter and the liberty of the sea. They did not exempt him from the influence of that most pernicious of superstitions, a presumptuous fatalism. They did not preserve hint from the inebriation of prosperity, or restrain him from indecent querulousness in adversity. On the other hand, the fanaticism of Cromwell never urged him on impracticable undertakings, or confused his perception of the public good. Our countryman, inferior to Bonaparte ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... water rises! rises! and any minute it may burst through! The Saints have mercy! All our things will be lost; but it is the will of God—we cannot fight against it." And Volodia crossed himself devoutly with Russian fatalism. ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... fatalism!" exclaimed the priest. "It is the guiding spirit of this land. And you, too, are going to be led by it. Take care! You have come to a land of fire, and I think ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... animal spirits must be one reason why they are such an indestructible race. The habitual influence on their minds of the agency of unseen spirits may have a tendency in the same direction, by preserving the mental quietude of a kind of fatalism. ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... a failure. I am, as you know, inclined to fatalism, and do not believe that such a thing as chance exists; so I am bound to think that this experience was given to me for some end. It was a preliminary canter for the big race, perhaps. My mother was disappointed, but tried to show it as ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... though he may have wholly lost the confidence of the representatives of the people in Congress. While this makes for stability in administration and keeps the ship of state on an even keel, yet it also leads to the fatalism of our democracy, and often the "native hue" of its resolution is thus "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." Take a striking instance. I am confident that after the sinking of the Lusitania, the United States would have entered the world war, if President Wilson's ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... ready assent. They are unmitigated ruffians, but terrible and determined fighters. The fanatical fatalism of the Mohammedan creed renders them utterly impervious to panic. They keep up a steady, quick-loading fire into the charging Ba-gcatya, and, aiming low, every shot tells, committing fearful havoc among the serried, onrushing masses. Yet those ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... accidents. As such, it seems simple, because you do not at first realize all that it involves. But when its whole significance dawns on you, your heart sinks into a heap of sand within you. There is a hideous fatalism about it, a ghastly and damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence, of strength and purpose, of honor and aspiration, to such casually picturesque changes as an avalanche may make in a mountain landscape, or a railway accident in a human figure. To call this Natural ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... wandered so far, nor enriched myself with such varied knowledge of the relics of ancient history, as I might have purposed or wished, I have at least learned to know the Turk and the Arab, been soothed by the patience inspired by their fatalism, and warmed by the gorgeous gleams of fancy that animate their poetry and religion. These ten months of my life form an episode which seems to belong to a separate existence. Just refined enough to be poetic, and just barbaric enough to be freed from all conventional fetters, it ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... about the ancients and their fatalism," exclaimed Napoleon; "they belong to a darker age. Political supremacy is our modern fatalism, and our tragedies must be the school of politicians and statesmen. That is the highest summit which poets are able to reach. You, for instance, ought ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... dense woods where in my boyhood I had spent hours and days of happiness. One last look I turned towards the scene of my late catastrophe ere I began to descend the mountain. The postboy, with the happy fatalism of his country, and a firm trust in the future, had established himself in the interior of the chaise, from which a blue curl of smoke wreathed upward from his pipe; the horses grazed contentedly by the roadside; and were I to judge from the evidence before ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... experience a shock on hearing that there are large numbers of even highly educated human beings who hold that the standard is altogether false. Yet that, Lyall would argue, is generally the Oriental frame of mind. Fatalism, natural conservatism and ignorance lead the uneducated to reject our ideas, while the highly educated often hold that our standard of progress is too material to be a true measure, and that consequently, far from advancing, we are standing still or even retrograding. ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... fall back on fatalism as an explanation of irrational events (that is to say, events the reasonableness of which we do not understand). The more we try to explain such events in history reasonably, the more unreasonable and incomprehensible do ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... But a great chasm lies between the teachings of these men and the beliefs of the common people. Only from a study of the epitaphs do we know what the average Roman thought and felt on this subject. A few years ago Professor Harkness, in an admirable article on "The Scepticism and Fatalism of the Common People of Rome," showed that "the common people placed no faith in the gods who occupy so prominent a place in Roman literature, and that their nearest approach to belief in a divinity ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... anything else. Not that he is a materialist; on the contrary, he is a most strenuous assertor of the soul, and, with the soul, of the body as its infallible associate and vehicle in the present frame of things. Neither does he drift into fatalism or indifferentism; the energy of his temperament, and ever-fresh sympathy with national and other developments, being an effectual bar to this. The paradoxical element of the poems is such that one may sometimes find them ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... anything, and owing to an inward self-contempt, seek to GET OUT OF THE BUSINESS, no matter how. The latter, when they write books, are in the habit at present of taking the side of criminals; a sort of socialistic sympathy is their favourite disguise. And as a matter of fact, the fatalism of the weak-willed embellishes itself surprisingly when it can pose as "la religion de la souffrance humaine"; that ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... President manifested no feeling of chagrin or disappointment over the result at Baltimore. Throughout the campaign and during the balance of his term of office he bore himself with courage and with dignity. Indeed, his equanimity seemed almost like the fortitude of fatalism. No doubt, he was sustained by the conviction that the compromise measures had avoided civil war, and by the feeling that if he had erred, Clay and Webster had likewise erred; but he could have had no presentiment of the depth of the retirement to which he was destined. He was to reappear, ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... not free, what right have we to punish those who cannot help committing bad actions, or to reward others who cannot help committing good actions? Holbach gives to this and the various other ways of describing fatalism as dangerous to society, the proper and perfectly adequate answer. He turns to the quality of the action, and connects with that the social attitude of praise and blame. Merit and demerit are associated ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... surroundings, yet discovered nowhere the slightest opening for escape. The vigilance of the guard, as well as the thorough manner in which I was bound, rendered any such attempt the merest madness. Realizing this, with the fatalism of a veteran I resigned myself in all patience to what ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish
... things happen and you can't do 'em over again," observed the little seamstress, with the natural fatalism of the ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... in common, including fatalism and morbidity, for the Slav temperament is in a hundred ways akin to ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... be noted, however, that taking racial heredity into full account by no means leads to an attitude of fatalism as regards racial problems. On the contrary modern biology clearly teaches that racial heredity is modifiable both in the individual and in the race. It is modifiable in the individual through education or training; it is modifiable in the race through selection. Therefore racial heredity does ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... that he is a man of great ability and a good speaker, more in the familiar English than the bombastical French style. Talleyrand has a high opinion of him. He wrote a history of the Revolution, which he now regrets; it is well done, but the doctrine of fatalism which he puts forth in it he thinks calculated to injure his reputation as a statesman. I met him again at dinner at Talleyrand's yesterday with another great party, and last night he started on a ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... We passed through streets of dark melancholy, through labyrinthine passages where the gas-jets spluttered asthmatically, under weeping railway arches, and at last were free of the quarter where the cold fatalism of the East combats the wistful dubiety of the West. But the atmosphere, physical and moral, remained with us. Not that the yellow men are to blame for this atmosphere. The evil of the place is rather ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... perhaps many. Chief among these, probably, is the fact that our progress along industrial lines has occupied the entire time of the majority of our best intellects, and it is also in no small degree the consequence of a fatalism that regards disease as a direct visitation of providence and therefore a thing which man may not avoid. Another cause in some instances is the pride of our people in their homes and respective localities, which ...
— Health on the Farm - A Manual of Rural Sanitation and Hygiene • H. F. Harris
... along the lightless highways, or huddling in the lonely hovels outside Marut, the remnant of Behar Singh's great army hid from the hand of the destroyer. They had followed their god, and their god had deserted them. All hope was lost, and with the fatalism of their race they flung their weapons from them as ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... England) is that it cannot leave the moral government of the universe in the hands of divine Providence. I was willing to leave so many things which I could not control to the Deity, who probably could that she accused me of fatalism, and I was held to be little better than one of the wicked because I would not forecast the effects of what I did in the lives of others. I insisted that others were also probably in the hands of the somma sapienza e il primo ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... damnation those whom He hath chosen in Christ out of mankind, and to bring them by Christ to everlasting salvation, as vessels made to honour." However it may be with others, Churchmen at all events have no right to sneer at Gordon's views on the doctrine of God's Sovereignty, or Fatalism, as he more frequently used to ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... This quiet fatalism only increased her longing to see Alymer once more. It was the one thing in all existence left to long for. It merged every remaining faculty into one desire. And Hal would bring him. Hal never failed ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... instant reply. "You have a perfect right to be wrong!" There was here a great deal more than a felicitous epigram. This acknowledgment of every man's right to be wrong underlay Townsend's philosophy of life and his religious attitude. Though, curiously enough, he had borrowed a certain touch of fatalism from his intercourse as a young man with the philosophies of the East, he felt very strongly the essential freedom of the will. But that freedom he saw could not exist, could not be worthily exercised, could not, as it ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... With the fatalism of youth they had accepted their tragedy as final. He still held the end of her veil in his hand, but her face was turned ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... lectures her flock on the advantages of fresh air. She hurries little Johnny off to school and gets Sally out to service. She has a keen nose for drains and a passion for clean hands and faces. What worries her most is the fatalism and improvidence of the poor. She is full of exhortations to "lay by" for the rainy day, and seductive in her praises of the Penny Bank. The whole life of the family falls within her supervision. She knows ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... it from the pillow. But he managed to shift his gaze from the window until it rested upon a man's face—a gaunt, impassive brown face illuminated by steady and thoughtful eyes, filled with that mystic, unshakable spirit of fatalism that is the real Genius of the eastern peoples. The head itself stood out with almost startling distinctness against the background of pure white. It was swathed with an immaculate white turban. The thin, stringy brown neck ran into a loose surtout ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... clergy of Encyclopaedists. Helvetius and Holbach were its doctors of atheology. Most reading and thinking Frenchmen were for a time its members. Rousseau was its arch-heretic. The doctrines were materialism, fatalism, and hedonism. The sect still exists. It has adhered, from the time of its formation, to a curious notion, its favorite superstition, which may be expressed somewhat as follows: "Human reason and good sense were first invented from thirty to fifty years ago." "When ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... an instinctive fatalism, the people have taken their plight for granted, without harbouring resentment against the more fortunate. It may be added that most of them are convinced believers in those fallacies which cluster around the phrase "making work." It were strange if they were not. The labourer lives ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt |
