"Fortuitous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... may amount to millions of miles if you only have your lines long enough. The Projectile had certainly gone off its direct course; whatever the cause, the fact was undoubted. It was a great pity. The daring attempt must end in a failure due altogether to a fortuitous accident, against which no human foresight could have possibly taken precaution. Unless in case of the occurrence of some other most improbable accident, reaching the Moon was evidently now impossible. To failure, therefore, our travellers had to ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... Wested. He had stayed over night with them several times, and had come to them for consolation after his wife died. It seemed to her that his decline in health and loss of courage, Mr. Wheeler's fortuitous trip to Denver, the old pine-wood farm in Maine; were all things that fitted together and made a net to envelop her unfortunate son. She knew that he had been waiting impatiently for the autumn, and ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... There is, perhaps, no gulf, whether it is entered by the eastern or western passage, the navigation of which is so easy as that of St. Vincent, and so clear of dangers, that it can only be by the most fortuitous circumstances, or the most culpable neglect, that any accident can befal a ship in its passage ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... practically the long known and historic overland stage-road, over which so many thousands of gold-seekers and emigrants came in the days of California's gold excitement. Every mile has some story of pioneer bravery or heroism, of hairbreadth escape from hostile Indians or fortuitous deliverance from storm or disaster. It was over this route the pilgrims came who sought in Utah a land of freedom where they might follow their own peculiar conceptions of religion and duty, untrammeled and uninterfered with by hostile onlookers and disbelievers. Here ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... supreme and peculiar obligation of her being. Though she was less fine than Jenny, who in her studious way was a girl of much character, she was by no means as superficial as she appeared, and might in time, aided by fortuitous circumstances, make a strong and capable woman. Her faults, after all, were due in a large measure to a training which had consistently magnified in her mind the space which she would ultimately ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... wont to offer corn-wreaths as first-fruits of the harvest and to observe strict chastity for nine days. Similar cases of incest with a daughter are reported of many ancient kings. It seems unlikely that such reports are without foundation, and perhaps equally improbable that they refer to mere fortuitous outbursts of unnatural lust. We may suspect that they are based on a practice actually observed for a definite reason in certain special circumstances. Now in countries where the royal blood was traced ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... to swamp the Court which received the approval of four-fifths of the House of Representatives cannot be lightly dismissed as an aberration. Was it due to a fortuitous coalescence of local grievances, or was there a general underlying cause? That Marshall's principles of constitutional law did not entirely accord with the political and economic life of the nation at this period must be admitted. The Chief Justice was at once behind ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... have not forgotten anything unintentionally, these are the principal opinions concerning the soul. I have omitted Democritus, a very great man indeed, but one who deduces the soul from the fortuitous concourse of small, light, and round substances; for, if you believe men of his school, there is nothing which a crowd of atoms cannot effect. Which of these opinions is true, some God must determine. It is an important question for us, Which has the most ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... tell you that! Ah, Daniel! that is an experience which alone is worth a man's whole life. And yet I had the courage, mad as I felt I was becoming, to speak to her words of calm reason. Yes, I had the sublime courage, and the almost fortuitous control over myself, to conjure her to retreat into ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... Another fortuitous gift to Jamaica, so far as human intention is concerned, was the invaluable donation of the Guinea grass. Toward a century ago some African birds were brought as a present to a gentleman in the west of the island. Some grass seeds had been brought along for their feed; and when they ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... ventilating-shaft, protected against intruders by its extreme narrowness and by grains of dust which obstruct it a little without stopping it up. I said it was simply marvellous. Was I wrong? If a construction of this sort is a fortuitous result, we must admit that blind chance is gifted ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... while admiring the bright object ever in his mind, feared venturing a disclosure, which, in his position and prospects, his conscience whispered to him would be considered presumptuous. Thus matters rested, until a fortuitous circumstance broke the spell that bound these two young hearts, and disclosed to each the transitory ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... to be, roughly speaking, that in England about one adult in ten has had such an experience at least once in his life, and that of the experiences themselves a large number coincide with some distant event. The question is, Is the frequency of these latter cases too great to be deemed fortuitous, and must we suppose an occult connection between the two events? Mr. and Mrs. Sidgwick have worked out this problem on the basis of the English returns, seventeen thousand in number, with a care and thoroughness that leave nothing to be desired. ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... new art demands a more subtle construction than this, something that appeals less to the eye and more to the soul. This "concealed construction" may arise from an apparently fortuitous selection of forms on the canvas. Their external lack of cohesion is their internal harmony. This haphazard arrangement of forms may be the future of artistic harmony. Their fundamental relationship will finally be able to be expressed in mathematical form, but in terms irregular ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... Diderot brought into relief the vicious absoluteness of its philosophy. Then came Helvetius and Holbach, not merely with criticism, but with substitutes. Holbach brought a new dogma of the universe, matter and motion, and fortuitous shapes. Helvetius brought a theory of human character, and a new analysis of morals—interest the basis of justice, pleasure the true interpretation of interest, and character the creature of ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... by the spilling of some liquid on the surface of the paper? and would it not be rash and unjust to raise an accusation from such a fact? There would indeed be great temerity in drawing such a conclusion from a fortuitous circumstance; but the inference which may be drawn from the place occupied by these stains on the surface of the paper, from the more or less significant words found in those places, would not permit an accusation to be so lightly brought, where simple reasoning ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... of both Testaments were not written by express command at one place for all ages, but are a fortuitous collection of the works of men, writing each as his period and disposition dictated. (44) So much is clearly shown by the call of the prophets who were bade to admonish the ungodly of their time, and also by ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part III] • Benedict de Spinoza
... satisfactory conclusion. He never suspected for one moment what in this evil and matter-of-fact generation would have occurred even to the most credulous—to wit, that either insanity or fanaticism, aided by fortuitous events, if we may so speak, was the cause of this delusion, at least to the unhappy woman now the object of Dee's most abstruse speculations. His thoughts, however, would often recur to his quondam associate, Kelly, and, if ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... dwell upon the affinity between this temper of adventure in poetry and the teaching of Bergson. That the link is not wholly fortuitous is shown by the interesting Art Poetique (1903) of his quondam pupil, Claudel, a little treatise pervaded by ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... asks if there is really any such thing as chance. Philosophy answers, in conformity with Aristotle's definition (Phys., II. iv.), that chance is merely relative to human purpose, and that what seems fortuitous really depends on a more subtle form of causation.—CH. II. Has man, then, any freedom, if the reign of law is thus absolute? Freedom of choice, replies Philosophy, is a necessary attribute of reason. Man has a measure of freedom, though a less perfect ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius
... that it streamed by connatural result and emanation from God, the infinite and eternal Mind, as the light issues from the sun; so that there was no instant of duration assignable of God's eternal existence in which the world did not also coexist. Others held a fortuitous concourse of atoms—but all seem jointly to explode a creation, still beating upon this ground, that the producing something out of nothing is impossible and incomprehensible; incomprehensible, indeed, ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser
... themselves, or loll about afterward like gorged snakes, they think it is smart to laugh at all the sweet and beautiful things in life, and to sneer at people who believe in ideals, and to talk about mankind being merely a fortuitous product of fermentation, and twaddle of that sort. It ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... cross-section something like the figure eight. But the chief and valuable characteristic is that the flattened cylinder is not straight, but twisted. It is this twist which gives its peculiar and overwhelming importance to cotton, for without this apparently fortuitous characteristic, the spinning of cotton, if possible at all, would result in a much weaker and less durable thread. The twist makes the threads "kink" together when they are spun, and it is this kink which makes ...
— The Fabric of Civilization - A Short Survey of the Cotton Industry in the United States • Anonymous
... to consider in what manner the advancement of Europe in civilization has taken place, to ascertain how far its progress has been fortuitous, and how far ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... field, 240 white or black and therefore conspicuous, 60 spotted and inconspicuous, 24 were soon picked off by crows, but only one of these was spotted. This was not the proportion that there should have been if the mortality had been fortuitous. There is no doubt that it often pays an animal to be like its habitual surroundings, like a little piece of scenery if the animal is not moving. It is safe to say that in process of time wide departures from the safest coloration ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... the ORTHOGRAPHY, which has been to this time unsettled and fortuitous, I found it necessary to distinguish those irregularities that are inherent in our tongue, and, perhaps, coeval with it, from others, which the ignorance or negligence of later writers has produced. Every language has its anomalies, which, though inconvenient, and in ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... felt that it would be. But he could not afford to take any risks. Having found nothing in Swing's warbags save his friend's personal belongings, Racey slid the knife up his sleeve and went downstairs to breakfast. On the way he stopped a moment at a fortuitous knothole in the board wall. When he passed on his way the knife was no longer ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... the existence of God? "Supposing even," he says, "that man existed before God, even his higher pre-Adamite supposititious creation must have had an origin and a creator, for a creation is a more natural imagination than a fortuitous concourse of atoms; all things remount to a fountain, though they may flow to ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... in the acquisition of languages, as ordinarily carried on, these natural relations between words and their meanings are habitually traced, and their laws explained; it must be admitted that they are commonly learned as fortuitous relations. On the other hand, the relations which science presents are causal relations; and, when properly taught, are understood as such. While language familiarises with non-rational relations, science ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... professed teacher of those virtues, his reverend brother's disrespect for his vocation never once made him relax for a moment in his anxiety to gain him advancement in the Church. In the course of a few years, and in consequence of many fortuitous circumstances, he had the gratification of procuring for him the appointment to a deanery; and thus at once placed between them an insurmountable barrier to all friendship, that was not the effect of condescension on the ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald
... the philosopher, "that the corporal connection of my head with my body is an essential property, the colour of it a fortuitous accident." ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... with open mouth for food. The most mature one pointed its bill straight up and sat as still as if petrified. The whole impression one got from the nest and its contents was of something inept and fortuitous. But the cares of a family woke the parents up and they got down to real work ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... jocular strain, indicative of a bright and cheerful temperament. The following characteristic paragraph refers to the opinions of the Epicureans with regard to the appearance of a new star, which they ascribed to a fortuitous concourse of atoms: 'When I was a youth, with plenty of idle time on my hands, I was much taken with the vanity, of which some grown men are not ashamed, of making anagrams by transposing the letters of my name written in Latin ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... Eastern and Mountain time, the dinner for two in the private dining-room of the Inter-Mountain synchronized very fairly with the threshing out of college reminiscences by the two young men whose apparently fortuitous meeting on the veranda of the far-away North Shore club-house one of them, at least, was ascribing to the good offices of the god ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... autograph (page 189) illustrates the black-track method. At first these dots look inconsequent and fortuitous, but a careful examination shows that the creature had four toes with claws on the forefeet, and five on the hind, which is evidence, though not conclusive, that it was a rodent; the absence of tail marks shows ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... despondency. The Liberal Party must not allow itself to be overawed by the hostile Press which is ranged against it. Boldly and earnestly occupied, the platform will always beat the Press. Still less should we allow ourselves to be perturbed by the fortuitous and sporadic results of by-electoral warfare. I suppose I have fought as many by-elections as most people, and I know that all the advantages lie with the attacking force. The contests are complicated by personal and local influences. The discussions ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... the origin and structure of the Capella Reale is, that to the completion of this most perfect illustration of the art of ecclesiastic building three nations have contributed—the Greeks, Saracens, and Normans. And by this fortuitous association the chaste style of the ancients, the cold manner of the Northerns, and the luxurious fashion of the East are all here ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... than the case of Colorado. The population was larger, and being devoted to agriculture, was naturally regarded as more stable than that of Colorado, which was based principally upon the somewhat fortuitous discovery of mines of the precious metals. But there was an admitted political embarrassment in regard to both Territories, the principal debate on which occurred when the bill admitting Nebraska was under consideration. Congress was, at the time, engaged in passing the Reconstruction ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... Democritus Who sets the world at chance.] Democritus,who maintained the world to have been formed by the fortuitous concourse ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... inadvisedly that I make this specification of great names, of men who were born coincidentally with, or were in the broader sense contemporaries of Robert Browning. There is no such thing as a fortuitous birth. Creation does not occur spontaneously, as in that drawing of David Scott's where from the footprint of the Omnipotent spring human spirits and fiery stars. Literally indeed, as a great French writer has indicated, a man is the child of his time. It is a matter often ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... now, they could never in time past have done so—that because they had clearly not been designed with an eye to all circumstances and all time, they never, therefore, could have been designed with an eye to any time or any circumstances; and, secondly, in maintaining that "accidental," "fortuitous," "spontaneous" variations could be accumulated at all except under conditions that have never been fulfilled yet, and never will be; in other words, his weak place lay in the contention (for it comes to this) ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... mind has not an adequate but only a confused knowledge of itself, its own body, and of external bodies, whenever it perceives things after the common order of nature; that is, whenever it is determined from without, namely, by the fortuitous play of circumstance, to regard this or that; not at such times as it is determined from within, that is, by the fact of regarding several things at once, to understand their points of agreement, difference, and contrast. Whenever it is determined ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza
... deliberate persecution of the powers, and an accusation of guilt directed against him for some neglect or deficiency in his relation to them. Hence by a perfectly logical and natural sequence there arose the belief in other-world or supernatural powers, whether purely fortuitous and magical or more distinctly rational and personal; there arose the sense of Sin, or of offence against these powers; there arose a complex ritual of Expiation—whether by personal sacrifice and suffering or by the sacrifice of victims. There arose too a whole catalogue ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... professed archaeologists. Indeed, the wicked have been known to scoff at them freely as mere accidental lumps of broken flint, and to deride the notion of their being due in any way to deliberate human handicraft. These are the sort of people who would regard a grand piano as a fortuitous concourse of atoms. But the shapely stone hatchet of the later neolithic farmer and herdsman is usually a beautifully polished wedge-shaped piece of solid greenstone; and its edge has been ground to such a delicate smoothness that it seems rather like a bit of nature's exquisite ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... between the operations of nature and those of man which is a peculiar but not fortuitous character, and is based on the identity of the will in both. When the herbivorous animals had taken their place in the organic world, beasts of prey made their appearance—necessarily a late appearance—in each species, and proceeded to live ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... connection with the human form as being subsequent. The ideas connected with the animals were those of their most prominent characteristics; hence it appears that it was for the sake of the character that each animal was worshipped, and not because of any fortuitous ...
— The Religion of Ancient Egypt • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... second treatise on the new star, discussing various theories to account for its appearance, and refusing to accept the notion that it was a "fortuitous concourse of atoms". This was followed in 1607 by a treatise on comets, suggested by the comet appearing that year, known as Halley's comet after its next return. He regarded comets as "planets" moving in straight ...
— Kepler • Walter W. Bryant
... 448. Adj. derived from without; objective; extrinsic, extrinsical[obs3]; extraneous &c. (foreign) 57; modal, adventitious; ascititious[obs3], adscititious[obs3]; incidental, accidental, nonessential; contingent, fortuitous. implanted, ingrafted[obs3]; inculcated, infused. outward, apparent &c. (external) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... distaste for the forced acquaintanceships of travel and a craving for home brought me back. Save perhaps in health I had profited little by my journeyings. My bodily shell formed part of strange landscapes and occurred in fortuitous gatherings of men, but my heart was all the time in my Mausoleum by the Regent's Park. I was drawn thither by a force almost magnetic, irresistible. My two domestics welcomed me home, but no one else. Only my lawyers knew of ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... future. We know that from the Past, stretching back into infinity, we have ourselves made the Present,—and according to Divine law we also know that from this Present, stretching forward into infinity, we shall ourselves evolve all that is yet To Come. There is no power, no deity, no chance, no 'fortuitous concurrence of atoms' in what is simply a figure of the Universal Mathematics. Nothing can be 'forgiven' under the eternal law of Compensation,— nothing need be 'prayed for,' since everything is designed to accomplish each individual spirit's ultimate good. You are here to learn not only the ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... There is nothing fortuitous or mysterious in inventive energy. Necessity is its mother, which simply means that it moves along the line of least resistance. Men like Kay, Hargreaves, Arkwright, Cartwright, set their intelligence and industry ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... year on every estate, according to the varying circumstances that influence them—such as greater or less exhaustion of the soil, greater or less facilities of irrigation, manure, transit to market, drainage—or from fortuitous advantages on one hand, or calamities of season on the other; or many other circumstances which affect the value of the land, and the abilities of the cultivators to pay. It is not so much the proprietors of the estate or the Government as the cultivators themselves who ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... fide reality. That which does not accord with it is negative, worthless existence. Before the pure light of this divine Idea—which is no mere Ideal—the phantom of a world whose events are an incoherent concourse of fortuitous circumstances, utterly vanishes. Philosophy wishes to discover the substantial purport, the real side of the divine idea, and to justify the so much despised reality of things; for Reason is the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... These laws are to be revealed now in order that what belongs to the Lord may be ascribed to Him, and nothing ascribed to man that is not man's. For very many in the world attribute everything to themselves and their prudence, and what they cannot so attribute they call fortuitous and accidental, not knowing that human prudence is nothing and that "fortuitous" and "accidental" ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... are generated out of it, and corrupted again into it. His infinite is nothing else but matter." "Whence," says Cudworth, "we conclude that Anaximander's infinite was nothing else but an infinite chaos of matter, in which were actually or potentially contained all manner of qualities, by the fortuitous secretion and segregation of which he supposed infinite worlds to be successively generated and corrupted. So that we may easily guess whence Leucippus and Democritus had their infinite worlds, and perceive how near akin these ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... feet of these rocks; all the streams which come down from these same reservoirs, and which swell the rivers, after fertilizing the country; the thousands of fountains which start from the same source, and which water animal and vegetable kind; all these things seem no more the effect of a fortuitous cause and of a declension of atoms, than the retina which receives the rays of light, the crystalline lens which refracts them, the incus, the malleus, the stapes, the tympanic membrane of the ear, which ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... remained on the wall believed that he had passed into the Roman camp and was troubling it. The fall of the tower, and the confusion it had wrought in the Roman camp, never occurred to them to have been fortuitous incidents with which Seraiah had nothing to do. Of the thousands that witnessed that miracle, most of them were convinced that ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... girl no longer. Her figure was slim as ever—or perhaps not quite, for a certain boyish swagger, a sort of insolent adolescence, had gone the way of the first blooming of her cheeks. But she was beautiful; dignity was there now, and the charming lines of a fortuitous nine-and-twenty; and she sat in the car with such perfect appropriateness and self-possession that it made him breathless ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... There was a fortuitous delicacy in this distribution, the woman being placed farthest from the social and physical dirtiness of Atzerott, and nearest the unblanched ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... l'Humanite Posthume," by M. D'Assier, a French follower of Comte. The mixture of positivism and ghost-stories highly diverted me. Moved by the sagacity and pertinence of M. D'Assier's arguments for a limited and fortuitous immortality, I fell into such an uncontrollable fit of laughter as caused, I could see, first annoyance and then anxiety in those members of my club whom my explosion of mirth had awakened. As I still chuckled and screamed, ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... circumstances which occur at such opportune moments that they leave one with a sense of a guiding finger behind the affairs of men—are they, after all, only fortuitous accidents, or have they a deeper ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... theory of a God who ordains results absolutely inevitable, although to us it seems as if they might have been different, it may be observed that the attraction which drew Reuben to his dear Camilla was not quite fortuitous. What decided her to go? It was perfect autumn weather; it was just the time of year she most loved; there would be no crowding or confusion, for many people had gone away to the seaside, and so she was delighted at the thought of the picnic. What decided him to go? The ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... thought the most acceptable kindness which could repay his hospitality; and whose solitary possession Castagno thought cheaply purchased by the guilt of the betrayer and murderer; it was in this process, the deduction of watchful intelligence, not by fortuitous discovery, that the first impulse was given to European art. Many a plank had yawned in the sun before Van Eyck's; but he alone saw through the rent, as through an opening portal, the lofty perspective of triumph widening ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... comfortable attitudes and at peace with themselves and each other, and now and again, perhaps three or four times in an hour, making a worthy and memorable remark, they are all haggard and intent upon keeping this fetish flow agoing. A fortuitous score of cows in a field are a thousand times happier than a score of people deliberately assembled for the purposes of happiness. These conversationalists say the most shallow and needless of things, impart aimless information, simulate ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... loss of the French was much more distributed among their ships than was the case with the English. No less than three of the latter escaped without a man killed, while of the French only one. The kernel of the action seems to have been in the somewhat fortuitous concentration of two French seventy-fours and one sixty-four on an English seventy-four and sixty-four. Assuming the ships to have been actually of the same force as their rates, the French brought, counting broadside only, one hundred and six guns ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... replace part of a damaged copy; reproduction by a teacher or student of a small part of a work to illustrate a lesson; reproduction of a work in legislative or judicial proceedings or reports; incidental and fortuitous reproduction, in a newsreel or broadcast, of a work located in the scene of an event ...
— Reproduction of Copyrighted Works By Educators and Librarians • Library of Congress. Copyright Office.
... the songs of a Virgil and the tide of a Homer. Elfonzo and Ambulinia soon repaired to the scene, and fortunately for them both the house was so crowded that they took their seats together in the music department, which was not in view of the auditory. This fortuitous circumstances added more the bliss of the Major than a thousand such exhibitions would have done. He forgot that he was man; music had lost its charms for him; whenever he attempted to carry his part, the string of the instrument would ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... in that direction, but still worse as a satisfactory interpretation of the panorama of the life about us. It is a philosophy of the gloomiest fatalism. It holds that we simply chance to be that which we are; that we are what we are merely because of fortuitous chemical and mechanical combinations. Had the combinations chanced to be something different we should not be in existence. Chance is the king of the ...
— Elementary Theosophy • L. W. Rogers
... large quantities, are manufactured. The paper, household furniture, pottery, crockery, and even glass generally in use, are of home production, which will give the reader an idea of the present native resources of the country, developed not by fortuitous aid, but under ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... interviews, the result of great subtlety on Mr Wegg's part, but assuming the mask of careless yielding to a fortuitous combination of circumstances impelling him towards Clerkenwell, had enabled him to complete his bargain with ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... superior stratum becomes more condensed by cold than the inferior one by pressure, the upper region will descend and the lower one ascend. In this situation if one part of the atmosphere be hotter from some fortuitous circumstances, or, has less pressure over it, the lower stratum will begin to ascend at this part, and resemble water falling through a hole as mentioned above. If the lower region of air was going forwards with considerable velocity, it will gain an eddy by riling up this ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... necessity undergo the particular set of modifications exhibited; but, under some slight change of predisposing causes—as of season or latitude—might have undergone some other set of modifications: the determining circumstance being one which, in the human sense, we call fortuitous. ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... the imputation, colonel," said Devers, to all appearances much injured at such injustice. "The wagon rarely, if ever, goes to town on Monday, and that Private Paine should have gone with it is equally fortuitous." ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... good. Billy Louise tried to believe that it was all going to be as plain sailing as this fortuitous beginning, but she was aware of a nervous fluttering in her throat while she waited, and she knew that she positively dreaded hearing Seabeck gallop up behind her on the frozen trail. "Why will people do things ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... attempt to make his own way on foot. But the German officer would not accept this unselfish sacrifice on the part of his servant; but he was relieved of the necessity of again separating from his faithful henchman by the fortuitous circumstance that, at that very moment, an English officer's riderless charger came in sight. The animal, a beautiful chestnut, was uninjured, and allowed itself to be caught without trouble. They were now in a position to continue their flight ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... matter so fortuitous that Mr. Hammond could not accept Ruth's version of the loss without some doubt, in any case. And then, her suddenly finding in the only good scenario submitted to him by any of his company, one that she believed was plagiarized from her lost story, seemed to put a cap on the whole matter. ...
— Ruth Fielding Down East - Or, The Hermit of Beach Plum Point • Alice B. Emerson
... Blanche Holmes, a pretty blue-eyed English girl, with light brown hair and ruddy cheeks. She was not over eighteen years of age, and was one of those trusting, confiding creatures, who win friends at first sight. By the strange, fortuitous circumstances which fate seems to indiscriminately weave about people, the maid and John Stevens were thrown much into each ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... necessity and fortuitous circumstance seemed to make advisable another Southern effort in Parliament. The cotton loan, though fairly strong again because of Confederate governmental aid, was in fact a failure in its expected result of public support for ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... drifting, falling flakes. No shape was to be seen, no sound but that of the wind to be heard. It was like the dream of a delirious child after reading the ancient theory of the existence of the world by the rushing together of fortuitous atoms. Wan and thick, tumultuous, innumerable to millions of angels, an interminable tempest of intermingling and indistinguishable vortices, it stretched on and on, a boundless hell of cold and shapelessness—white thinned with gray, and ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... intelligence of the savages upon whom it was to be used. The traders did not reason this out. Beche do mer English was the product of conditions and circumstances. Function precedes organ; and the need for a universal Melanesian lingo preceded beche de mer English. Beche de mer was purely fortuitous, but it was fortuitous in the deterministic way. Also, from the fact that out of the need the lingo arose, beche de mer English is a splendid ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... varying in distance, but accidentally seen in nearly the same direction, (or that they form an enormously long system turned by accident directly towards the earth), than I could look on the association of several thousand persons in the form of a procession as a fortuitous arrangement. ...
— Half-hours with the Telescope - Being a Popular Guide to the Use of the Telescope as a - Means of Amusement and Instruction. • Richard A. Proctor
... by his misfortunes, and he never ceased to plot for his deliverance. Weeks passed without any fruitful event occurring in the life of the prisoner, yet help was to come to him from a source from which he could never have expected it. But before that fortuitous result was destined to take place—in fact, as preliminary to its achievement—he was destined to be an actor in the most remarkable scene that ever has been recorded in the annals of prison life, and in one of the ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... the marks of electrical action in the cases cited, and since we know something of the subtlety of the agent; that it may be "amassed, condensed and rarefied," that it is not loose and wandering, and the mere plaything of fortuitous forces, as the atmosphere is supposed to be; but, on the contrary, has close and most sympathetic adjustment with the earth-force; and that it is the invisible hand that holds and manages the grosser atmospheric matter; since we ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers
... which occurs only every 800 years. After discussing a great variety of topics, but little connected with his subject, and in a style of absurd jocularity, he attacks the opinions of the Epicureans, that the star was a fortuitous concourse of atoms, in the following remarkable paragraph, which is a good specimen of the work:—"When I was a youth with plenty of idle time on my hands, I was much taken with the vanity, of which some grown men are not ashamed, of making anagrams ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... particular, meets first of all, in the strange city of Calydon, the very man he is looking for! When Pseudolus is racking his wits for a stratagem, Harpax obligingly drops in with all the requisites. The ass-dealer in the As. is so ridiculously fortuitous that it savors of ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... not merely fortuitous. For, however abhorrent such a notion may be to those yet wedded to Victorian ideals, we were, even before the war, undoubtedly passing through great changes in our philosophy of life. Just as a plant keeps on conforming ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... either a chaos or a fortuitous aggregation and dispersion of atoms; or else it is builded in order and harmony and ruled by Wisdom. If then it is the former, why should one wish to tarry in a hap-hazard disordered mass? Why should I be concerned except to ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... amiable in society, shall be more friendly than a brother." Again, Valerius Maximus says (Fact. et Dict. Memor. iv 7): "The ties of friendship are most strong and in no way yield to the ties of blood." Moreover it is quite certain and undeniable, that as to the latter, the lot of birth is fortuitous, whereas we contract the former by an untrammelled will, and a solid pledge. Therefore we ought not to love more than others those who are united to us ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... lives, perhaps, often makes us insensible of the negligence with which we suffer them to slide away. We never consider ourselves as possessed at once of time sufficient for any great design, and therefore indulge ourselves, in fortuitous amusements. We think it unnecessary to take an account of a few supernumerary moments, which, however employed, could have produced little advantage, and which were exposed to a thousand ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... more ultimate question arises, How is it that all physical causes conspire, by their united action, to the production of a general order of Nature? It is against all analogy to suppose that such an end as this can be accomplished by such means as those, in the way of mere chance or 'the fortuitous concourse of atoms.' We are led by the most fundamental dictates of our reason to conclude that there must be some cause for this co-operation of causes. I know that from Lucretius' time this has been denied; but it has been denied only on grounds of feeling. No possible reason ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... choose, by day or by night, with or without advantage of ground, with or without the bidding of their leader, neither maintaining their ranks nor observing the order of battle; and let our armies, from being a solemn and consecrated company, grow to resemble some dark and fortuitous gathering of cut-throats." With this passage before us, it is easy to pronounce whether the armies of our times be "a dark and fortuitous gathering," or "a solemn and consecrated company;" nay, how far they fall short of anything ...
— Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius • Niccolo Machiavelli
... of Tom Duncombe and his speech is instructive as well as amusing, for it is a curious proof of the facility with which the world may be deceived, and of the prodigious effect which may be produced by the smallest means, if they are aided by some fortuitous circumstances and happily applied. Tommy came to Henry de Ros and told him that his constituents at Hertford were very anxious he should make a speech, but that he did not know what to say, and begged Henry to supply him with the necessary materials. He advised him to strike out something new, ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... community of blood is the starting-point, in which those who are connected by natural community of blood form the original body within whose circle the artificial members are admitted. A group of mankind thus formed is something quite different from a fortuitous concurrence of atoms. Three or four brothers by blood, with a fourth or fifth man whom they agree to look on as filling in everything the same place as a brother by blood, form a group which is quite unlike a union of four or five men, none of whom ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... required. To learn the laws of Heredity and Variation there is no other way than that which Darwin himself followed, the direct examination of the phenomena. A beginning could be made by collecting fortuitous observations of this class, which have often thrown a suggestive light, but such evidence can be at best but superficial and some more penetrating instrument of research is required. This can only be provided ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... to think that it is not entirely fortuitous that this added impulse is given to our work just at this time. We all feel that the present is a moment when the very foundations of our ethical life—both as individuals and as groups—have received a rude shock. At such a time—more than ever—we need to understand ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... later date the whole ship was through fortuitous circumstances exposed to certain disadvantageous conditions which rendered ...
— British Airships, Past, Present, and Future • George Whale
... events proved that McClellan's great need was not the reinforcements for which he so constantly clamored, but decision and energy of character. Had he possessed these qualities he could have won for himself, from the fortuitous order which fell into his hands, a wreath of unfading laurel, and perhaps have saved almost countless lives of his fellow-countrymen. As it was, if he had only advanced his army a little faster, the twelve thousand Union soldiers, surrendered by the incompetent and pusillanimous Gen. Miles, would ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... defined generally as "a contract by which one of the parties binds himself to the other to pay him a sum of money, or otherwise indemnify him, in the case of the happening of a fortuitous event provided for in a general or special manner in the contract, in consideration of the sum of money which the latter party pays or binds himself to pay"; or, in the words of an eminent English judge, "It ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... familiar with the Attic tragedians? He begins by saying that he will not bottom his case "on the ground of parallels in sentiment and reflection, which, as they express commonplaces, are likely to be" (fortuitous) "coincidences." Three pages of such parallels, all from Sophocles, therefore follow. "Curiously close similarities of expression" are also barred. Four pages of examples therefore follow, from Sophocles and AEschylus, plays and fragments, Euripides, and Homer too (once!). Again, "identities ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... which seem to connect Prophecy with the facts of the origin and history of Christianity,—some, embracing events too vast for hazardous speculations and others, incidents too minute for it,—are purely fortuitous; that all the cases in which the event seems to tally with the prediction, are mere chance coincidences: and he must believe this, amongst other events, of two of the most unlikely to which human sagacity was likely to pledge itself, and yet which have as undeniably ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... heaven an earnest petition that they might have the power to rescue them, and eagerly waited their chance. The three men had no control whatever over the spar; it was as much as they could do to preserve their hold. Washed about backwards and forwards, their peril seemed imminent; but at last a fortuitous wave carried them on to the rocks amid the rejoicings of their compatriots. Captain Wright and five others drifted towards Point Danger, where they encountered serious obstacles to their landing in the immense growths of seaweed, and the wall of surf that spanned the beach. ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... whom I had never seen, yet knew that I should recognize when found. My quest was not aimless and fortuitous; it had a definite method. I turned from one street into another without hesitation and threaded a maze of intricate passages, devoid of the fear of ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... questions—and among them those that are of the profoundest interest to our spiritual life—which, so far as we can see, must remain insoluble to the human intellect unless its powers become of quite a different order from what they are now. Has the universe any unity of plan or purpose, or is it a fortuitous concourse of atoms? Is consciousness a permanent part of the universe, giving hope of indefinite growth in wisdom, or is it a transitory accident on a small planet on which life must ultimately become impossible? Are good and evil of importance ...
— The Problems of Philosophy • Bertrand Russell
... of Credit for the unexampled sum of five hundred millions, Mr. BONAR LAW apologised for a slight error in his Budget statement. He had then estimated the expenditure of the country at five and a half millions a day. Owing to fortuitous circumstances, the amount for the first thirty-five days of the financial year had turned out to be seven and a half millions a day. Mr. MCKENNA, conscious of some similar lapses in calculation during his own time at the Exchequer, handsomely condoned ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 16, 1917. • Various
... to the ancestry of the individual—that is, they must be matters of heredity in the ordinary sense, coupled with the fortuitous variations which accompany ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... is what each one thought to be true, was a thing of naught, and, if you consider it closely, a dangerous thing. Only the mind which is capable of comprehending the laws of Nature can escape the danger of mistaking the fortuitous, and ever changing reality, for the eternal and unchangeable truth. Therefore I do not regret what I have done. If one of my grandsons should wish to become a painter I have obviated the risk of his falling into the error of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... some fortuitous circumstance places promising chil- 61:15 dren in the arms of gross parents, often these beautiful children early droop and die, like tropical flowers born amid Alpine snows. If perchance 61:18 they live to become parents in their turn, they may re- produce in their own ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... about modern science and the lights of the age. Our natural history is much advanced as compared with that of the Greeks; but the vital question has not varied. Does nature manifest the intervention of a directing mind, or do we see in it only a fortuitous ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... I agreed that the rumors retailed by Colgius concerning the wager said to have been made by Palus were probably correct; for he did just what that rumor specified and so singular and spectacular a series of feats could hardly have been fortuitous. It was quite plain that he pulled in his team in the third race, and let a Gold team get the lead of him and keep it till five eggs and five dolphins had been taken down by the tally- keepers' menials and there were but two full laps to run. Then he took the lead ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... of horrors irony is seldom absent. Sometimes it enters directly into the composition of the events, while sometimes it relates only to their fortuitous position among persons and places. The latter sort is splendidly exemplified by a case in the ancient city of Providence, where in the late forties Edgar Allan Poe used to sojourn often during his unsuccessful wooing of the gifted poetess, Mrs. Whitman. Poe generally stopped ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... peace will fix and perpetuate all the errors of the war; because it will be made upon the same false principle. What has been lost in the field, in the field may be regained. An arrangement of peace in its nature is a permanent settlement: it is the effect of counsel and deliberation, and not of fortuitous events. If built upon a basis fundamentally erroneous, it can only be retrieved by some of those unforeseen dispensations which the all-wise, but mysterious, Governor of the world sometimes interposes, to snatch nations from ruin. It would not be pious error, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... to seek his sympathy; she was almost alone. She could have fled, but felt herself fixed to the ground, and with desperate efforts endeavored to conceal her excitement. He approaches nearer; with glistening eye she watches and hopes some fortuitous circumstances may call him aside. Their glance meets; she blushes and trembles, Father Francis ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... the mask of night; and every one reading this speech with the context, must have felt the peculiar propriety of its simplicity, though perhaps without examining the cause of an omission which certainly is not fortuitous. The reason lies in the situation and in the feeling of the moment; where confusion, and anxiety, and earnest self-defence predominate, the excitability and play of the imagination would be checked ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... the men to whom he was most attached. No two men of ability could be much less like each other. Smith's talents were apparently equally adapted for fine classical scholarship and for the most abstract mathematical investigations. If it was not exactly by the toss of a shilling it was by an almost fortuitous combination of circumstances that he was decided to take to mathematics, and in that field won a European reputation. He soared, however, so far beyond ordinary ken that even Europe must be taken to mean a small set of competent judges who might almost be reckoned upon one's fingers. But devoted ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... dispensation. The promise of a Saviour was almost coeval with the world; and during the long succession of ages which had since elapsed, and the infinite diversity of events, so perplexing to the human eye and so apparently fortuitous, the love of God was pursuing its high purpose. The frequent intimations given to the ancient patriarchs, and to the prophets of Israel, proved that the eternal Ruler of the universe was producing, ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. II • Francis Augustus Cox
... guns, keeping to himself his plans for the reconquest of the Soudan. He wrought and watched while he waited, selecting and surrounding himself with able officers, and exacting from each diligence and obedience in the discharge of their duties. The Dongola campaign and the fortuitous one of the Atbara against Mahmoud greatly strengthened his position. There might be further delay, but his triumphal entry into Omdurman and the downfall of the Khalifa were certain. The Sirdar had but to ask, to receive all ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... the name come to be common (for it is not seemingly a case of fortuitous equivocation)? Are different individual things called good by virtue of being from one source, or all conducing to one end, or rather by way of analogy, for that intellect is to the soul as sight to the body, and so on? However, perhaps we ought to leave these questions now, ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... the revenge he had taken on the man who had frustrated it. Payment of Mr Simpson's annuity was resisted, and the poor mathematician was in great straits for those necessaries of life, which, necessary as they may be, are often with a great portion of the human family very fortuitous. Ask not on what legal pretexts Sir John had been successful in inflicting this revenge. Such pretexts are "thick as blackberries." Facilis est descensus—No rich suitor ever sought long for admission into the Court of Chancery, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... and results of habit! A circumstance, apparently fortuitous and accidental, placed him in the midst of an Indian family, the female owner of which loved him with the most disinterested tenderness, and lavished upon him all the affectionate sentiments of a mother towards a son. Had the die ...
— The First White Man of the West • Timothy Flint
... on the steps? It was fortuitous, like everything destined to confound us. There stood Lady Jocelyn with Andrew, fretting his pate. Harry leant against a pillar, Miss Carrington, Mrs. Shorne, and Mrs. Melville, supported by Mr. George Uplift, held watchfully by. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Fourteenth Amendment therefore acted as a protective bulwark in state as well as nation. In brief, then, the legal position of the big industrial organizations was almost impregnable because of the fortuitous circumstance that the words of a part of the Constitution might be held to mean something which probably did not enter the minds of the Congress or the state legislatures which placed the ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... dining-room. Again, embracing Lanyard, his glance seemed devoid of any sort of intelligible expression; and if its object needed all his self-possession in that moment, it was to dissemble relief rather than dismay. An accent of the fortuitous distinguished this second encounter too persuasively to excuse further misgivings. What the adventurer himself hadn't known till within the last ten minutes, that he was coming to Troyon's, Roddy couldn't possibly have anticipated; ergo, whatever the detective's business, ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... bourgeois of Paris, with his unfailing umbrella, an expert in showers, who foresaw this particular one, but would come out in spite of his wife; this one takes a seat in the porter's chair. According to individual character, each member of this fortuitous society contemplates the skies, and departs, skipping to avoid the mud,—because he is in a hurry, or because he sees other citizens walking along in spite of wind and slush, or because, the archway being damp and mortally catarrhal, the bed's edge, as the proverb says, is better ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... the sources of my thoughts, I find they had their beginning in fragile Chance; were born of little moments that shine for me curiously in the past. Slight the impulse that made me take this turning at the crossroads, trivial and fortuitous the meeting, and light as gossamer the thread that first knit me to my friend. These are full of wonder; more mysterious are the moments that must have brushed me with their wings and passed me by: when Fate beckoned and ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith |
