"Destiny" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... confident in the purity of her air as her neighbour, stood another female "Briton," with the come-into-my-parlour expression of countenance, regarding us as prey. Under the circumstances, exhausted nature gave in; though saved from Scylla, our destiny was Charybdis, and we accordingly surrendered ourselves to a wash, breakfast, and the Brahminee Bull. During the day, we had a visit from a friend and ex-brother officer, whom we had promised to stay with, at "Kussowlie," on our ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... coldly. Mirande's conduct took him by surprise, for resistance to arrest was rare during the Revolution. Such men as Mirande, courageous, bigoted, devoted to an ideal, made a point—unless they resorted to suicide—of submitting calmly to destiny ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... hero of him; as much astonished, perhaps, as Beaufort to know that his careless, impertinent compliment to Madame Danton's charming head had sealed the fate of his own. But 'tis in this hap-hazard fashion that the destiny of mortals is decided. We are but the victims of chance or mischance. Of all vainglorious philosophies, that of ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... we'll scour Eastborough and Mason's Corner and Montrose for orders in the morning, and then we'll deliver all the goods by team in the afternoon in regular Boston style. I never knew just exactly what I was cut out for. I know I don't like studying law, and it may be, after all, that it's my destiny to become a grocery-man." ...
— Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks - A Picture of New England Home Life • Charles Felton Pidgin
... concerned about his destiny just then, nor for the dangerous enmity of Marsh. He was following ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... on the full ebb, threading holes in bridges as cotton threads a needle. It was London, and the roar of London, majestic, imperial, super-Roman. And lo! earlier than the earliest municipal light, an unseen hand, the hand of destiny, printed a writing on the wall of vague gloom that was beginning to hide the opposite bank. And the writing said that Shipton's tea was the best. And then the hand wiped largely out that message and wrote in another ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... Heav'n itself I cried, Asking, "What Lamp of Destiny to guide Her little Children stumbling in the Dark?" And—"A blind Understanding!" Heaven replied. ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... wine, a vin de pays with the island flavour and not old enough to become spirituous. If the vine be again grown in these parts, its produce will be drunk in England under some such form. But Madeira has at last found her 'manifest destiny:' she will be an orchard to Northern Europe and (like the England of the future) a kitchen-garden to the West African Coast, especially ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... pray dismiss a groundless dread: Look less severely on a venial error. You love. We cannot conquer destiny. You were drawn on as by a fatal charm. Is that a marvel without precedent Among us? Has love triumph'd over you, And o'er none else? Weakness is natural To man. A mortal, to a mortal's lot Submit. You chafe against a yoke that others Have long since borne. The dwellers in Olympus, The ...
— Phaedra • Jean Baptiste Racine
... compelled at last to content herself with what fate was willing to apportion her. Had the poor woman been only thirty and one instead of thirty and two summers—the difference according to her mode of reckoning was great—she would have restored to Destiny the award it offered her to wait for another more suited to her taste, but since man proposes and necessity disposes, she saw herself obliged in her great need for a husband to content herself with a poor fellow who had been cast out from Estremadura [116] and ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... no other effort to fight her destiny. Determined to meet it heroically, she put a chair precisely into the middle of the room, and sat up straight in it, till she heard the birds sing. Somewhere about that epoch she fell into a doze with one eye open, when a terrific peal of thunder started her to her feet. It was Patsy knocking ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... had started on his drive with his wife and sister that afternoon, was in one of those strenuous moods which seem to make one's whole being tick with the clock-work of destiny and cause everything else, all the environment, and the minor happenings of life, to appear utterly idle. Even when he talked, and apparently with earnestness, it was always with that realization of depths, which made his own voice ring ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Hector then had found his fate, But Jove and destiny prolong'd his date. Safe from the darts, the care of heaven he stood, Amidst alarms, and death, and ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... allowances, the story of Tyrconnell "commonly" sending an unconstitutional letter to influence the election. But how very good these Jacobite sheriffs and mayors were to let King into the secret, in 1691, when their destiny was uncertain! That such gossip was current is likely, but for a historian to assert ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... true heroism is breathed into him his eyes, without his knowledge of the fact, may assume the amber hue of your dreams. Sometimes, in the development of the spirit of heroism, this color is only transient; in time it may become permanent. Muggie, these dreams indicate your destiny. You should marry none but a hero, and when he comes you will know him by his amber eyes." With this Sampey sighed, for Muggie was looking earnestly into his ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... abstractions, he asks for nothing even of the gods. Let them do justice! Nay, let them submit to justice too! Great leveller! Is not virtue so uncompromising as this, very near to rebellion against the gods and destiny?" ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... and the Jewish law are at their end, and the world is the heir to that covenant and to the blessing of God by Abraham and his seed. With the new covenant the old one ceases. It has fulfilled its destiny. It was a state of preparation for this period of universal salvation to all who have love, hope, and faith. With Adam and the flesh came the sin, law, and death; with Jesus the flesh ceases, hence no ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... a poisonous cloud over everything. These people came and went, an endless procession of them; they laughed and danced and gossiped and drank their way through the boy's life, and unconsciously he judged them, and hated them and feared them. It was not by such that his destiny was ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... had been amusingly precocious, now she was assuming an innocence, a naivete, that were no longer hers, had never been natural to her at any time. She had always been coolly indifferent to the lives of other men and women. Now she was embittered as to her own destiny, and full of ugly and eager gossip concerning everyone she knew. She chanced upon the name of Magsie Clay, little dreaming how straight the blow went to Rachael's heart, but had excellent reasons of her own for not expressing the belief that Magsie would soon leave the stage, ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... their propriety and correctness. No. You are not a mere automaton, or boy-machine; but a rational being. You ought, therefore, to think methodically, to reason soundly, and to investigate every principle critically. Don't be afraid to think for yourself. You know not the high destiny that awaits you. You know not the height to which you may soar in the scale of intellectual existence. Go on, then, boldly, and with unyielding perseverance; and if you do not gain admittance into the temple of fame, strive, at all hazards, to ...
— English Grammar in Familiar Lectures • Samuel Kirkham
... small casement and thinking upon the fresh, free, 'outdoor' life the soul will some day live. And such a mood as this is surely a sign of the soul's growth, a testimony of its responsiveness to the divine touch, a sudden sense of its splendid destiny borne in upon it among the grey and narrow circumstances of ...
— The Threshold Grace • Percy C. Ainsworth
... to be grown for local needs and overflowed upon the markets of the world, becoming a factor in finance, arenas where its destiny was decided were established in the large centres of trade. In these basins of commerce the never-ending flow concentrated and wheeled for a short space before in re-directed currents it rolled on its way to ocean ports. Here, according to the novelists, ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... ourselves Bacon, Shakspeare, and Newton, were men of original genius. There was a time when there were men of spirit and ability in every Greek city: there was a time when the Roman empire governed the world and there was not one great man from Britain to the Euphrates. Having fulfilled its destiny—which seems to have been the introduction into the Western World of the ideas of unity, law, and order, though unintentionally on its part, for it was nothing but a military despotism—it perished as it deserved, and its language is now ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... by the audience as a theme; and they all fixed their eyes upon the explanation, thereby to judge the symphony. It was grand, and full of his genius. It was another of those earnest, hopeless questionings of Destiny. The very first bars were full of this. It opens with a crash of the whole orchestra, determined and inexorable. Then follows a low deep wailing of the flutes and horns, full of tenderness, of aspiration, of subdued ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... the past has been accomplished not by the total overthrow of institutions so much as by discarding that which was bad and preserving that which was good; not by revolution but by evolution has man worked out his destiny. We shall miss the central feature of all progress unless we hold to that process now. It is not a question of whether our institutions are perfect. The most beneficent of our institutions had their beginnings in forms which would ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... to stop him. "Alas!" said he, "All advice would be useless. I can foretell destiny, but I cannot change it. M. de la Perouse would laugh if he heard my words, as the son of Priam laughed when Cassandra prophesied; and see, you begin to laugh yourself, Count Haga, and laughing is contagious: your companions are catching ...
— The Queen's Necklace • Alexandre Dumas pere
... in form and character. To the unprogressive ritual element it brought these conceptions, itself—he pterou dunamis, the power of the wing—an element of refinement, of ascension, with the promise of an endless destiny. While the ritual remains fixed, the aesthetic element, only accidentally connected with it, expands with the freedom and mobility of the things of the intellect. Always, the fixed element is the religious ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... like a tidal wave. No possible room for doubt remained. "Gus" was the only Gus in New York that mattered, and this resolute and injured female before him was the Girl Friend, in whose slim hands rested the happiness of New York's baseball followers, the destiny of the unconscious Giants, and the fate of his thousand dollars. A strangled croak proceeded from his ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... readily be formed into habits. It is worth noticing that back of the act lies an interest; in the act lies the seed of a habit; ahead of the act lies behavior, which grows into conduct, this into character, and character into destiny. Bad interests should be shunned and discouraged. But even that is not enough. Good interests must be installed in the place of the bad ones from which we wish to escape, for it is through substitution rather ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... away; Kish Taka was evidently asleep. Howard set his canteen down in the shade of a bush, found another bush for himself, and lay as the Indian was lying, on his back, relaxing his body. He did not regret having shared his water with an Indian, but he wondered why his destiny at this time of need had sent to him another thirsty mouth. Further, he allowed himself to wonder soberly if he would ever see his green fields again. He measured his chances with a steady mind, and in the end his mouth ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... of destiny That went down scornful under many spears; Who soon as we are born are straight our friends, And live in simple music, country songs, And mournful ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others
... many right hands born to manual labor, there was nothing in its fundamental shape to bear out the physiological conventionalism that gradations of birth, gentle or mean, show themselves primarily in the form of this member. Nothing but a cast of the die of destiny had decided that the girl should handle the tool; and the fingers which clasped the heavy ash haft might have skilfully guided the pencil or swept the string, had they only been set to ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... though savages by name, were warriors, were men of hearts, human and humane. He had proofs of it before him. His mother and sister would share his destiny; but Catalina,—ha! that one thought resolved ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... with a great deal of esprit, to whom forty years' experience of the great world had given a prodigious perspicacity of judgment, the Duchess of Chalux, arbitress of the opinion to be held on all new comers to the Faubourg Saint Germain, and of their destiny and reception in it;—one of those women, in a word, who make or ruin a man,—said, in speaking of Gerard de Stolberg, whom she received at her own house, and met everywhere, 'This young German will ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... heroine. There was no exaggeration in saying that many incidents of her life would appear improbable in fiction. Her adventures with the Marquis de Salvo form one of the prettiest romances in the Italian language; everything in her destiny was touched with adventure: nor was it the least of her claims to sympathy that she had incurred the ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... myself doomed to an obscure life of little usefulness to others, and less enjoyment to myself. Among my privations I must rank that of spending my days in unconnected solitude. Who will willingly share the scant portion of bare sufficiency, or interweave their destiny with the tangled web of my intricate fortunes? Would you plant a flourishing eglantine under the blasted oak? Remove it from such a neighbourhood, or the blessed rain passing through the blighted branches, will affect its verdure with pestilent mildew, ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... he was enabled to carry out at once certain extensions which he had quite expected would only be justifiable after the lapse of some years. But, while prospering beyond his highest anticipations, what of the growth of the true man, the development of the great human soul, which craves a higher destiny than mere grovelling among the sordid things of earth? While supremely unconscious of any change in himself, there was nevertheless a great change—a very great change indeed. It was inevitable. A life so narrow, so circumscribed, so barren of beauty, lived so solitarily, away from every ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... shop, Andrew took down a volume from his bookcase. "Receive this as a parting gift from one who wishes you well, and who, although his body is chained to his counter, will accompany you in spirit to those far-off Eastern lands it may be your happy destiny to visit," he said, as he handed the book to me, with a kind look which showed ...
— Saved from the Sea - The Loss of the Viper, and her Crew's Saharan Adventures • W.H.G. Kingston
... followed the Hero away from St. Domingo to his grave, and afterwards the thought of the remaining negroes came very faintly back. We read what Napoleon said of his own conduct in the matter; but with the abolitionist Miss Martineau on one side, and the doubtful Man of Destiny on the other, the pure fact grew very attenuated, and I am not now sure that I have seen it. The moment your curiosity is really aroused about an historical circumstance, the glasses through which you have been ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... the beauties, which could only be voluntarily surrendered to HAMET. They heard him with a vacant countenance of surprize and wonder; and while he waited for their reply, they agreed among themselves, that no man could avoid the destiny that was written upon his head; and that if ALMEIDA had thus been taken from HAMET, and given to ALMORAN, it was an event that by an unchangeable decree was appointed to happen; and that, therefore, it was their duty to acquiesce. ...
— Almoran and Hamet • John Hawkesworth
... he had associat himself with Tydeus, Capaneus and other impious commanders marching to the siege of Thebe." ("Gillespie's Miscel. Quest.," p. 178.) AEschylus makes Eteocles give the following description of the character of Amphiaraus, and foretell his destiny.—("Septem cont Thebas," ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... by the mercilessness of a destiny that had so outraged right. She was wholly innocent of having done any wrong. She had struggled through years of privation to keep herself clean and wholesome, worthy of those gentlefolk from whom she drew her blood. And earnest effort had ended at ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... fall flat and refuse its office; for it is here that the fate of every heroine culminates. For what are women born but to be married? Old maids are excrescences in the social system,—disagreeable utilities,—persons who have failed to fulfil their destiny,—and of whom it should have been said, rather than of ghosts, that they are always in the wrong. But life, with pertinacious facts, is too apt to transcend custom and the usage of novel-writers; and though the one brings a woman's legal existence to an end when ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... beautiful secret; but it was strange to him to see how to Maud it seemed like the realisation and fulfilling of all desire, the entering into a kingdom; it was not only the satisfaction of all the deepest vital processes, but something glorious, unthinkable, the crowning of destiny, the summit of life. There was no reasoning about it; it was the purest and finest instinct. But with Howard it was not thus. He could not look beyond Maud; and it seemed to him like the dawning of a new influence, ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... this narration not only a picturesque, almost a melodramatically picturesque glimpse of the poet's apparition to those quiet monks in their seagirt house of peace, but also an interesting record of the destiny which presided over the first great work of literary art in a ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... greater honor than court or field can bestow; but even this honor is far surpassed by that which comes to a man when a woman of rare intelligence, tact and knowledge of society and the world, unburdens her heart of all its hopes and fears, and unhesitatingly leaves her destiny to be shaped by his love. Women like Alice Mayton do not thus give themselves unreservedly away except when their trust is born of knowledge as well as affection, and the realization of all this changed me on that afternoon from whatever I had been into what I had long hoped ...
— Helen's Babies • John Habberton
... nothing to do with converting heathens or others to Christianity. It has to do with that awful government of the world, of which the Bible preaches from beginning to end; that moral and providential kingdom of God, which rules over the destiny of every kingdom, every nation, every tribe, every family, nay, over the destiny of each human being; ay, of each horde of Tartars on the furthest Siberian steppe, and each group of savages in the furthest island of the Pacific; rendering to each man according to his works, rewarding the good, ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... alone, it may be presumed that, in these remarks, Mr Swiveller addressed himself to his fate or destiny, whom, as we learn by the precedents, it is the custom of heroes to taunt in a very bitter and ironical manner when they find themselves in situations of an unpleasant nature. This is the more probable ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... from all that is created and finite, and is elevated above all that is finite; comp. my Commentary on Rev. iv. 8. Believers are holy, because they are separated from the world as regards their moral existence and their destiny. Here only the latter aspect is considered. Holy in a moral sense they were already, inasmuch as it is this which forms the condition of their being spared in the divine judgments. They became holy because they are partakers ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... serfdom; and if, in doing so, either can help the other, it must be done—but in friendship, not in love. To you, through good conduct, there may open, even in slavery, many posts of influence and profit; and, in so much, of better worth than our own boasted liberty with poverty. And as for me—I see my destiny already beckoning me to a position such as many a free Roman ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... opinion of Mr. Ellsworth, the result of observation and experience, himself largely interested in ascertaining the safest and surest course to be pursued. The destiny he has indicated for this beautiful fertile region of country, will undoubtedly be fulfilled; it will become a great pastoral, stock-raising, and ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... Rome with a notice of divorcement to Octavia, and with an order that she should leave his house. Octavia obeyed. She went forth from her home, taking the children with her, and bitterly lamenting her cruel destiny. ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... fleeting charms must lie Decayed, unnoticed and o'erthrown, Oh, hasten not its destiny, Too ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... and can read the future. It was I who summoned this storm to drive you hither that you might hear your fate, that fate which the stars last night revealed to me. Ah! ah! ah! you now wish that you had passed by instead of seeking shelter beneath my roof; but your destiny drove you hither, and against ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston
... stolen from Heaven. Jupiter is represented as attaching the terrible consequences of a rational and responsible vitality, thus conferred upon a creation of earth, by sending this wonderfully gifted Pandora into the world loaded with all the evils which it was fated to endure. It was her destiny to be the occasion of the fall, the instrument of doom; but her fortunes are linked to the resurrection and life, as well as the suffering and death of the race. Among the gifts of Pandora which had otherwise been fatal, she brought hope which lay concealed after ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... goddaughter in her chamber until midnight. Secure from interruption, the two women told each other the sorrows of their lives, and exchanged their sufferings. As Agathe listened to the last echoes of a soul that had missed its destiny, and felt the sufferings of a heart, essentially generous and charitable, whose charity and generosity could never be exercised, she realized the immensity of the desert in which the powers of this noble, unrecognized soul had been ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... other end there hung a vast mirror in which there was reflected the reality behind all these appearances. She seemed, with her contracted brows and compressed lips, to be watching its image of her destiny and checking it with her reason's estimate of the case. "Yes!" she sighed, and shivered and stiffened her back as if there had fallen on her something magnificent and onerous. "I am twice as responsible for Richard as most mothers are ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... vaine, in vaine, O Cassius all in vaine, Tis Heauen and destiny thou striuest against. Titin. VVhat better hope or more accepted tydinges, Ist Noble Cassius from the Battell bringes? Cassi. This haples hope that fates decreed haue, Philippi field must bee our haples graue. 2410 Titin. And then must this ...
— The Tragedy Of Caesar's Revenge • Anonymous
... he dogged Swann's winding and devious path as far as possible. Apparently Swann had checked his irregularities as far as Lorna was concerned. Still Lane trusted nothing. He became an almost impassive destiny with the ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... canons and unities and other things which every well-bred dramatist is bound to respect that his work is really unworthy of serious criticism (orthodox). Indeed he knows no more about the dramatic art than, according to his own story in "The Man of Destiny," Napoleon at Tavazzano knew of the Art of War. But both men were successes each in his way—the latter won victories and the former gained audiences, in the very teeth of the accepted theories of war and the ...
— Arms and the Man • George Bernard Shaw
... music,—alluring, baffling, and evasive. This time we have the landscape of the night, the glamour of moon and stars,—pictures half real and half unreal, mystic imaginings, fancies, dreams, and the enchantment of "faerie," and throughout the unanswered cry, the eternal "Wherefore" of destiny. Dawn ends the song with a fine clear note, the return of day, night's misty phantoms rolled away, and the world itself, again green, ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... up with it; he looked upon himself as a born coward, and all the time he knew that he was destined for the army. He could not have avoided his destiny without an explanation, and he could not explain. But what he could do, he did. He hunted deliberately, hoping that familiarity with danger would overcome the vividness of his anticipations. But ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... and banishing uncertainty, a strong, well-balanced, broad-minded, self-abnegating chief executive, and she proposed to furnish one. Whether she would succeed or not must be left to the future to reveal, but the one great task set by destiny for her to accomplish was to prepare the mind of a worthy successor to meet openly and intelligently the problems which had been too vast, too new and too complicated for her predecessors, if not for herself, ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland
... this little book being to start from the influences that determine man's destiny in a physical, external, necessary sort of way, and to work up gradually to the spiritual, internal, voluntary factors in human nature—that strange "compound of clay and flame"—it seems advisable to consider law before ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... Barzello, "from pure love for her three brothers, of whom I spake, saw fit to leave her native land and venture her future destiny ...
— The Young Captives - A Story of Judah and Babylon • Erasmus W. Jones
... that appeared as natural as the dropping of a leaf, she pressed down the eyelids over the expressionless eyes. "Well, that's the way life is, I reckon," she remarked, as an epitaph over the obscure destiny of Mrs. Green. ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... of the name can sit on the brink of a great canyon or gaze up from the dark depths of a gorge without a sense of awe and wonder. There, as in few other places, Nature shows with unmistakable grandeur the marvelous power and certainty with which her laws work out the destiny of ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington
... would now come to the subject under discussion. He should think meanly of his hon. colleagues if they consented to bestow their approbation upon a mere astronomical production. Had they forgotten that they once were considered the arbiters of fate, and the prognosticators of man's destiny? What had lost them that proud position? Was it not the infernal march of intellect, which, after having turned the earth topsy-turvy, was now disturbing the very universe? For himself (others might do as they pleased), but he stuck to the venerable Partridge,[659] ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... and carried more than his share of the load. But now and again he stopped to look over at the outline of Building A, limned hard against hot blazing sky. And each time it was with a sense of heady exhilaration that he thought of his destiny—his hard-earned, dearly bought destiny. To be among that select group who would first set foot upon the surface of ...
— The Stowaway • Alvin Heiner
... evening we have no pleasures to hope for, is it worth the trouble of dressing and undressing? Does the sun shine on me to-day, that I may reflect on what happened yesterday? That I may endeavour to foresee and control, what can neither be foreseen nor controlled,—the destiny of the morrow? Spare me these reflections, we will leave them to scholars and courtiers. Let them ponder and contrive, creep hither and thither, and surreptitiously achieve their ends.—If you can make use of these suggestions, without swelling your ...
— Egmont - A Tragedy In Five Acts • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... painting Valentine tried to excel in, the same unhappy destiny seemed always in reserve for each completed effort. For years and years his pictures pleaded hard for admission at the Academy doors, and were invariably (and not unfairly, it must be confessed) refused even the ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... bad luck, I'm afraid," he muttered as he went to get his axe from the rack. He was as fond of his axe as a soldier of his musket, but to-day he shouldered it with reluctance. He felt like a man with his destiny before him. The tree stood like a sentinel. He raised his axe, once, twice, a dozen times, but could not bring himself to make a cut in the bark. He walked backwards a few steps and looked up. The funereal ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... likewise overthrown or destroyed; and the integrity of the Union of the States and the majesty of the Constitution as a charter of organized liberty were vindicated, and the American Republic, full-orbed, was perpetuated, under one flag, and with one destiny. ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... Slovenes, in declaring that it is the desire of our people to free itself from every foreign yoke and to constitute itself a free, national and independent State, a desire based on the principle that every nation has the right to decide its own destiny, are agreed in judging that this State should be founded on the following modern ...
— The Russian Revolution; The Jugo-Slav Movement • Alexander Petrunkevitch, Samuel Northrup Harper,
... I expect to reap ten or twenty bushels. I can sow in one day what will take ten men to reap. The Spaniards have this proverb: "Sow a thought and reap an act. Sow an act, and reap a habit. Sow a habit, and reap a character. Sow a character and reap a destiny." And it takes a longer time to reap than to sow. I have heard of a certain kind of bean that reproduces itself a thousand fold. One thistle-down which blew from the deck of a vessel is said to have covered with ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Dwight Moody
... period, in the early foolishness of England in her own colonies. In both cases there is an attempt to suppress individuality and initiative, to exploit, to bully, to Downing Street-ify. It was a policy of Unionism, the sort of Unionism that linked the destiny of the lady to that of the tiger. The fruits of it were a little bitter in the eating. The colonies in which under the Home Rule regime "loyalty" has blossomed like the rose, were in those days ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... hers. He dared not let such an accident happen now. And yet—surely she saw the situation! Was the inscrutable seriousness with which she applied herself to his lesson a mockery? There was such a bottomless depth in her eyes that it was impossible to guess truly. Let it be that destiny alone had ruled that their hands should be ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... of our absence to settle our destiny; she had rented her villa. This was one of the bitter dregs. Another was to find that the life of the village seemed to pass us by; it gave us to understand, with unflattering frankness, that for strangers who made no bargains ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... Adam. He is the lineal ancestor, twentieth in direct ascent, of the little Boy now sleeping in his cradle at Berlin; let him wait till nineteen generations, valiantly like Conrad, have done their part, and gone out, Conrad will find he is come to this! A man's destiny is strange always; and never wants for miracles, or will want, though it sometimes may for ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... we of all others! The gods were doomed to die. Uranus was mutilated by Saturn, and Saturn by Jupiter. He will be himself annihilated. Each in its turn. It is destiny!" ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... Charles J. Patterson, coming thus upon Noble's ear, was like an unexpected shrine on the wayside where plods the fanatic pilgrim; and yet Mr. Patterson was the most casual of Julia's uncles-by-marriage: he neither had nor desired any effect upon her destiny. To Noble he seemed a being ineffably privileged and fateful, and something of the same quality invested the wooden gateposts in front of Julia's house; invested everything that had to do with her. What he felt about her father, that august old danger, himself, was not only the uncalled-for ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... Let the Boa sleep, And Rabbits, that have given bills to destiny, Meet his demand at three and six months' date! (We know such Boas and rabbits, Know we not?) Let me pass on! And here 'tis cool; nay, even ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... of reciprocated affection; yet if the religious part of their home-mission remain unfulfilled, their family is divested of its noblest attraction; its greatest interests will fall into ruin; its highest destiny will not be attained; and soon its fruits will be entombed in oblivion; while their children, neglected and perishing, will look back upon that home with a bitterness of spirit which the world can neither soothe ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... pieces presently,—American institutions an alternative between fallacy and absurdity, the fruit of raw minds and precocious theories;—American liberty a contradiction;— American character a compound of quackery and pretension;—American society (except at Mrs. Evelyn's) an anomaly;—American destiny the same with that of a Cactus or a volcano; a period of rest followed by a period of excitement; not however like the former making successive shoots towards perfection, but like the latter grounding every new face of things upon the demolition of that which went before. Smoothly and pleasantly ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... If he went away he must go without consent or parental blessing; he must slip away in the night with his few possessions packed in his battered bag. Very well; if that were the only way, it must be his way. The voices were calling—always calling—and it might as well be tonight. Destiny is impatient of temporizing. Yes, tonight he would start out there, somewhere, where the battles were a man's battles, and ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... he might have been able to render to God and his neighbour had he been in health. He wished to suffer because to do so was the good pleasure of God, Who held the keys of his life and of his death, of his health and of his sickness, and of his whole destiny. ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... the message from the hands of the Maori bearer. As he deciphered it his fingers trembled with eagerness. 'Oh, Heaven! Here is the Hand of Destiny!' he exclaimed, when he had read the message; and with pallid face he ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... the United States, which afforded, in his opinion, "the most magnificent picture of human happiness" which the world had ever seen. And this because in America, more than in any other country, each citizen was free to live his own life, manage his own affairs, and work out his own destiny, under the protection of just and equal laws. As regards political institutions in England, he seems to have been converted rather gradually to the belief that Reform was necessary. In 1819 he ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... sung that "there's a destiny that shapes our ends." At eight years of age, as already stated, two events occurred which had much to do in giving direction to my after life. The one the death of my father, as formerly mentioned; the other the insurrection of Nat Turner, of South Hampton, ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... delighted to portray. The omnipotence of Fate, in their opinion, was more shown in the destruction than the rewards of the good. Success in life they were willing enough to ascribe to the able conduct of the persons concerned; they only began, like the French, to speak about destiny when they were unfortunate. Their ignorance of the fundamental principles of religion, familiar to every peasant in Europe, shines forth in every page of Sophocles and Euripides. The noblest tragedy of AEschylus, the Prometheus Vinctus, is intended to portray the highest divine benevolence ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... Schley was secretly furious at his having found out what she had been doing, still more furious at his having dared to criticise any proceeding of hers. To revenge herself at one stroke on both Lord and Lady Holme she had turned to Leo Ulford, whose destiny it evidently was to be used as a weapon against others. Long ago Lady Holme had distracted Leo's wandering glances from the American and fixed them on herself. With the instinct to be common of an utterly common nature Miss Schley had resolved to awake a double ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... manner destiny willed that two great personages forever lie side by side in death; and consequently the Taj is enriched as a temple of sentiment; but—they do not sleep within the marble caskets the traveler beholds. ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... have children, how surpassing is the bliss, while their own gay prime is mellowly subsiding into age, to trace the features and the virtues they adored in youth, renewed before their eyes, and feel themselves the proud and grateful authors of each other's joy—Ah! trust me, uncle! such a destiny is beyond the reach of fortune's malice; 'tis the ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... jealously, God knows I did, but it was not with that other dead love, which shall never be revived on earth. In the sight of heaven we belonged to one another, a pledge is a pledge, in spite of all the subterfuges and impediments of destiny, and we were pledged to one another. Therefore do I weep my widowed love, as if men had called her mine, ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... where all men are upon an equality. When I look around me, and see what I have made myself in spite of circumstances, and think what I might have been with the same heart and brain beneath a fairer skin, I am almost tempted to curse the destiny that made me what I am. Time after time, when scraping, toiling, saving, I have asked myself. To what purpose is it all?—perhaps that in the future white men may point at and call me, sneeringly, ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... sadly. "Only this. I met her first at Vienna when I was thirty-five, and she was eighteen. I treated her shamefully. Marriage seemed to me, with all my dreams of great achievements, an act of madness. I believed in myself and my career. I believed that it was my destiny to restore the monarchy to our beloved country. And I wanted to be free. I think that I saw myself a second Napoleon. So I won her love, took all that she had ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... live freely, and contract their marriages in the waters of the sea. With us it is different, because half of us must live within the other half or perish. Parasites upon the rest, levying a daily toll of nutriment upon their hosts, they are yet in some measure the arbiters of the destiny of those within whom they dwell. At the moment of union of two gametes is decided the character of another zygote, as well as the nature of the population of gametes which must make its home within him. The union once affected the inevitable sequence takes its ...
— Mendelism - Third Edition • Reginald Crundall Punnett
... The destiny of poor Lily was also in his keeping, and for her to be sold was to be consigned to a fate worse than death to a pure-minded girl—a fate which both of them were old enough ...
— Watch and Wait - or The Young Fugitives • Oliver Optic
... day you will all have one common thought, common interests, a common destiny; you will embrace each other, and recognize each other as children of the same blood and of the same race; that day you shall no longer be hostile tribes—you will be a people; you will be no longer merely Burgundy, Normandy, Brittany, Provence—you will be ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... one of a saintly young shepherdess of Nanterre, known as Ste. Genevieve. Like the shepherdess of our picture, she was a dreamer, and her strange visions and wonderful sanctity set her apart from childhood for a great destiny. She grew up to be the saviour of Paris, and to-day her name is honored in a fine church dedicated to her memory. It was the crowning honor of Millet's life that he was commissioned to paint on the walls of this church ...
— Jean Francois Millet • Estelle M. Hurll
... wrappered and sheltered all your life. And yet you understand me better than any of the people I meet. All my life I have fought with myself. I might have been a gentleman and I'm only a wolf. My appetites and passions, stronger than myself dragged me down. It was Kismet, the destiny ordained for me from ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... console myself with the assurance; but my blood curdled with a new conviction that arose and clung to me, and would not be cast off—the certainty that, by the utterance of one word, I had, for good or ill, linked to my future destiny the reasonless and wretched being, who stood and shrieked beneath the casement long ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... than half an hour a medical man was on board; and by his order King was immediately wrapped up in blankets and taken ashore. He was in the last stage of intestinal inflammation; and an hour more would have sealed his destiny. I need not say, that for many days life oscillated uncertainly between death and the vigour of his constitution; but R—— had the good fortune to secure the services of a most skilful, though young, Norwegian physician. None of us can speak too highly of the kindness ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... being sewn in a sack and thrown into the water. She envied that blue-stocking of the desert, Lady Hester Stanhope; she longed to be a sister of Saint Camilla and tend the sick and die of yellow fever in a hospital at Barcelona; 'twas a high, a noble destiny! In short, she thirsted for any draught but the clear spring water of her own life, flowing hidden among green pastures. She adored Byron and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or anybody else with a picturesque or dramatic career. Her tears were ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... greater and better. The American people, however, did not intend to force their beliefs upon other nations. But the Germans were led by the idea that German Kultur would be a blessing for all mankind and that it was their destiny to conquer ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... but just taken off my dusty clothes, bathed my face and hands with cold water, and stepped out on the verandah, when a storm of music burst out from a little summer-house on the grass. Wherever I go this sort of ovation follows me. Music and flowers seem to be my destiny. No matter where I roam, in all the steamboats and hotels they send storms of homage after me. Well, I am grateful, and I hope bear these honors ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... he must necessarily endure on such a march, &c. But all was unavailing. Young Burr was determined, and was immoveable. He forthwith selected four or five hale, hearty fellows, to whom he proposed that they should form a mess, and unite their destiny on the expedition through the wilderness. To this arrangement they cheerfully acceded. His friend Ogden, and others of his acquaintance, were conveyed in carriages from Cambridge to Newburyport, distant about sixty miles; but Burr, ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... the English knight perceived that he had lost so favourable an opportunity of acquiring fame, and was obliged to submit to his destiny, or be slain upon the spot. There was only one consolation, that no battle was ever more honourably sustained, being gained as much by accident ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... endows a man at once with the genius of Dante and the appearance of a Greek god, that man holds the world in the hollow of his hand. He was born with a purpose. He dares not seek to evade his destiny." ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... God," exclaimed an old Arabian chronicler, "is the destiny of princes; he alone giveth empire. A Moorish horseman, mounted on a fleet Arabian steed, was one day traversing the mountains which extended between Granada and the frontier of Murcia. He galloped swiftly ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... of their best years to the children. These are the productive years, and generally unfit the women to go into economic competition with the rest of the world afterwards. Society owes it to the mothers of the race to see that they are not made to suffer for fulfilling their destiny. Motherhood today is as dangerous as the soldier's life, though it ought not to be, and it is more difficult to raise children than to conduct a successful business. However, the financial rewards for motherhood are generally nil. The least society can do is to see that these ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... their spirits broken by the series of reverses, which had followed without interruption from the first hour of the campaign, to the last disastrous affair of the Garigliano. The very elements seemed to have leagued against them. Further efforts they deemed a fruitless struggle against destiny; and they now looked with melancholy longing to their native land, eager only to quit these ill-omened shores ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... criticism in Carlyle's French Revolution; it remains the most vivid and impressive version of a tremendous drama that has ever been given to the world. Froude and Carlyle had the same scorn of the multitude, the same belief in destiny, the same love of truth. Froude was more sceptical, less inclined to hero-worship, far more academic in thought and style. They agreed in setting the moral lessons of history above any theory of scientific development, and in cultivating ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... said Gerald, cheerfully. "That's what it was made for, you see. A door that does not fulfil its destiny might just as well be something else, skittles, or a ...
— Fernley House • Laura E. Richards |
