"Fatalism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... player has 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 year to year these change, these pass. Only ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... 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 either to Father or to herself ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... cold, and we huddled ourselves up on the beach. Some of us were indifferent in our fatalism to the shells of Asiatic Annie; if our time had come—well, Kismet. Others, like myself, waited fascinated. I know I had almost hungered for that meaning flash in Asia, the terrible delight of suspense, ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... had incredibly 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 ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... said, in the most daring and cynical of his poems. The old associations, the antiquarian charm, that lingered round this faded ancestral belief, appealed strongly to the romantic patriotism of the historian. His own religion was a sort of mild fatalism; he pauses now and then to draw rather commonplace reflections on the blindness of men destined to misfortune, or the helplessness of human wisdom and foresight against destiny. But at the same time he gravely chronicles miracles and portents, not so much from any belief in their ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... 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
... supplemented by other influences, to check the growth of the qualities of initiative and self-reliance, especially amongst a people whose lack of education unfits them for resisting the influence of what may present itself to such minds as a kind of fatalism with resignation as its ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... the whole order of 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 ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... on shore. His wife and friends distrusted the tone of the reception, and begged him to wait till he could land with his own guard. The presence of Septimius gave Pompey confidence. Weak men, when in difficulties, fall into a kind of despairing fatalism, as if tired of contending longer with adverse fortune. Pompey stepped into the boat, and when out of arrow-shot from the ship was murdered under his wife's eyes. His head was cut off and carried away. His body was left lying ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... singular illustration of fatalism, such certainly as we might expect in a Stoic, but carried even to a Turkish excess; and not theoretically professed only, but practically acted upon in a case of capital hazard. That no prince ever killed his own successor, ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... its grinding doctrine of fate, rather it fastened this incubus of social progress more firmly upon it. Philosophic and popular Buddhism alike thus threw athwart the course of human and social evolution the tremendous obstacle of fatalism, which the Orient has never discovered a way either to surmount or evade. Buddhism teaches the impotence of the individual will; it destroys the sense of moral responsibility; it thus fails to understand the real nature of man, his glory and power and ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... ground without your Father,' their attitude towards religion might have resembled Tony's—a mixture of trust and insouciance, neither of them driven to any logical conclusion and both tempered by fatalism. "When yu got to die, yu got tu," says Tony, and it makes little difference to him whether the event has been decreed since the beginning of time, or whether it is to be decreed at some future date by a being so remote as God. The thing is, to ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... deceived. Perhaps you're deceived. Perhaps the whole of life is a humbug." So Ned said, with careless fatalism. "Only, if your mates were in trouble you'd be a cur if you didn't stand by them, wouldn't you? That's the difference between you and me, Mr. Strong. You don't believe that we're all mates or that the crowd has ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... not a nuisance, he was not exacting, he did not demand unreasonable things, or refuse to submit to unreasonable things, when these were demanded of him. In fact, he seemed to accept his pain as God-given, and with a fatalism which in some ways was rather admirable. He could not help smelling like that, for he was full of rubber drains and of gauze drains, and if the doctor was too busy to dress his wounds that day, and so put him off till the next, it was not his fault for smelling so vilely. He did not raise ...
— The Backwash of War - The Human Wreckage of the Battlefield as Witnessed by an - American Hospital Nurse • Ellen N. La Motte
... many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views." But if you examine the context of Madison's paper, you discover something which I think throws light upon that view of instinctive fatalism, called sometimes the economic interpretation of history. Madison was arguing for the federal constitution, and "among the numerous advantages of the union" he set forth "its tendency to break and control the violence of faction." Faction was what worried Madison. And the causes ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... guards threw down their shields with a sudden clatter and seized the prisoners, four to each. The crowd shivered with delicious anticipation. The doomed men neither struggled nor cried, for fatalism is an anodyne as well as an explosive. King set his teeth. Yasmini, with both hands behind her head, continued to smile down on them all as sweetly as the stars shine ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... overruled, in the early part of the century, people generally gave in. The stronger tide was called Providence. Perhaps there was a small degree of fatalism in it. So Mrs. Leverett acquiesced, and recalled the fact that she had promised ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... antecedents and consequents. Mind becomes only a higher form of matter. Sin loses its poignancy. Immortality disappears. God exists not, except as a personification of the Cosmos. Materialism, atheism, fatalism, are the ultimate results which are proved by logic and history(99) to follow from this extreme view. The idea of spirit cannot be reached by it. For if some other form of experience than the sensitive be regarded as the origin of knowledge; if a ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... quietly, almost on a note of fatalism. "It is beyond the bounds of possibility that I should change. I loved you then, I love you now. I shall go on loving you as long as I live. I never thought it possible that you could care for me—until ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... considered as fixed banks and breakwaters; and the new ideas are so mutable, so fickle, that those which were considered novel ten years ago are deemed obsolete to-day, and the new ones of to-day will in their turn be obsolete to-morrow. And, in a sort of fatalism, you see statesmen yielding way to these successive mockeries of experiment,—for they are experiments against experience,—and saying to each other with a shrug of the shoulders, 'Bismillah! it must be so; the country will have ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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 Osman has ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... believe, every living being has a special work to do—or, rather, has a variety of appropriate paths in any one of which he may walk with more or less advantage to himself and his fellow-men—it behoves every young man to find out what path is the best one for him, and to walk in it vigorously. Fatalism is folly. No one believes in it. At least no one in this country acts upon it. When I say that every being has a special work to do, I don't mean that it has been decreed exactly what each man has ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... while other thinkers regarded Spinozism as the only rational system, indeed as the last word of all speculative metaphysics; for them logical thought necessarily led to pantheism and determinism. In France, after reaching its climax in Voltaire, it ended in materialism, atheism, and fatalism; and in England, where it had developed the empiricism of Locke, it came to grief in the scepticism of Hume. If we can know only our impressions, then rational theology, cosmology, and psychology are impossible, and it is futile to philosophize about God, ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... evidently more excited than he liked to own. He is eminently a man who loves danger, and his nature never warms so genially as when something desperate is to be done. A Christian by race and belief, he has absorbed much of the fatalism of the Oriental races, and his courage is of the fatalist kind, ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... conclusiveness, with fatalism. "It is no good trying. Either you are noble or simple,—God makes you so,—you cannot help it. If I were noble, I should be a contessina. If you were noble, you would ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... the 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 Christ drew His teaching. ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... rather straining. The first climax, however, is reached, and our Scribe thinks it too sad for words. He himself sheds a few rheums with the fair-looking, fair-spoken Dame, and dedicates to her a few rhymes. Her magnanimity, he tells us, is unexampled, and her fatalism pathetic. For when Khalid severs himself from the Spiritual Household, she kisses him thrice, saying, "Go, Child; Allah brought you to me, and Allah will bring you again." Khalid refers, as usual, to the infinite wisdom of the Almighty, and, taking his handkerchief from his pocket, wipes ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... late years; for Henry Clairville he entertained a certain sad respect, as for a gentleman and landed proprietor fallen from grace indeed, but by the Will of God rather than by personal shortcomings. His tendency to fatalism was Calvinistic in its intensity, and he trod his accustomed path baptizing, marrying, burying, with the sour curve of his thin profile growing sourer every day. Thus this silent, censorious-looking priest presented a strong ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... 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 1900. ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... charge against the main deductions of the materialist that, right or wrong, they gradually destroy his humanity; I do not mean only kindness, I mean hope, courage, poetry, initiative, all that is human. For instance, when materialism leads men to complete fatalism (as it generally does), it is quite idle to pretend that it is in any sense a liberating force. It is absurd to say that you are especially advancing freedom when you only use free thought to destroy free will. The determinists come to bind, not to loose. They may well call their law the "chain" ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... post-horse. "Ne bos', Bog pomozhet" ("Do not fear. God will help"), replies coolly your phlegmatic Jehu. You may have your doubts as to whether in this irreligious age Providence will intervene specially for your benefit; but your yamstchik, who has more faith or fatalism, leaves you little time to solve the problem. Making hurriedly the sign of the cross, he gathers up his reins, waves his little whip in the air, and, shouting lustily, urges on his team. The operation is not wanting in excitement. First there ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... or re-made. The world harshly preaches the indelibility of character, and proclaims that the Ethiopian may as soon be expected to change his skin or the leopard his spots as the man accustomed to do evil may learn to do well. That dreary fatalism which binds the effects of a dead past on a man's shoulders, and forbids him to hope that anything will obliterate the marks of 'what once hath been,' is in violent contradiction to the large hope brought ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... 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 nothing more than ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... this, had she heard it, Edith, too religious to acknowledge any thing tending towards fatalism, would not for a moment have agreed; yet it embodied a truth destined to cause her deepest sorrow, and which was gradually forcing itself upon her. Already, although they had been married so few weeks, even her love-blinded eyes could not but perceive much in her husband which shocked ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... of 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 the stars in their courses will ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... the 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 ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis
... was 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
... believe that you cannot alter yourself. What is the matter with you is just what is the matter with me—sheer idleness. You hate getting up in the morning, and to excuse your inexcusable indolence you talk big about Fate. Just as 'patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,' so fatalism is the last refuge of a shirker. But you deceive no one, least of all yourself. You have not, rationally, a leg to stand on. At this juncture, because I have made you laugh, you consent to say: 'I do try, all I can. But I can only alter myself a very little. By constitution I am mentally ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... perhaps, the presence of something of the same quality that led him to give the preference, among the numerous histories of the French Revolution, to Mignet, though, in putting him into my hands, he cautioned me against that dangerous spirit of fatalism, which, making man the unconscious instrument of an irresistible necessity, leaves him no real responsibility ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... moved by unwonted freedom, how much the usually reserved women revealed of themselves, their lives, their trials and desires! But whatever the story, the dominant note was acceptance of what was, without protest. It may be fatalism, Mate, but it is indisputable that looking finality in the face had brought to all of them a quietness of spirit that no longing for wider fields or personal ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... he at least must have known, and my perfect if rueful sense of having myself had no such quarrel with our conditions: embalmed for me did they even to that shorter retrospect appear in a sort of fatalism of patience, spiritless in a manner, no doubt, yet with an inwardly active, productive and ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... still oftener a woman—would approach him, and the whole figure would wake to life—a gentle, whimsical, melancholy life, yet possessed of a strange spell and pungency. Brooding, sad and deep, seemed to me to hold his inmost mind. The fatalism and dream of those Oriental religions to which he had given so much of his scholar's mind had touched him profoundly. His poems express it in mystical and somber verse, and his volumes of Asiatic Studies ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... in the illusions of your race,—mystery—fatalism. They become you well. But here among the roses of Konopisht there is no room in my heart or yours for anything but happiness. See how they nod to each other in the sunlight, Marishka. Like us, they love and are loved. June comes to Bohemia but once a year—or to us. Let us bloom ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... allegory in which men are likened to birds snared and caged until set free by the Angel of Death might be met with anywhere in the immortal Dialogues. The tractate on Love is a commentary on the Symposium; and the essay on Destiny is Greek in spirit without a trace of Oriental fatalism, as you may judge from the concluding sentence, which I leave you as his special message: "Take heed to the limits of your capacity and you will arrive at a knowledge of the truth! How true is the saying:—Work ever and to each will come ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... of Madame Vauchelet's disappointment by promising herself to call to-morrow. She sat watching the boats and the water and the gay banks of the river with a sense of relief, and a curious sort of fatalism, partly suggested perhaps, by the persistent movement of the boat, and the interminable succession of new scenes, all bubbling with human life, full of the traces of past events. One layer of consciousness was busily engaged in ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... counter of the shop. His intention was not to overwhelm his wife with bitter reproaches. Mr Verloc felt no bitterness. The unexpected march of events had converted him to the doctrine of fatalism. Nothing could be helped now. ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... the midnight glitter of the endless East India Dock Road. 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 that of Londoners, and the bitter nightmare spirit of the place ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... stops. Faith in the justice and love of the Father is the best and indeed the only support under the sufferings of this life. The foundation of all of our pains is unbelief; we doubt whether what happens to us ought to happen to us; we think ourselves wiser than providence, because to avoid fatalism we believe in accident. Liberty in submission—what a problem! And yet that is what we must always ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Mexican priests. The Egyptian and Syrian divinities had them; in short, oracles were quite as necessary as mysteries, and continue so in heathen religions. The only exception, I believe, is in Mohammedanism, whose votaries save themselves any trouble about the future by their thorough fatalism. They believe so fully and vividly that everything is immovably predestinated, being at the same time perfectly sure of heaven at last, that they quietly receive everything as it comes, and don't take the least trouble to find out how ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... happened, was it not his duty to endeavor to repair the damage? 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 ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... truth. The facts of nature and life are more apt to be complex than simple. Theories distinguished by their simplicity most commonly ignore or omit a part of the facts. Simplistic theories are generally one-sided and partial. Materialism, Atheism, Idealism, Fatalism, are all very simple theories, and explain all difficulties with a marvellous rapidity. This makes them, at first, attractive to the intellect, which always loves clear and distinct views; but afterwards, when ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... are not insensible to the degradation in which they are languishing. But accustomed, in suffering and privation, to find consolation in fatalism—which teaches implicit acquiescence in and obedience to the will of Allah—they drag out their days in passive submission. Seditions are almost always excited by unbelievers, who feel their wrongs more deeply. The devout Turkish peasant seeks no better fortune than the means wherewith ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... "Count Anteoni's 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.
... that state of mind when the pleasantness of a contemplated object excludes any inquiry whether it is true or false, good or evil; and, in spite of Paul's fatalism, she was satisfied that it was with Walter's own free will that he had done what he had done, and said what he had said. The changed inscription on the locket, and the delivery of that pledge to her, would complete the ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... of her bells, is pursued all his life by a longing which bears him no rest until the enchanted city rises before him once more—or draws him down below unto the depths. The unfortunate person who has once gazed upon the ghastly ruins of Fatalism, knows no peace, but like the legend of Vineta, it will drag him ...
— Bohemian Society • Lydia Leavitt
... 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 was their recognition of fate," which "seldom appears as a fixed law of nature...but rather as a ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... "No, not fatalism: insight into temperament. Fatalists believe that your life is arranged for you beforehand from without; willy-nilly, you MUST act so. I only believe that in this jostling world your life is mostly determined by your own character, in its interaction ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... Lady's pale face there sat the look of one resigned with fatalism to whatever issue might appear. She made no further speech, but was the first to step into the boat. Madame Delchasse, still grumbling, followed clumsily. Eddring helped them in, took up the oars, and the two deck-hands, who had been holding the skiff, clambered back ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... 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 younger men, they receive ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... do not identify this doctrine with pagan fatalism, but I hold that it is akin thereto, and that it tends to the same practical results. It is, in my opinion, worse than pagan fatalism. That doctrine represents all events and actions as strictly necessary, but it binds the gods as well as men. All bow to that mysterious power called ...
— The Calvinistic Doctrine of Predestination Examined and Refuted • Francis Hodgson
... Theodor had attacked him from the hut; perhaps from this very hut—quite possible that it was the same. He could make no use of the pistol, for he had left his powder-horn in the carriage; but it did him a service by strengthening him in his fatalism: a man who had escaped so many dangers must still have some work to do in the world. And indeed he required some encouragement, for after nightfall it began to be uncanny here in the desert. Not far away wolves were howling, and through the bushes Timar saw the shining green eyes: one and ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... dam may go any moment. The village will be overwhelmed. Nothing can save it! The 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
... free, he had no fear of the sort of death befitting a fighter—sudden and violent—but a deep repugnance for those two assassins against which a victim could not fight back—disease and poison. The Brazilian youth's nonchalant fatalism aroused him to the fact that here both those forms of death were very near him; the one in the air, the other on ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... reminded that the natives of Japat were fatalists. In contradiction to this belief, however, it is related that one night a wife took it upon herself to reverse the lever of destiny: she slew her husband. That, of course, was a phase of fatalism that was not to be tolerated. The populace burned her ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... 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 were, have its full ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... this, I think, and nothing more—that, as Saduko and the others were Mameena's tools, and as all of them and their passions were Zikali's tools, so he himself was the tool of some unseen Power that used him and us to accomplish its design. Which, I suppose, is fatalism, or, in other words, all these things happened because they must happen. A poor conclusion to reach after so much thought and striving, and not complimentary to man and his boasted powers of free will; still, one to which many of us are often driven, especially if we have lived among savages, where ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... spent in heaven, and they all live in a dream, whether it be of the next world or of a revolution. Effort is to them useless, submission to everybody and everything the only safe course; in a word, fatalism expresses ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... 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 is ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Then she sits half upon the table and cuts. A glance! a moment of sudden fear! she has cut death for herself! The blow has come to her in her most reckless moment. After an instant's pause she sings with a simple fatalism ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... equilibrium was established within him, but it was primarily based on indifference. Nothing really mattered. Effort was useless. Things merely happened. No one could help what happened. And in this fatalism, so utterly foreign to his ardent, supersensitive nature, he found a certain momentary sense ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... Lillian drew nearer. He felt with instinctive certainty that the supper-room was its destination, but he remained motionless, held by a species of fatalism. He watched her draw near with an unmoved face, but in the brief space that passed while she traversed the corridor he gauged to the full the hold that the new atmosphere, the new existence, had gained over his mind. With ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... developed enough to achieve either self-pity or self-analysis. He bears his pain, when it comes, as a dumb animal does, and forgets it as quickly when it goes. When the hour of death descends, he meets it stoically, partly because physical pain dulls his senses, partly because the instinct of fatalism is there in ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... Russian Jewess on one side of her family, Southwestern American on the other, was an event in Cowperwood's life. She was tall, graceful, brilliant, young, with much of the optimism of Rita Sohlberg, and yet endowed with a strange fatalism which, once he knew her better, touched and moved him. He met her on shipboard on the way to Goteborg. Her father, Isadore Platow, was a wealthy furrier of Chicago. He was a large, meaty, oily type of man—a kind of ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... was allied with a certain fatalism, hopelessness, and moral indolence in Hawthorne's nature. Hollingsworth, in "The Blithedale Romance," is his picture of the one-ideaed reformer, sacrificing all to his hobby. Hollingsworth's hobby is prison reform, and characteristically Hawthorne gives us no details of his plan. ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... be objected that this proposed method of analysis assumes that religions begin and develop under the operation of inflexible laws. The soul is shackled by no fatalism. Formative influences there are, deep seated, far reaching, escaped by few, but like those which of yore astrologers imputed to the stars, they potently incline, they do not coerce. Language, pursuits, ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... preliminary 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 were written the decrees of all events between the morning ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... real fault is that he is not consistently pantheistic. Pope was attacked both for his pantheism and fatalism and for having borrowed from Bolingbroke. It is curious enough that it was precisely these doctrines which he did not borrow. Bolingbroke, like most feeble reasoners, believed firmly in Free Will; and though ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... torturing himself with fears and regrets and fancies, until at last, in a calmer moment, he realized that he was working himself up into an absurd state of nerves over something which was done and could not now be helped. The man had an odd streak of fatalism in his nature—that will have come of his Southern blood—and it came to him now in his need. For the work upon which he was to enter with the morrow he had need of clear wits, not scattered ones; a calm judgment, not disordered nerves. So he took himself in hand, and it would have been amazing ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... watch, Rodin resolved not to open the letter, until the hand should mark half-past nine, of which it still wanted seven minutes. In one of those whims of puerile fatalism, from which great minds have not been exempt, Rodin said to himself: "I burn with impatience to open this letter. If I do not open it till half-past nine, the news will be favorable." To employ these minutes, Rodin took several turns up and down the room, and stood in admiring contemplation ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... them were dead. Though the stout Cockney, harbormaster, known as "Pinkie" because of his rosy complexion, was pallid with fear, the other European residents of Sandakan seemed utterly indifferent to the danger to which they were exposed. But life in a land like Borneo breeds fatalism. As an official remarked, with a shrug of his shoulders, "After you have spent a few years out here you don't much care how you die, or how soon. Plague is as convenient a way of going ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... this century, so fertile in religious sects and disputes, could escape the controversy concerning fatalism and free will, which, being strongly interwoven both with philosophy and theology had, in all ages, thrown every school and every church into such inextricable doubt and perplexity. The first reformers in England, as in ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... elemental truths about men and women, he believed, lost sight of in the kaleidoscopic attritions of the town, might there be clearly seen. The choice of locale was thus part of an attitude toward life. That attitude or view may be described fairly well as one of philosophic fatalism. ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... bold. The trembling had ceased. Now that he faced nemesis the strength of native fatalism came to his rescue, bolstering up the pride that every uncontaminated Nyamwezi owns. He was not more than seventeen years old, but he stood there at last like a ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... myself in meditating flight; they drily declared that after-wit serves no good purpose: whilst I considered the possibility of escape, they looked only at the prospect of being dragged back with pinioned arms by the Amir's guard. Such is generally the effect of the vulgar Moslems' blind fatalism. ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... ever-increasing measure, when pain is accepted and met in the way in which Christ accepted and met His pain, not in the spirit of useless and wild rebellion against the laws of the universe, nor in that of a blind, fatalistic, and unintelligent fatalism, which calls itself resignation. We may, hence, learn to look beyond and behind pain to that great law of perfection through suffering which takes effect, as it were, spontaneously in lower forms of life; but which, in the realm of the moral and the spiritual, demands the co-operation ...
— Gloria Crucis - addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907 • J. H. Beibitz
... carry in itself the 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 ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... admitted that the Kabyles, with a thousand faults, are far from the fatalism, the abuse of force and that merging of individualism which are found with the Islamite wherever he appears. Whence, then, have come these more humane tendencies, charitable customs and movements of compassion? There are respectable authorities who consider them, with emotion, as feeble gleams ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... some thoughts together; but these, when ripe for speech, were spoken in various languages. Those whose eyes twenty-five and more years before had seen "the glory of the coming of the Lord," saw in every present hindrance or help a dark fatalism bound to bring all things right in His own good time. The mass of those to whom slavery was a dim recollection of childhood found the world a puzzling thing: it asked little of them, and they answered with little, and yet it ridiculed their offering. Such a paradox ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... different as possible from the clear-headed tenacity of purpose that the experience of the next few months was to develop. It is hard to evoke, without seeming to exaggerate it, that the mood of early August: the assurance, the balance, the kind of smiling fatalism with which Paris moved to her task. It is not impossible that the beauty of the season and the silence of the city may have helped to produce this mood. War, the shrieking fury, had announced herself by a great wave of stillness. Never was desert hush more complete: the silence of a street ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... of 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, ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... obliteration of his home and even the ground upon which it stood. There would be nothing to record, no stain could come upon the living. The instinct that kept him true to HER would tell her how he died; if it did not, it was equally well. And with this simple fatalism his only belief, this strange man groped his way to his bed, lay down, and in a few moments was asleep. The storm still roared without. Once again the surges leaped against the cabin, but it was evident that the wind was ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... "Though this tragedy," says Bell, "must be allowed a very noble composition, it is highly reprehensible for exhibiting the chimeras of witchcraft, and still more so for advancing in several places the principles of fatalism. We would not wish to see young, unsettled minds to peruse this piece without proper companions ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... environment, so be it. But if, on the contrary, we are unable to believe that this "awful slough," which engulfs the manhood and womanhood of generation after generation is incapable of removal; and if the heart and intellect of mankind alike revolt against the fatalism of despair, then, indeed, it is time, and high time, that the question were faced in no mere dilettante spirit, but with a resolute determination to make an end of the crying ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... often heard now-a-days, "the world is an end-in-itself," leaves it uncertain whether Pantheism or a simple Fatalism is to be taken as the explanation of it. But, whichever it be, the expression looks upon the world from a physical point of view only, and leaves out of sight its moral significance, because you cannot assume a moral significance without presenting the world as means to ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... possible? Pathological and physiological theories of genius.—General characters of great inventors. Precocity: chronological order of the development of the creative power. Psychological reasons for this order. Why the creator commences by imitating.—Necessity or fatalism of vocation.—The representative character of great creators. Discussion as to the origin of this character—is it in the individual or in the environment?—Mechanism of creation. Two principal processes—complete, abridged. Their ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... who expects this book to contain a collection of patriotic prophecies will be disappointed. I am not a prophet in any sense of the word, and I entertain an active and intense dislike of the foregoing mixture of optimism, fatalism, and conservatism. To conceive the better American future as a consummation which will take care of itself,—as the necessary result of our customary conditions, institutions, and ideas,—persistence in such a conception is admirably ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... him some ancient touch of superstition, some sense of fatalism, which now made him rise to his feet and throw his sword upon ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... 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 ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... 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 of ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... of everything even when shells are falling within a dozen yards of them. They stay in the trenches five days and then get five days' rest. In talking to the men one feels the influence on them of a curious sort of fatalism—they have been lucky so far and will come through all right. One sees and feels everywhere the spirit of a great game. The strain of football a thousand times magnified. The joy of winning and boyish pleasure in getting ahead of the other ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... too far, very forceful and convincing. No matter whether the man succumbed to the dreariness of work or to the malarial fever of the Pontine swamps, all that has ever been said about Millet's man and the terrible fatalism of his facial expression is found in ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... up. Her fatalism—even in the women of the Sahara it lurks—was awake. In that moment she was ready to die, to silence the bitter laughter of her rivals. It sank away as Sadok grasped the scorpions in his filthy claw, and leaped, gibbering in his beard, upon ...
— Halima And The Scorpions - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... were asserted to have been delivered hundreds of years previously. They had a most pernicious effect upon the mind of the vulgar, as they induced a belief in fatalism. By taking away the hope of recovery—that greatest balm in every malady—they increased threefold the ravages of the disease. One singular prediction almost drove the unhappy people mad. An ancient couplet, preserved for ages by tradition, foretold, that in the year ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... another name for happiness—that contentment which accepts the fact that there is a chain of causes linked to effects by an invincible necessity; and that whatever is, could not have wisely been but so. And if this was fatalism, it was at least a brighter thing than the languid pessimism, which would have led her life among quicksands, to end it ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... the power of will, which annihilates the sickly, sentimental doctrine of fatalism,—you must, but can't, you ought, but it ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... exaggerations. There is a school of writers, of which Buckle is an admirable representative, who are so struck by the long chain of causes, extending over many centuries, that preceded and prepared Revolutions, that they teach a kind of historic fatalism, reducing almost to nothing the action of Individualities; and there is another school, which is specially represented by Carlyle, who reduce all history into biographies, into the action of a few great men ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... 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 ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... point out that the antithesis is not a practical one, as we have 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 by the men they hate and fear, as if this were the inevitable ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... is another picture of that youth which we see—youth reduced to ineffectiveness by fatalism and by the egoism of the lyric nature which longs to gain dramatic freedom, but cannot achieve it. It is one of a series of portraits, wonderfully traced psychological studies of the Russian dreamers and ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... 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
... a step toward the deeper shadows. He swallowed 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 and ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... couldn't go to church in her usual way, but stayed at home tortured by the most hopeless and tragic anticipations of evil. At lunch time he had not returned. It was with difficulty that she restrained herself from sending Hollis out over the hill with a search party, but the curious fatalism that had settled on her when once her decision was made, compelled her to patience. It was his own battle, she reflected, and if he had wanted her help he would have come to her. Evidently, he had decided to fight it out alone. She went to her own room and prayed desperately ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... curiously alike in their independence of thought and action, in their chivalrous devotion to honour and duty, in their absolute contempt for the world's opinion, in their love of adventure, in their indifference to danger, in their curious mysticism and fatalism, and in the neglect which each suffered from the Government until it was too late. They were both born leaders of men, and for that reason indifferent followers, incapable of running quietly in the official harness. Least of all could they have worked together, for they were too like ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... him to handle important philosophical questions with the well-balanced ability of the great Greek and Indian writers, but he has never been surpassed in adaptation to the spiritual wants of humble life, making even his fearful fatalism administer thereto. A pitiless destiny is awaiting us; yet the prophet is uncertain what it may be. "Unto every nation a fixed time is decreed. Death will overtake us even in lofty towers, but God only knoweth the place in which a man shall die," After many an admonition of the resurrection and the ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... an accurate measure of human moral and material advancement that we 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. Lyall, ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... against the freedom of man, that as a consequence unbelievable orgies and indecencies take place, and that all restraint is at an end. The despatch states, futhermore[11], that the aristocrats remaining in Russia have lost all will and energy. They accept degradation or death with complete fatalism and do not even try to save ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... here, 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 words or threats can cure. This terrible catastrophe made me wish to send all the remaining Hottentots back to Zanzibar; but as they all preferred serving with me to returning to duty at the Cape, ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... succession of discrowned tyrants and law-makers smitten by the cruel laws they had made. Sometimes, in its bold and not very delicate way, the Mirror for Magistrates is impressive still from its lofty moral tone, its gloomy fatalism, and its contempt for temporary renown. As we read its sombre pages we see the wheel of fortune revolving; the same motion which makes the tiara glitter one moment at the summit, plunges it at the next into the pit of pain ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... cause of Turkey's troubles is the ignorance and fanaticism of her people. These evils result largely from the utter absorption of all devout Moslems in their creed and ritual. Texts from the Koran guide their conduct; and all else is decided by fatalism, which is very often a mere excuse for doing nothing[86]. Consequently all movements for reform are mere ripples on the surface of Turkish life; they never touch its dull depths; and the Sultan and officials, ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... later, to cause even to the masses. It is only by criticism that metaphysicians (and, as such, theologians too) can be saved from these controversies and from the consequent perversion of their doctrines. Criticism alone can strike a blow at the root of materialism, fatalism, atheism, free-thinking, fanaticism, and superstition, which are universally injurious—as well as of idealism and scepticism, which are dangerous to the schools, but can scarcely pass over to the public. If governments think proper to interfere with the affairs of the learned, ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... system of fatalism. Independently of ourselves, and far beyond our control, we are reserved for good or for evil by the predestinating spirit that reigns over all things. Unhappy is the individual who enters himself in this school. He has no consolation, except the gratified wish to know distressing ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... 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; ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... 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 one ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... (mark the note of fatalism), "is as certain as the rising sun. Just as the bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century wanted democracy applied to politics, so the proletariat of the twentieth century wants democracy applied to industry. ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... 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 Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... it ever evoked any warmer dream or vision during those calm, cold, virgin-like spring nights, when even the moon and the greater planets retreated into the icy blue, steel-like firmament, I cannot say. Enough that this superstition began to be colored a little by fancy, and his fatalism somewhat mitigated by hope. Dreams of this kind did not tend to promote his efficiency in the communistic labors of the camp, and brought him a self-isolation that, however gratifying at first, soon debarred him the benefits of that hard practical wisdom which underlaid ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... sense of the term, he certainly is, but it is of the earlier type. Cyrenaic would be a juster epithet, the "carpe diem" doctrine of the poem is too gross and sensual to have commended itself to the real Epicurus. Intense fatalism, side by side with complete agnosticism, this is the keynote of the poem. Theoretically incompatible, these two "isms" ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the Austrian archduchess was woefully deficient. She was pious, and, as her letters declare, had spent much of the previous winter in praying that Providence would choose another consort for Napoleon. But with the resignation of her faith, which some call fatalism, and with the obedience which German life demands from all women, even those of the highest station, she had accepted her destiny. These qualities, combined with her capacity for motherhood, soon gained a courteous and ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... disregarded at that time. This work has been lost. The Vox Clamantis, or voice of one crying in the wilderness, is directly historical, being a chronicle, in Latin elegiacs, of the popular revolts of Wat Tyler in the time of Richard II., and a sermon on fatalism, which, while it calls for a reformation in the clergy, takes ground against Wiclif, his doctrines, and adherents. In the later books he discusses the military and the lawyers; and thus he is the voice of one crying, like the Baptist in the wilderness, ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... in the will of God, not belief in destiny, not fortitude or fatalism, not unselfishness or devil-may-care indifference, had saved the people from the haunting dread of being mown down by the unseen ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... 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 ...
— A Short History of Wales • Owen M. Edwards
... the word she used to herself; perhaps, as the butler had suggested, she had brought home some terrible ideas from the East—ideas about Kismet and fatalism and the cheapness of human life in comparison to human good. Wrong ideas, from the point of view of the queer, drab, cramped ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... show what effects are aimed at by the poet. 9. Compare with Despair Bunyan's Giant Despair and the Man in the Iron Cage. 10. Trace the sophistries by which Despair works in the mind of the Knight, e.g. the arguments from necessity (fatalism), humanity, cowardice, discouragement and disgust on account of his past failures, dread of the future, of God's justice, and the relief of death. 11. Does Despair show knowledge of the Knight's past? 12. With what powerful truths does Una meet the ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... 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 Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... '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 ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... 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
... degree, how limited are their powers; the high responsibility which is attached to free-will rises before them, and they shrink from the idea of trusting their own welfare to their own short-sighted reason alone. Most men, at such times, take refuge in a sort of fatalism; they stand inactive, until urged in this or that direction by the press of outward circumstances; or they rush blindly forward, under impatience of suspense, preferring risk ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... nothing of the cynic. A tragic dreamer. He was one of those whom crime leaves pensive; he had the brow of an incendiary tempered by the eyes of an archbishop. His sparse gray locks turned to white over his temples. The Christian was evident in him, complicated with the fatalism of the Turk. Chalkstones deformed his fingers, dissected by leanness. The stiffness of his tall frame was grotesque. He had his sea-legs, he walked slowly about the deck, not looking at any one, with an air decided and sinister. His eyeballs were vaguely filled with the fixed ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... And it was the truth. Her instinctive belief in a modified kind of fatalism made her judgments of people—even of those who caused her to suffer—singularly free from personal bitterness. Freddie, a mere instrument of destiny, had his good side, his human side, she knew. At his worst he was no worse than the others, And aside ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... regard to the information. According to his system of fatalism he would have considered it beyond his power to alter the predetermined course of things, but it is not probable that his mind dwelt upon the thought of personal security. He went straight forward to the village, calling at places where he thought ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... hurried on his business with an activity which nothing could discourage, neither Oriental discursiveness—that refined fair-spoken politeness, under which is hidden ferocity—nor coolly indifferent smiles, nor averted looks, invoking divine fatalism when human lies fail. The self-possession of this southerner, in whom was condensed, as it were, all the exuberance of his compatriots, served him as well as his perfect knowledge of French law, of which the Code of Tunis is only a ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... only with his lips, but with his whole self. They were not out of keeping with his nature. There is no more desperate blood in the world's veins than that of the Celt when he is driven to bay or exasperated by passion. In him the reckless fatalism of the Asiatic is blended with the cool daring of ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... considered that these were the methods whereby the gods were graciously pleased to make known beforehand revelations of their foreordained purposes. (Herein lay one among the marked points of contrast between Stoics and Epicureans.) They held this foreordination even to the length of fatalism, and made the same replies, as have been given in modern times, to the difficulty of reconciling it with the existence of evil, and with the apparent condition of the better and the worse individuals ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... parted from her several hours afterwards, he had almost recovered the casual gaiety which had become his habit of mind. Life was too short either to wonder or to regret, he had once remarked, and a certain easy fatalism had softened so far the pricks of ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... which produced those new systems of hypothetical 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
... Italy and all that enchanted coast? Or for the rains that poured their sudden and swift rivulets down the wooded slopes and filled the gorges that gutted some of the streets? Was it the love of nature, or a belief in fatalism, or sheer laziness, I wonder, that preserved to Monterey those washouts, from two to five feet in depth, that were sometimes in the very middle of the streets, and impassable save by an ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... read without the twitching of a facial muscle. He shrugged his shoulders, accepting the inevitable with the fatalism of his race. ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine |
