"Destiny" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Yet there were two or three in whom she felt or fancied a more critical attitude; who looked at her coolly, and seemed to avoid her. Bostonian Pharisees, no doubt!—ignorant of all those great expansions of the female destiny that were going forward. ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... moralize on destiny And other things obscure, But has no more philosophy Than changeless ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... felt it, that wordless thinning down of radiance, that mysterious holding back of warmth, until it seemed to strike a chill into the bones. It was the darker wing of Destiny hovering over man's head, deepening at the same time that it shadows the receding sky-line, so that even the memory of it, a thousand miles away, could drain the jocund blitheness out of the open prairie and give an air of pathos and solitude ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... must act in such manner that they may not be able to say that we have accepted the said commission, because it is my wish to protect [protest? D. C. W.] at all times against their being charged with determining our destiny. You must bear in mind that the policy of the government is to obtain absolute independence, and if perchance we should know by the course of events that such cannot be the case, we will then think of ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... the rear.[410] It was arranged that Titus should carry on the war in Judaea, while Vespasian held the keys of Egypt.[411] Against Vitellius it seemed sufficient to send a part of their forces under the command of Mucianus. He would have Vespasian's name behind him and the irresistible force of destiny. Letters were written to all the armies and their generals with instructions that they should try to win over those of the Guards who were hostile to Vitellius by promising ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... knows anything of her sea-going qualities. Again and again she had been on the point of foundering; and again and again some change in the weather or the steady pumping of the crew had prevented her from fulfilling her destiny. So surprised was the skipper at these repeated interpositions of Providence that he had quite made up his superstitious mind that the ship never would go down, and now devoted himself with a whole heart to his old occupation of drinking himself into delirium ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... as of old, Their children sit with empty hands to wait The sequel that the future shall unfold,— The unwritten "Finis" of remorseless fate. Vanquished they stand before oblivion's gate, Knowing that soon the everlasting seal Of destiny shall all obliterate Their finished story, which, for woe or weal, Shall be with Him who writ ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... time the Cin-au-aev brothers met to consult about the destiny of the U-in-ka-rets. At this meeting the younger said: "Brother, how shall these people obtain their food? Let us devise some good plan for them. I was thinking about it all night, but could not see what would be best, and when the dawn came into the sky I went to a mountain and sat on its summit, ...
— Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians • John Wesley Powell
... grievous riot, While mothers died of grief beneath your fiat, To know why you yourself cannot be quiet?" "I quiet!—I!—a wretch bereaved! My only son!—such anguish be relieved! No, never! All for me below Is but a life of tears and woe!"— "But say, why doom yourself to sorrow so?" "Alas! 'tis Destiny that ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... are perplexed with the existing state of things. They know nothing of the physical organization of the planet we inhabit, of its political and civil divisions, and of the whole machinery of human society, and are profoundly ignorant of the past history and future destiny of the race to which they belong. It is not remarkable that mind so unnaturally and peculiarly circumstanced—with its usual inlets of knowledge so obstructed, and deprived of external objects to act upon—should ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... going to be the best of friends," said Gilbert, jubilantly. "We were born to be good friends, Anne. You've thwarted destiny enough. I know we can help each other in many ways. You are going to keep up your studies, aren't you? So am I. Come, I'm going to walk home ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... hands, till mountain and valley were bathed in glorious sunlight; and when at last, she descended the rocky footpath, she felt, as she looked forth upon the new life opening before her, no fear, no shrinking, but strong to go forward and meet her destiny, ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... an awkward silence, then Ernest said a little belligerently: "Germany must fulfill her destiny, ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... while he was stoutly declaring what it was his intention to do, fate was stealthily at work weaving another of her webs of destiny for Roderick Drew, and his friends' anxious eyes saw the first signs of it when they bade him good night. For fever had laid its hand on the white youth, the fever that foreshadows death unless a surgeon is near, the fever of a wound going bad. Even Mukoki, graduated ...
— The Gold Hunters - A Story of Life and Adventure in the Hudson Bay Wilds • James Oliver Curwood
... it appears that destiny is not so much a thing that gives no warning as a thing that cannot be avoided, for they say that wondrous signs and appearances presented themselves. Now, as to lights in the skies and sounds by night moving in various directions and solitary birds descending into the Forum, it is perhaps ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... Leopardi was substantially a poet,—that is to say, he had imagination, sentiment, passion, an intense love of beauty, a powerful impulse towards things ideal. The sad tone of his speculations about the universe and human destiny gave an impression of mournfulness to his lines, but this rather deepened the pathos of his work. In the same breath he sang of love and the grave, and the love was the more eager for its brevity. He had the poetic temperament—sensitive, ardent, ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... and driver, there arises the suggestive fact that the poor man and his bullocks are crushed more mercilessly than the rich man and his horse. But be this as it may, poor and rich, serf and knight, the griffin of destiny encompasses and pounces upon each; and the talons of evil pin down and the beak of misery rends with impartial ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... for a series of years would have proved a valuable contribution to human knowledge, as showing the steady and remarkable changes through which a man who is doomed to be fat passes onward to his destiny. But Maltboy stopped sitting for portraits when he reached the age of twenty, deciding, as many another public character has done, to transmit only the earlier and more ethereal representations of ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... scheduled, but the President desired play and the word went on "to play." Mr. Leech and Mr. Myrick, ever ready for emergencies in tennis, called for gasolene, which was forthcoming speedily, and, while the Chief Executive of the United States interviewed men on the destiny of nations, the people of Washington watched nearly 200 barrels of gasolene flare up over the surface of the court. The desired result was attained and at 2 o'clock President Harding personally called play. Singles between Williams and ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D
... He was a member, too, of that distinguished body, the Metaphysical Society, which met once a month during the palmy years of the seventies to discuss, in strict privacy, the fundamental problems of the destiny of man. ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... great talk of trend and tide, And wisdom and destiny, Hail that undying heathen That is sadder than ...
— The Ballad of the White Horse • G.K. Chesterton
... impossible for me to know noble and pure emotions excepting in the heart of this being unsoiled by crime. You have your fancies, here I show you mine. In exchange for the blight which society has brought upon me, I give it a man of honor, and enter upon a struggle with destiny; do you wish to be of ...
— Vautrin • Honore de Balzac
... because he taught higher lessons than the mob could understand. He died discussing the immorality of the soul, and his farewell to his judges was full of quiet dignity. "It is now time," he said, "that we depart—I to die, you to live; but which has the better destiny is unknown to all, except to God." Bruno was burnt at Rome, because he exposed the false philosophy of the day. When Galileo, an old man of seventy, taught the truth about the earth's motion, they cast him ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton
... just taken off my dusty clothes, bathed my face and hands with cold water, and stepped out on the verandah, when a storm of music burst out from a little summer-house on the grass. Wherever I go this sort of ovation follows me. Music and flowers seem to be my destiny. No matter where I roam, in all the steamboats and hotels they send storms of homage after me. Well, I am grateful, and I hope bear these honors with ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... privation, apathy seemed the predominant feeling with these outcasts of society, and reflection on the past, or anticipation of the future, was absorbed in the vacuum of insensibility. Reckless of his destiny, here the manacled felon wore, with his gyves, the semblance of the most perfect indifference; and the seriousness of useful retrospection was lost in the levity of frivolous amusement. Apart from the other prisoners was seated a recluse, whose appearance ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... in art, was seen in Lemercier's Pinto (1799), where great events are reduced to petty dimensions, and the destiny of nations is satirically viewed as a vulgar game of trick-track. In his Christophe Colomb of 1809 he dared to despise the unities of time and place, and excited a battle, not bloodless, among the spectators. Exotic heroes suited the imperial regime. ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... altar. Our host entertaineth us with no loves of Strephon and Phillis, nor leads beneath shady arcades to a vine-clad cottage, wherein is love and rich cream and homemade butter. The three sisters, the dread Moirae, in their darksome cavern, spinning the golden thread of destiny, reel from their distaff no bright soft film of wedded happiness. The polished metal, many times refined, would never show half its qualities were it not subject to unwonted tests. We suffer according to our powers of endurance, and are tried according to our gifts. Else why ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... and before the night was over, there was another doctor in consultation. There were also two nurses. And to both doctors, both nurses and Mirabelle, Mr. Starkweather, who knew his destiny, whispered the same message at intervals of fifteen minutes. "Don't have Henry come back—don't have Henry come back—no sense his comin' back 'till August. Tell him I said so. Tell him I want him to stay ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... felt that he had the power to do with it as he pleased. He could rend it like a card, and he could help to set it on a firm footing in its peasant framework. He reveled in feeling himself master of another man, and thought that never would this peasant-lad drink of such a cup as destiny had given him, Chelkash, to drink. And he envied this young life and pitied it, sneered at it, and was even troubled over it, picturing to himself how it might again fall into such ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... events make a treaty for as long a term as possible, and put off our private differences to another day. In fine, let us recognize that the adoption of my advice will leave us each citizens of a free state, and as such arbiters of our own destiny, able to return good or bad offices with equal effect; while its rejection will make us dependent on others, and thus not only impotent to repel an insult, but on the most favourable supposition, friends to our direst enemies, and at feud ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... of the palm of my hand comparatively—the round of a copper penny, no wider! And from that you jumped at a bound to the round of this earth: you were for humanity. Ay, we sailed our planet among the icy spheres, and were at blood-heat for its destiny, you and I! And now you hover for a wind to catch you. So it is for a soul rejecting prayer. This wind and that has it: the well-springs within are shut down fast! I pardon my Jenny, my Harry Denham's girl. She is a woman, and has a brain like a bell that ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... he proposed to go to Strasbourg or Basil, in company with his sole surviving brother, Antony Calvin; but as the roads were not safe on account of the war, except through the duke of Savoy's territories, he chose that road. "This was a particular direction of Providence," says Bayle; "it was his destiny that he should settle at Geneva, and when he was wholly intent upon going farther, he found himself detained by an order from heaven, if I may so speak." At Geneva, Calvin therefore was obliged to comply with the choice which the consistory and magistrates made of him, with ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... of his own nature. For the mystic teaching of the Church was substituted culture in the classical humanities; a new ideal was established, whereby man strove to make himself the monarch of the globe on which it is his privilege as well as destiny to live. The Renaissance was the liberation of humanity from a dungeon, the double discovery of the outer and the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the wounded man lay silent thinking out his programme. Not for a moment did he doubt that he was going to live, and his brain was already busy planning for the future. By some freak of luck the cards had been stacked by destiny in his favor. He knew now that in the violence of his anger against Elliot he had made a mistake. To have killed his rival would have been fatal to the Kamatlah coal claims, would have alienated his best ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... demands, haunted him to despair. And, yet, to sink under them-to leave all behind him and be an outcast, homeless and friendless upon the world, where he could only look back upon the familiar scenes of his boyhood with regret, would be to carry a greater amount of anguish to his destiny. The destroyer was upon him; his grasp was firm and painful. He might live a life of rectitude; but his principles and affections would be unfixed. It would be like an infectious robe encircling him,—a disease which he never could eradicate, so that he might feel he was not an empty vessel among ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... were dangerous to both. Alone you must learn your destiny, as have all the females of our race, excepting your grandmother, and what have been the consequences of her neglecting the rules of our house? Lo! her descendant stands before me an orphan in the very ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... peoples alike took their rise could have made it possible. We do not say that the Transvaal Republic has among its guides and rulers a Solon or a Lycurgus, but it has to-day, among the men guiding its destiny, men of brave and earnest spirit, who are seeking manfully and profoundly to deal with the great problems before them in a wide spirit of humanity and justice. And we do again repeat that the strong sympathy of all earnest and thoughtful minds, not only in Africa, but ...
— A Century of Wrong • F. W. Reitz
... development, and, like an unrestrained youth, was bent on overthrowing every obstacle, on the instant, that opposed its advance and expansion. A war horse could not have been more impatient to rush on to his destiny. ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... some regard this notion of necessity with terror, while others do not fear it at all? Has not Carlyle somewhere said that a belief in destiny is the bias of all earnest minds? 'It is not Nature,' says Fichte, 'it is Freedom itself, by which the greatest and most terrible disorders incident to our race are produced. Man is the cruellest enemy ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... an adoring husband had been promised her, and with the exception of a few shadowed years, not a cloud larger than the hand of a man was to cross the sky of her destiny. ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan
... neighbour on the other side and Major Thomson was able to resume the role of attentive observer, a role which seemed somehow his by destiny. He listened without apparent interest to the conversation between Geraldine Conyers and the young man whom ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the many-sided evils of polygamy was thus presented by President Cleveland in his first annual message:— "The strength, the perpetuity, and the destiny of the nation rests upon our homes, established by the law of God, guarded by parental care, regulated by parental authority, and sanctified by parental love. These are not ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... written (in the book of Destiny). Fatalism and predestination are essential tenets ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... congeniality of sentiment between us, that he had always shown a partiality for my society. We had battled out many a long watch together, beguiling the weary hours with chat, song, and story, mingled with a good many imprecations upon the hard destiny it seemed our common fortune ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... passed since the death of Mr. Hawkins. Eight years are not many in the life of a nation or the history of a state, but they maybe years of destiny that shall fix the current of the century following. Such years were those that followed the little scrimmage on Lexington Common. Such years were those that followed the double-shotted demand for the surrender of Fort Sumter. ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... position of supremacy in Asia, and established by means of them a kingdom which, at his death, stretched from the Volga to the Pacific, and from Siberia to the Persian Gulf; he regarded himself as commissioned by Heaven to conquer the world, a destiny which he almost ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... mean and scandalous occupations, nor are they anywhere a majority of such, but considering their general numbers, they contribute perhaps more than their proportion to the aggregate of the vile. In this they obey the law which regulates the destiny of all persecuted races: the infamous is the business of the dishonoured; and as infamous pursuits are generally illegal pursuits, the persecuted race which has most ability will be most successful in combating the law. The Jews have never been so ...
— Lord George Bentinck - A Political Biography • Benjamin Disraeli
... the contrary, we must make it a national principle that we will not tolerate a large army of unemployed and that we will arrange our national economy to end our present unemployment as soon as we can and then to take wise measures against its return. I do not want to think that it is the destiny of any American to ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt
... time for sleep: I think no speech There needs to pass between us what we mean, For we soul-venturing mingle each with each. So, mother, pass across the world unseen And share in me some wished-for dream in you; For so brings destiny her pledges true, The mother withered, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... prisoners. While for the women—if they be young and beautiful, the princes of the land have places in their bed and bower; nor are they employed like the captives of Agamemnon's host, to draw water from an Argive spring, but are admired and adored by those whom fate has made the lords of their destiny." ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... the Lusiad, an epic poem by Camoens (1569), is the personification of the evil principle which acts in opposition to Jupiter, the lord of Destiny. Mars is made by the poet the guardian power of Christianity, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... of a century has elapsed since this settlement of a problem which involved the destiny of two races, and of our whole country. The question now before the Nation and before the churches is a corollary of slavery. It is the second section of the first chapter. The first question was: How shall liberty be proclaimed to the captive and the enslaved become free? ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889 • Various
... longing desire for the long-suspended intercourse with Walter, and a sense of his displeasure, formed no slight portion of her miserable feelings. The arrangements for her marriage she looked on as part of her destiny,—at any rate, they occupied her mind; and there would be an end, after that, of these dreadful ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... marriage. His aunt, Mrs. Whiteside, who had taken her to Europe for the benefit of the tour, gave, on her return, so lamentable an account of Mr. Adolphus Young, to whom the headstrong girl had united her destiny, that it operated as a chill upon family feeling—especially in the case of the half-brothers. Catherine had done nothing subsequently to propitiate her family; she had not even written to them in a way that indicated a lucid appreciation of their suspended sympathy; so that it had become ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... in it I have seen hope for you, when I could see none for others; but now also I rejoice greatly to see that you unite the courage of men to the docility of babes. Hitherto your lot has been that of peace, and if you have not enjoyed riches, you have at any rate been contented: another destiny is before you now—peace and content have left the country, and have been followed by robbery, confusion, and war. My children, you must, for a while, give over your accustomed peaceful duties; your hands—your hearts—all your ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... what the miserable youth upstairs had not counted on. Chance had ruined him; destiny had sent Madam Death into the room below him to draw, with her macabre charms, every ardent winged messenger which he liberated from ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... confirmation or lapse, it is yet to be decided, whether the revolution must ultimately be considered a blessing or a curse:—a blessing or a curse not to the present age alone, for with our fate will the destiny of ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... again; two idle lads, in short (as we need not fear to acknowledge now), doing a hundred things that the Faculty never heard of, or else it would have been the worse for us—still, it was your prognostic of your friend's destiny that he was to be a writer ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... was pinned under him. With admirable tenacity of life the pilot-wheel steer staggered back and made several efforts to gore the dying horse and helpless rider, but with a dozen shots through his vitals, he sank down and expired. A destiny, over which he had no seeming control, willed that he should yield to the grim reaper nearly three thousand miles from his birthplace on the ...
— Cattle Brands - A Collection of Western Camp-fire Stories • Andy Adams
... white hat left behind to mark the spot where the secret sharer of my cabin and of my thoughts, as though he were my second self, had lowered himself into the water to take his punishment: a free man, a proud swimmer striking out for a new destiny. ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... feeling some pride at having risen, 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 hope for a still higher destiny in the ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... at luncheon once more won Deering to a cheerier view of his destiny. Hood called for the proprietor and lectured him roundly for offering canned-blueberry pie. The fact that blueberries were out of season made no difference to the outraged Hood; pie produced from a can was a gross imposition. ...
— The Madness of May • Meredith Nicholson
... Yet it was what she had feared, even when she had dared to hope for forgiveness. Now she knew what her life after death was to be since the word had been spoken by those inspired lips. O dreadful destiny! To dwell alone, to tread alone that desert desolate, that illimitable waste of burning sand stretching from star to star through infinite space, where was no rock nor tree to give her shade, no fountain ...
— Dead Man's Plack and an Old Thorn • William Henry Hudson
... five fates," or "the five works," or "the five fields" (because by the use of his fingers man works out his own destiny. Hence also the worship of the Hand among the Nahuas as the god Maitl, and among the Mayas as the god Kab, both which words ...
— Nagualism - A Study in Native American Folk-lore and History • Daniel G. Brinton
... of a day, We move like insects on thy soil, And wear our little lives away In fleeting pleasures or in toil; But naught our destiny ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... word on the subject. You will look about you for something like hope, you will shake the doors of churches to see if they still swing, but you will find them walled up; you will think of becoming Trappists, and destiny will mock at you and for reply give you a bottle of wine and ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... prayed for himself unto the gods around him for a child. They decreed that one should be born to him. And his wife, after her time was fulfilled, brought forth a son. Then came the Hathors to decree for him a destiny; they said, "His death is to be by the crocodile, or by the serpent, or by the dog." Then the people who stood by heard this, and they went to tell it to his Majesty. Then his Majesty's heart sickened very greatly. And his Majesty caused a house to be built upon the desert; it was ...
— Egyptian Literature
... own patron. We have all learned that greatness is negligent and contemptuous, and that in Courts life is often languished away in ungratified expectation; but he that approaches greatness, or glitters in a Court, imagines that destiny has at last exempted him ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... utterly; only a victorious warrior could overcome its powerful scruples, which in the aggregate prevented the hearty adhesion of French Roman Catholics to the republican system. Of necessity their conceptions of Italian destiny must yield to his, which were widely ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... interview with the Abbess of her Order, and it would have considerably lengthened the journey, which both Musgrave and Lorimer were anxious to make as short as possible. They preferred likewise to keep to the country, that was still chiefly open and wild, with all its destiny in manufactories yet to come, though there were occasionally such towns, villages and convents on the way where provisions and ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... into touch with them under exceptional circumstances. That is your case and Eleanor's. At present you are upon different spheres, but in the future, no doubt, you will find yourselves side by side again, as you have often been, in due course to be driven apart once more by the winds of Destiny, and perhaps, after ages, finally to be united. Meanwhile she plays the part of one of your ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... had to deliver. He had audiences on Kennington Common amounting to ten, twenty and thirty thousand people, great numbers of whom were savingly impressed by his message. He melted their hearts, and sent them away, reflecting on the great problems of man's history, and on the dignity and destiny of the human mind. Take the following from his published diary, which is now scarce, and ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 234, April 22, 1854 • Various
... a complicated civil and servile war." He traced its consequences, present and future, in the proposition to give away the public lands, thereby withdrawing all aid from this source to objects of internal improvement; and in the destiny to which it consigns our manufacturing interests, and those of the handicraftsmen and the mechanics of our populous cities and flourishing towns, for the benefit of these ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... serenity. She had built her house upon the rock, and knew that it would stand. Her destiny was in her Heavenly Father's hands, and she was content to leave it there. Even death had no terrors to the simple, unquestioning faith of the little child who had put her ...
— Elsie Dinsmore • Martha Finley
... not tarry! Let the Boa sleep, And Rabbits, that have given bills to destiny, Meet his demand at three and six months' date! (We know such Boas and rabbits, Know we not?) Let me pass on! And here 'tis cool; nay, even cold Without ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... cause you came thus far, and why you have risked so much and waited so long. You have proved my friend indeed. You have accomplished your object, and your noble perseverance shall not go unrewarded. If you undertake other things with the same spirit, you will always succeed. My destiny compels me to remain where I am, although I should feel happy to be allowed to go with you. I have given you, of ordinary gifts, all you will need as long as you live; but I see you are backward to speak of the Red Swan. I vowed that whoever procured me my lost wampum-scalp should ...
— The Indian Fairy Book - From the Original Legends • Cornelius Mathews
... and, as she went into the street, a train of cars rushed into the hall to be loaded, and men swarmed out of every corner,—red-faced and pale, whiskey-bloated and heavy-brained, Irish, Dutch, black, with souls half asleep somewhere, and the destiny of a nation in their grasp,—hands, like herself, going through the slow, heavy work, for, as Pike the manager would have told you, "three dollars a week,—good wages these tight times." For nothing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... Henri III. For a time he had turned his eyes toward England, then governed by a woman, and to possess this throne he was ready to have married this woman, although she was Elizabeth, and was twenty years older than himself. In this plan destiny was beginning to smile on him, and he saw himself in the favor of a great queen, until then inaccessible to all human affections. Besides this, a crown was offered ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... Who then, yet liuing, deemd she had been dying, And yet in death some hope of life espying, At her owne rare perfections so amazed; Twixt ioy and griefe, yet with a smyling frowning, The glorious sun-beames of her eyes bright shining, And shee, in her owne destiny diuining, Threw in herselfe, to saue herselfe by drowning; The Well of Nectar, pau'd with pearle and gold, Where shee remaines for all eyes ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... a great deal of esprit, to whom forty years' experience of the great world had given a prodigious perspicacity of judgment, the Duchess of Chalux, arbitress of the opinion to be held on all new comers to the Faubourg Saint Germain, and of their destiny and reception in it;—one of those women, in a word, who make or ruin a man,—said, in speaking of Gerard de Stolberg, whom she received at her own house, and met everywhere, 'This young German will never ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... savant dies. What is lost? Not a single fact or a single truth, but only his apprehension, his collection of certain truths; not a single law of nature perishes or is altered thereby. We measure worth by prominence and fame; but the destiny of the simplest and vilest of the human race is as august, as momentous as the destiny of the mightiest king or conqueror; it is not our admiration of each other that weighs with God, but our nearness to, our dependence on Him. Yet, even so, ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Myers, Willis, Poe, Sedgwick, &c.—must yield the palm to him who has attracted all the peoples and tongues of Europe[Footnote: And, in one instance at least, of Asia also; for The Spy was translated into Persian!] to follow out the destiny of a Spy on the neutral ground, of a Pilot on the perilous coasts of a hostile race, of a Last of the Mohicans disappearing before the onward ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal Vol. XVII. No. 418. New Series. - January 3, 1852. • William and Robert Chambers
... very arrogantly on that evening, having resumed the airs and would-be dignity which he thought belonged to him as a man of rank and property. In his periods of low spirits, he was abject and humble enough; abject, and fearful of the lamentable destiny which at these moments he believed to be in store for him. But it was one of the peculiar symptoms of his state, that as he partially recovered his bodily health, the tone of his mind recovered itself also, and his fears for the time ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... happened, at about the same time Destiny had arranged that another character in this history was returning to that quiet Essex village, ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... deadly eye which glittered beneath the snowy cap; noiselessly swung the ashen oar, and as unerringly set as Destiny, and remorseless as Death, the knife-like bow slid through the black waters. One hundred, ninety, eighty, seventy, fifty, forty yards only, divide the doomed birds from the boat, and the white gunwale ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... saved, because one politician will lose two thousand a year by it, and another three thousand—a third a place in reversion, and a fourth a pension for his aunt! Alas! these are the powerful causes which have always settled the destiny of great kingdoms, and which may level Old England, with all its boasted freedom, and boasted wisdom, to the dust. Nor is it the least singular, among the political phenomena of the present day, that the sole consideration which seems to influence the ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... 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 ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... kept in readiness for any emergency, carrying off also his wife, who followed him, and was nearly taken prisoner, had he not protected her under a shower of arrows. She was a lady of high family and great wealth, whose modesty and the glorious destiny reserved for her subsequently saved ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... majority of the others, and was eventually compelled to write to a friend at Warm Springs, in the adjoining State of Missouri, to send me an editor from abroad whose instalment at the helm of manifest destiny could have ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... of these. It must be the story of many men and many women, each one working out his salvation in his own way and all the threads woven into the divine design, carrying along in its small place on the loom the inscrutable pattern of human destiny. But most of all it should be the story which shall explain the America that rose when her great day came—exultant, triumphant to the glorious call of an ideal, arose from sordid things environing her body and soul, and consecrated herself without stint or faltering ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... sway'st the world; thou whose eternal bands Sustain the order of material things, Come, gentle Concord! (11) these our times do now For good or evil destiny control The coming centuries! Ah, cruel fate! Now have the people lost their cloak for crime: Their hope of pardon. They have known their kin. Woe for the respite given by the gods Making more black the hideous ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... for this inordinate ambition to "get on"? Louis Stevenson was happier, as a small boy with a bull's-eye lantern at his belt, than any king upon his throne. The secret of enjoyment is to learn to look about us, to value what our destiny has given us, to transform it into magic by some contributory gift of poetry or humor, to consider with contentment the lilies of the field. The zest of life is in the living of it; and "to travel hopefully is a better ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... joy. This people, who for thirty years had passed through so many different emotions, and who had celebrated so many victories, showed as much enthusiasm as if it had been their first fete, or a happy change in their destiny. Verses were sung or recited at all the theaters; and there was no poetic formula, from the ode to the fable, which was not made use of to celebrate the event of the 20th of March, 1811. I learned from a well-informed person that the sum of one hundred thousand francs ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... no stouter cavalier than he; but when thou bringest him to us, we will carry him to King Afridoun." Then she went out with Zoulmekan and Dendan and walked on before them, saying, "Fare on with the blessing of the Most High God!" They did as she bade them, for the arrow of fate and destiny had fallen on them, and she led them on, through the midst of the Christian camp, till they came to the narrow pass aforesaid. Whilst the enemy watched them, but did them no hindrance; for the old woman ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume II • Anonymous
... name can sit on the brink of a great canyon or gaze up from the dark depths of a gorge without a sense of awe and wonder. There, as in few other places, Nature shows with unmistakable grandeur the marvelous power and certainty with which her laws work out the destiny ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington
... for the boy;—but Louey had hardly smiled since he had been taken from his mother. And now that he was told that he was to go and never see his father again, the tidings were to him simply tidings of joy. "There is a curse upon me," said Trevelyan; "it is written down in the book of my destiny that nothing ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... in outer nature for the purpose of making themselves actively known to mankind. Hence we find in the records of all ancient peoples a unanimous recognition of lightning and thunder on the one hand, and volcanic phenomena on the other, as means to which the Deity resorts for intervening in human destiny. A well-known example is the account in the Bible of the meeting of Moses with God on Mount Sinai. As occurrence in the early history of the Hebrews it gives evidence that even in historical times the fire element of the earth ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... those depressed-looking young women who have just gone by?" asked the Baroness; "they have the air of people who have bowed to destiny and are not quite sure whether the salute ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... 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 people who outnumbered them, as the ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... States and our government on the part of the people of Canada which would prevent any harmonious working. When they come, let them come by their own consent, let them come as brothers, and let us be all brothers with one flag, under one destiny. The question then is, Shall we simply be content to give the Canadians all the privileges of our markets? For the true policy is, that in getting those privileges they should be placed on equal footing with our own citizens in relation ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... newcomers from the world complain that they had not known that their destiny would be according to the affections of their love. To these, they said, they had given no thought in the world, much less to the enjoyments of the affections, for they loved what they found enjoyable. ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... the acquaintance between herself and Lucian Davlin had begun. Here six long, bright weeks of the Springtime had passed, each day finding them lingering longer among the leafy shadows, and drawing closer about them both the cords of a destiny sad for one, fatal ...
— Madeline Payne, the Detective's Daughter • Lawrence L. Lynch
... propagation of the Gospel, in the popular sense; nothing to do with converting heathens or others to Christianity. It has to do with that awful government of the world, of which the Bible preaches from beginning to end; that moral and providential kingdom of God, which rules over the destiny of every kingdom, every nation, every tribe, every family, nay, over the destiny of each human being; ay, of each horde of Tartars on the furthest Siberian steppe, and each group of savages in the furthest island of the Pacific; rendering to each man ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... to reckon with them, as they reckoned with her, to be a factor in the problem which the ages had to work out—What should be the general march of events, and what states and nations should most affect the destiny ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... her, he led Beulah to his horse. Here he made her sit down while he gave her water and food. Bit by bit she told him the story of her experience. He suffered poignantly with her, but he could not be grateful enough that the finger-tip of destiny had pointed him to her prison. He thanked his rather vague gods that it had been his footsteps rather than those of another man that had wandered here to ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... youth of the high destiny that awaited him, there was one unfailing characteristic of the imaginative order of minds—his love of solitude—which very early gave signs of those habits of self-study and introspection by which alone the "diamond quarries" of genius are worked and brought to light. When but a boy, at Harrow, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... cruel yet, haunts some men's souls; Both, ministers of justice conscience sends To do its fearful bidding in those breasts Which have rebelled and disavowed its rule. Perchance, a maiden happy as a queen To-night doth fix her destiny. A happy throng Gather around, and envy her her bliss. They little know what magic power lies low In the filled wine-cup as they pass it round; They little think it plants a venomed dart In the glad soul of her whose lips do press ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams |
