"Fatalism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... symbol of mystic revelation. It was not only the motif for all other decoration upon the walls and minor elements of the temple; it was the emblem of the trinity, deep, holy, significant of the mystery of the universe and the hereafter. There was something deeper than mere fatalism; behind all was the fact- rooted faith of ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... which were asserted to have been delivered hundreds of years previously. They had a most pernicious effect upon the mind of the vulgar, as they induced a belief in fatalism. By taking away the hope of recovery - that greatest balm in every malady - they increased threefold the ravages of the disease. One singular prediction almost drove the unhappy people mad. An ancient ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... that after-wit serves no good purpose: whilst I considered the possibility of escape, they looked only at the prospect of being dragged back with pinioned arms by the Amir's guard. Such is generally the effect of the vulgar Moslems' blind fatalism. ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... was at this fatalism (for so it appeared to me), of which he had often shown symptoms before (but I took them for mere levity), now I knew not what to do; for it seemed to me a murderous thing to set such a man on horseback; where he must surely bleed to death, even if he could keep the saddle. But he told ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... excess, and at the same time inspired me with bitter self-contempt. In the innermost recesses of my being the memory of my father dwelt, and poisoned my thoughts at their source. An impression of dark fatalism invaded my sick mind; it was so strange that I should live as I was living, nevertheless, I did live thus, and the visible "I" had but ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... materialist that, right or wrong, they gradually destroy his humanity; I do not mean only kindness, I mean hope, courage, poetry, initiative, all that is human. For instance, when materialism leads men to complete fatalism (as it generally does), it is quite idle to pretend that it is in any sense a liberating force. It is absurd to say that you are especially advancing freedom when you only use free thought to destroy free will. The determinists ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... again complains that Lady Macbeth is "unnecessarily indelicate." "Though this tragedy," says Bell, "must be allowed a very noble composition, it is highly reprehensible for exhibiting the chimeras of witchcraft, and still more so for advancing in several places the principles of fatalism. We would not wish to see young, unsettled minds to peruse this piece without proper ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... this doctrine with pagan fatalism, but I hold that it is akin thereto, and that it tends to the same practical results. It is, in my opinion, worse than pagan fatalism. That doctrine represents all events and actions as strictly necessary, but it binds the gods as well as men. All bow to that mysterious ...
— The Calvinistic Doctrine of Predestination Examined and Refuted • Francis Hodgson
... theological fatalism by this metaphor of a comedy. God wrote the drama which men have to play. In this life we cannot understand our parts. We act what is appointed for us, and it is only when the comedy is finished, that we shall see how good and evil, happiness and misery, were all needed by the great ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... that ideas which he may at first have set forth in order to dazzle his comrades came finally to master his whole being. Certainly the words just quoted betoken a quite abnormal wilfulness as well as a peculiarly subjective notion of fatalism. His "destiny" was to be mapped out by his own prescience, decided by his own will, gripped by his own powers. Such fatalism had nothing in common with the sombre creed of the East: it was merely an excess of individualism: it was the matured ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views." But if you examine the context of Madison's paper, you discover something which I think throws light upon that view of instinctive fatalism, called sometimes the economic interpretation of history. Madison was arguing for the federal constitution, and "among the numerous advantages of the union" he set forth "its tendency to break and control the violence of faction." ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... hours travelling between those prodigious masses of sand. Sand was below our feet, sand in front and behind, sand on each side. A sudden blast would inevitably cover us with it for many feet. It was nervous work. Fatalism alone could have induced men, fully alive to the danger they were incurring, to venture into such a position. To add to our danger, the loaded camels frequently fell down, and we were compelled to take off their burdens to enable ...
— Saved from the Sea - The Loss of the Viper, and her Crew's Saharan Adventures • W.H.G. Kingston
... of fatalism. Here he has not only the wisdom of the East but the logic of the West on his side. Necessity is as incontrovertible to thought as it is incredible to feeling. But in the potent illusion of free-will (if illusion it be) rests all morality and all the admiration that we feel for good and evil ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... but the shouting, I suppose?" Again she shrugged. The fatalism of her training spoke in that shrug, and the necessity for taking everything as it comes—since ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... degenerates into mere blind and helpless fatalism," responded the Afghan. "To do the right now suffices to give absolute trust in God for the hereafter. That is the key of destiny, and each man holds ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell
... so weary that they become oblivious of everything even when shells are falling within a dozen yards of them. They stay in the trenches five days and then get five days' rest. In talking to the men one feels the influence on them of a curious sort of fatalism—they have been lucky so far and will come through all right. One sees and feels everywhere the spirit of a great game. The strain of football a thousand times magnified. The joy of winning and boyish pleasure in getting ahead of the other fellows side by side ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... not decline. The very intensity of the anguish she suffered from the bindings at her wrists, producing a fierce bodily effort to resist it, strengthened her iron-strung nerves. She neither cried for help nor appealed to the Pagan for pity. The gloomy fatalism which she had inherited from her savage ancestors sustained her ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... which, upon the one pressing point, feverishly hurries into new, and all possible channels of thought, requires this pervading absolutism. It is the Erynnis of a bygone creed, in a renovated form of persecuting fatalism, brought to sport with the daily incidents and characters ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... main works 'On Fate,' or whatever name they bear, are written. They tell of the turning of the wheel of Fortune, and of the instability of earthly, especially political, things. Providence is only brought in because the writers would still be ashamed of undisguised fatalism, of the avowal of their ignorance, or of useless complaints. Gioviano Pontano ingeniously illustrates the nature of that mysterious something which men call Fortune by a hundred incidents, most of which belonged to his own experience. The subject is treated more humorously by Aeneas ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... be alike difficult, pointless, and undesirable. Those who oppose have no arguments, so long as the special international needs and conditions of the city are properly recognised and guaranteed. With true Oriental fatalism, the Turk has always regarded his ultimate disappearance from Europe as a certainty; the superstition which led the inhabitants of Stamboul to prefer burial across the straits in Asia has its parallel in the alarm aroused in the bazaars by the Young Turks' decision ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... houses left burning, and this had no communication with either Galata or Pera. But the disaster was a great one. Over fifteen hundred houses had been burnt. The exact number was never known. First because nobody counted them—that would have been quite contrary to oriental indifference and fatalism—and then because it would have been excessively difficult to make them out, in the confused ash heap which had taken their place. The number of families reduced to destitution must have been very considerable, but individual charity is very liberal amongst ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... an indiscriminatory bandog to guard them against (his) conclusions': 'they tugged lustily at the logical chain by which Hume was so coldly towing them and the world into bottomless abysses of Atheism and Fatalism. But the chain somehow snapped between them, and the issue has been that nobody now cares about either—any more than about Hartley's, Darwin's, or Priestley's contemporaneous doings in England.'[505] The judgment goes to ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... and his pooling policy, inherited from McKinley, the fatalism of Russian inertia meant the failure of American intensity. When Russia rolled over a neighboring people, she absorbed their energies in her own movement of custom and race which neither Czar nor peasant could convert, ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... philosophy of Heyst's father—that fatalism which is beyond hope and beyond pity—overshadows, like a ghastly image of doom seated upon a remote throne in the chill twilight of some far Ultima Thule, all the events, so curious, so ironic, ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... Nothing could avert this doom. When his hour came, a man must meet his death, and until his hour came he was safe. It might strike in the midst of the highest happiness, and then nothing could avert the evil, but until it struck he would come safe through the direst peril. This fatalism showed itself among this vigorous pushing race in no idle resignation. On the contrary, the Northman went boldly to meet the doom which he felt sure no effort of his could turn aside, but which he knew, if he met it like a man, would secure him the only lasting ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... point in the enemy's line had been reinforced. Who knows? The best laid plans are often thwarted by the merest trifles,—an insignificant puddle, a jingling canteen. This game of war is a hit or miss game, after all. A certain fatalism is bred thereby, and it is well to set out with a stock of that article. So our resolute advance became a forced reconnaissance, greatly to the chagrin of the younger and more ardent spirits. We found out exactly where the ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... two men looked into each other's eyes and the knowledge of death leaped into Ibraheim Omair's. With the fatalism of his creed he made no resistance, as, with a slow, terrible smile, the Sheik's left hand reached out and fastened on his throat. It would be quicker to shoot, but as Diana had suffered so should her torturer die. All the savagery in his ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... forbear;" and he is said to have observed that "Man is but a pilot; observe the star, hold the rudder, and be not distracted on thy way." Both these schools of philosophy, however, passed into skepticism. Epicureanism became a material fatalism and a search for pleasure; while Stoicism ended in spiritual fatalism. But when the Gospel awakened the human heart to life, it was the Greek mind which gave ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... population of the west midlands and the north of England, possibly of the whole of it, have been made up of the same elements. It cannot be explained by language—nearly one half of the Welsh people speak no Welsh. Some attribute it to the inexorable laws of geography and climate, others to the fatalism of history. Others frivolously put it down to modern football. But no one who knows Wales is ignorant ...
— A Short History of Wales • Owen M. Edwards
... on him in the confessional for every default? Luther is said to have been led into still deeper gloom by his study of the doctrine of predestination. True, but even this study did not lead Luther off into fatalism. It terrified him, because he studied that profound doctrine without a true perception of divine grace and the meaning of the Redeemer's work. However, this study did not at any time permanently affect his vigorous ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... wonderful and illuminating happening in his eleventh year, little Paul Kegworthy had taken existence with the fatalism of a child. Of his stepfather, who smelt lustily of sour beer, bad tobacco and incidentally of other things undetected by Paul's nostrils, and whom he saw rarely, he dwelt in mortal terror. When he heard of the Devil, ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... Allah," said the Turkish admiral to Lady Hester Stanhope, "but I have got two anchors astern," showing that, with all his fatalism, he did not despise what are technically called human means. So the reverend Archdeacon, going down for his sea-baths, might say, "I'm not quite sure they'll carry me safely, but it shall not be all misfortune—I'll take out some of it ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... stiffened what was once a free country with a German formalism and a German fear. By a queer irony, even the same popular writer who had already warned us against the Prussians, had sought to preach among the populace a very Prussian fatalism, pivoted upon the importance of the charlatan Haeckel. The wrestle of the two great parties had long slackened into an embrace. The fact was faintly denied, and a pretence was still made that no pact: existed beyond a common patriotism. But the pretence failed altogether; ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... thought: the body is the soul's beguiling sorceress, but also its helpful comrade; man is the passive clay which the great Potter moulded and modelled upon the Wheel of Time, and yet is bidden rage and strive, the adoring acquiescence of Eastern Fatalism mingling with the Western gospel of individual energy. And all this complex and manifold ethical appeal is conveyed in verse of magnificent volume and resonance, effacing by the swift recurrent anvil crash of its rhythm any suggestion that ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... extremely interesting in a historical point of view, is the character of Jasper Dryfesdale the steward of the Douglas family, in 'The Abbot.' In this man Scott has happily combined the sentiment of absolute feudal devotion to his superiors with a gloomy fatalism learned 'among the fierce sectaries of Lower Germany.' If carefully studied, Dryfesdale will be found to be, on the whole, the most morally instructive character in the entire range of Scott's writings. In the first place, he illustrates the fact, so little ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... teachings of these men and the beliefs of the common people. Only from a study of the epitaphs do we know what the average Roman thought and felt on this subject. A few years ago Professor Harkness, in an admirable article on "The Scepticism and Fatalism of the Common People of Rome," showed that "the common people placed no faith in the gods who occupy so prominent a place in Roman literature, and that their nearest approach to belief in a divinity was their recognition of fate," which "seldom appears as a fixed law of nature...but ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... objected that this proposed method of analysis assumes that religions begin and develop under the operation of inflexible laws. The soul is shackled by no fatalism. Formative influences there are, deep seated, far reaching, escaped by few, but like those which of yore astrologers imputed to the stars, they potently incline, they do not coerce. Language, pursuits, habits, geographical position, and those subtle mental traits which make up ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... old, and already had a desire to measure everything in the crucible of logic or cause and effect, and to accept nothing which did not come within the range of my reason. Looking at things from the standpoint of cause and effect, I was naturally caught in the meshes of fatalism, and this aggravated the religious ...
— To Infidelity and Back • Henry F. Lutz
... tender pity, sensitiveness and shame at the same time. She felt then that death had crouched behind her and was standing so close that it sent a shudder of frenzy through her entire being and cast her into an apathetic indifference. She ceased to think and surrendered herself passively, with the fatalism of people who have suffered long or who have been crushed by some overwhelming misfortune, to the wave that bore her on and did not even ask whither it was ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... is that of free will, which he defends against fatalistic determinism, and endeavors to reconcile with divine causality and foreknowledge. We have already seen (p. xxi) that this was one of the important theses of the Mu'tazilite Kalam. And there is no doubt that fatalism is opposed to Judaism. A fatalistic determinist denies the category of the contingent or possible. He says not merely that an event is determined by its proximate cause, he goes further and maintains that it is determined long in advance of any ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... Pathological and physiological theories of genius.—General characters of great inventors. Precocity: chronological order of the development of the creative power. Psychological reasons for this order. Why the creator commences by imitating.—Necessity or fatalism of vocation.—The representative character of great creators. Discussion as to the origin of this character—is it in the individual or in the environment?—Mechanism of creation. Two principal processes—complete, ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... May Rise Higher, but May Fall Lower How Fatalism Sustains Caste Contamination by Touch A Bone Collector's Pride of Rank The "Thief Caste" Caste and the Banyan Tree A Maharaja's Defence of Caste Some Forces That Are Battering Down the ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... expression of fatalism was genuine enough. It manifested a habit of his thought. One of the characteristics of our time is that it produces men who are determinists by instinct; who, anything but profound students or subtle reasoners, catch at the floating phrases of philosophy and recognize them as the index of ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... Pauline of late years; for Henry Clairville he entertained a certain sad respect, as for a gentleman and landed proprietor fallen from grace indeed, but by the Will of God rather than by personal shortcomings. His tendency to fatalism was Calvinistic in its intensity, and he trod his accustomed path baptizing, marrying, burying, with the sour curve of his thin profile growing sourer every day. Thus this silent, censorious-looking priest presented a strong contrast to the optimistic young Ontarian, yet one emotion was common ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... state of abject fear; despair was knocking at his fine old heart; he was up to his knees in the loathsome brine already, and being so twisted up by his own exertions that to budge another inch was beyond him, he did what a horse is apt to do in such condition—he consoled himself with fatalism. He meant to expire; but before he did so he determined to make his mistress feel what she had done. Therefore, with a sad nudge of white old nose, he drew her attention to his last expression, sighed as ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... of England, the story is an invaluable index to the social, political, and ethical ideals of our Germanic ancestors before and after they settled along the English coast. It is most poetical, and its testimony is historically most valuable, in the character-portraits that it contains. The fatalism that runs through it, instead of making the characters weak and less human, serves at times rather to dignify and elevate them. "Fate," says Beowulf (l.572), recounting his battle with the sea-monsters, "often saves an undoomed man if ...
— Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Exercise Book - with Inflections, Syntax, Selections for Reading, and Glossary • C. Alphonso Smith
... world sees, can never be unmade or re-made. The world harshly preaches the indelibility of character, and proclaims that the Ethiopian may as soon be expected to change his skin or the leopard his spots as the man accustomed to do evil may learn to do well. That dreary fatalism which binds the effects of a dead past on a man's shoulders, and forbids him to hope that anything will obliterate the marks of 'what once hath been,' is in violent contradiction to the large hope brought into the world by Jesus Christ. What we have ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... all a system of fatalism. Independently of ourselves, and far beyond our control, we are reserved for good or for evil by the predestinating spirit that reigns over all things. Unhappy is the individual who enters himself in this school. He ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... neither of them understand, seem to me, between ourselves, indefensible. He to whom God has intrusted a child, and an only child at that, must employ for her preservation all the means that God has made available, and not become careless of them through fatalism or self-sufficiency. If writing tires you, ask your mother to send us news. Moreover, it would seem to me very desirable if one of your friends could be prevailed upon to go to you until you are better. Whether a doctor can help you or not—forgive me, but you cannot judge of that ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... about him on his journeyings, and turned to such good purpose that he had seen a great deal. In doing so, he had simply obeyed the laws of his nature, and we have good reason to believe that he was, to some extent, a fatalist, but of an orthodox school of fatalism withal, that led him to rely upon himself and even upon Providence. He claimed that he was impelled, rather than drawn by his own volition, to journey as he did, and that he traversed the world like the locomotive, which does not direct itself, but is guided and directed ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... Tournefort, speaking of the fatalism of the Turks, says that they always and everywhere leave the world as they found it. According to their own proverb, no grass grows again where the ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... was that everybody was placed in life to fulfil a divine purpose and invested with the power to fulfil it. "No, no, it's not fatalism," Mr. Fargus used to say. "Not predestination. It's just exactly like a chess problem or an acrostic. The Creator sets it. He knows the solution, the answer. You've got to work it out. It's all keyed for you just as the ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... unhappily cut off in an early stage of his labours, and before the complete maturity of his powers, would probably have thrown off an error, the more to be regretted as it gives a colour to the prejudice which regards the doctrine of the invariability of natural laws as identical with fatalism. Mr Buckle also fell into another mistake which M. Comte avoided, that of regarding the intellectual as the only progressive element in man, and the moral as too much the same at all times to affect even the annual average of crime. M. Comte shows, on the contrary, a most acute sense ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... Since then a vague sympathy has remained in me for that man, who was lacking in genius, but whose mind was affectionate and beautiful, and who carried through great adventures a simple courage and a gentle fatalism. Then he is sympathetic to me because he has been combated and insulted by people who were eager to take his place, and who had not, as he had, in the depths of their souls, a love for the people. We have ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... that is the surest reliance: but when human means are available, it becomes a Mahommedan rather than a Christian to rely upon Providence or fate alone, and make no effort for its own preservation. Individuals never fall into this error among you, drink as deeply as they may of fatalism; that narcotic will sometimes paralyse the moral sense, but it leaves the faculty of worldly prudence unimpaired. Far otherwise is it with your government: for such are the notions of liberty in England, ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... barbarians, instead of becoming assimilated by them. It was strong enough to wipe out every trace of Asian and Slavic taint. It was strong enough to keep intact the Latin idea against the steely shock of Asian hordes, the immense, crushing weight of Slave fatalism, the subtleties of ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... can originate outside of New England) is that it cannot leave the moral government of the universe in the hands of divine Providence. I was willing to leave so many things which I could not control to the Deity, who probably could that she accused me of fatalism, and I was held to be little better than one of the wicked because I would not forecast the effects of what I did in the lives of others. I insisted that others were also probably in the hands of the somma sapienza e il primo amore, and that I was so little ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... delight in teaching me all the quaint terms of his fisher dialect, and many a deep argument have we held, I gazing into the burning sulphur of the clouds, he with mobile features flashing and classic brown fingers never still, while he expounded to me his strange, half pagan, half Christian fatalism. He was of the South, "well toward the Boot Heel, signore," but Love, the master mariner, had driven him out of his course and brought him within fifty miles of Rome to court a fickle beauty of the hills, whose brother had ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... whom Pompey personally knew, with a boat to conduct him on shore. His wife and friends distrusted the tone of the reception, and begged him to wait till he could land with his own guard. The presence of Septimius gave Pompey confidence. Weak men, when in difficulties, fall into a kind of despairing fatalism, as if tired of contending longer with adverse fortune. Pompey stepped into the boat, and when out of arrow-shot from the ship was murdered under his wife's eyes. His head was cut off and carried away. His body was left ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... she was a prey to continual terror. She represented in their union the sagacious and fore-casting side,—doubt, opposition, and fear; while Cesar, on the other hand, was the embodiment of audacity, energy, and the inexpressible delights of fatalism. Yet in spite of these appearances the husband often quaked, while the wife, in reality, was possessed of ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... mood of sullen desperation. He drained the vodka bottle. Perhaps the liquor brought him something of the chill Russian fatalism. He was dignified but sodden, with a depression that seemed to blow from the bleak Siberian steppes. His wife was already receiving the adieus of their guests. She was smouldering ominously, uncertain where the blame lay, but certain there ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... also within him a secret fanaticism that was very old, a fatalism, obscure, and cruel, and strange, a lack of scruple that would have revolted almost any Englishman who could have understood it, an occasional childishness, rather Egyptian than Turco-Egyptian, and a quick and instinctive subtlety that came from no ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... incident in the destiny of the soul is alluded to in stanza 1? Interpret ll. 13-14, and apply to your own experience. Why cannot we live "chance's fool"? Is there any hint of fatalism in the poem, or are we held accountable for our ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... has gathered the Pell Street stories of New York's Chinatown which have appeared in American magazines during the past few years. As contrasted with Thomas Burke's "Limehouse Nights," these stories reflect the oriental point of view with its characteristic fatalism and equability of temper. Four of these stories are told with the utmost economy of means and a grim pleasure in watching events unshape themselves. "A Simple Act of Piety" seemed to me one of the best short stories of 1918. The other volume is of more uneven quality, and psychic ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... you're deceived. Perhaps the whole of life is a humbug." So Ned said, with careless fatalism. "Only, if your mates were in trouble you'd be a cur if you didn't stand by them, wouldn't you? That's the difference between you and me, Mr. Strong. You don't believe that we're all mates or that the crowd has any particular troubles and ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... snuffs at the same scent. There was something in him that with fatalistic obstinacy made him one with his trade, in spite of its hopelessness; he had staked everything there, and there the question should be solved. Behind the fatalism of the common people lies the recognition that there is plan and perspective in their life too; such and such a thing is so because it must be so. And this recognition Pelle had no reason ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... There would be nothing to record, no stain could come upon the living. The instinct that kept him true to HER would tell her how he died; if it did not, it was equally well. And with this simple fatalism his only belief, this strange man groped his way to his bed, lay down, and in a few moments was asleep. The storm still roared without. Once again the surges leaped against the cabin, but it was evident that the wind was abating with ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... finding it cold, the deserted room, he made himself busy and laid the fire and set the two chairs hospitably by the hearth. He did not light the fire. It must be ready for her if she came. After it was in order (her house, it seemed to him now, with a fatalism of belief he accepted and did not dwell upon) he sat down by the cold hearth and tried to think. But never of himself. He thought of her: beautiful, lustrous, caged bird with the door of her prison open, and who yet would not go. His mind went ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... evil of the Marxist teaching is this, that it carries the conception of a necessary economic development to the pitch of fatalism, it declares with all the solemnity of popular "science" that Socialism must prevail. Such a fatalism is morally bad for the adherent; it releases him from the inspiring sense of uncertain victory, it leads him to believe the stars in their courses will do his job for him. The common Marxist is ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... it's due in part to their fatalism and their utter indifference to all human suffering. How much do you imagine the great province of the Pun-jab with over twenty million people and half a score rich towns has contributed to the maintenance ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... itself the germ of its own decay, and perhaps a civilisation is no sooner alive than it begins to contrive its end. Gradually the symptoms of disease become apparent to acute physicians who state the effect without perceiving the cause. Be it so; circular fatalism is as cheerful as it is sad. If ill must follow good, good must follow ill. In any case, I have said enough to show that if Europe be again at the head of a pass, if we are about to take the first step along a new slope, the historians of ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... only to lessen his own strength, while that of the enemy continues unimpaired, he begins to tell himself that it is useless to contend longer—that the monster is too strong for him, and he yields at last, from a mixed feeling of fatalism and irritation—a sort of 282 "have-it-your-own-way-then" frame of mind, which seeks to relieve itself from all responsibility by throwing the burden on things in general—the weakness of human nature—the force of circumstances—or any other indefinite and conventional scapegoat, which may serve ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... trial and to the guillotine. In this unveiling of the heart to the world, one sees a noble nature, generous and strong, animated to benevolence by native generosity, and nerved to resignation by fatalism. The consciousness of spiritual elevation constituted her only religion and her only solace. The anticipation of a lofty reputation after death was her only heaven. The Christian must pity while he must admire. No one can ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... goods on her lap, and doubtless the letter in her bosom, sat impressed and subdued, opposite to her in the shifting universe of the cab, which was moving away from the empty and silent home. Florrie was being thrown back out of luxury into her original hovel, and was accepting the stroke with the fatalism of the young and of the poor. And one day Hilda and her mother and Florrie would be united again in the home now deserted, whose heavy key was in the traveller's satchel.... But ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... had it all out of doors, but when I tried my eloquence on Mrs. Ogden I found her firmly persuaded not only that her own ill health and the sickness in the hamlet were "the will of the Lord," but in her religious fatalism, that it was absolutely profane to think that cleansing and drainage would amend them; and she adduced texts which poor uninstructed I was unable to answer, even while I knew they were a perversion; and, provoked as I was, I felt ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... saved, but 'except these abide ... ye cannot be saved,' The belief that God wills anything is a reason for using all means to effect it, not for folding our hands and saying, 'God will do it, whether we do anything or not.' The line between fatalism and Christian reliance on God's will is clearly drawn ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... I then supposed it would be our last opportunity. Heard there of an extensive fire which had raged near the factories, in which over five hundred houses had been destroyed. A fire in Canton is a serious affair, and from the ideas of fatalism which the Chinese entertain, is much dreaded by ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... anything in a hurry and then found they had got to Dover instead of where they wanted to go to,' Dora said. But when it came to dinner-time they went home, so that they were entirely out of it. This often happens to them by some strange fatalism. ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit
... chimneys of many a house rose above the dense woods where in my boyhood I had spent hours and days of happiness. One last look I turned towards the scene of my late catastrophe ere I began to descend the mountain. The postboy, with the happy fatalism of his country, and a firm trust in the future, had established himself in the interior of the chaise, from which a blue curl of smoke wreathed upward from his pipe; the horses grazed contentedly by the roadside; and were I to judge from the evidence before me, I should ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... led in Spinoza. All cognition is taking up the form of the object. The perfection of man is based more on his passive capacities than on his active reason, which is concerned with mere ideas, unreal shadows; the mathematical spirit leads to fatalism, to the denial of freedom. The passive faculties, on the contrary, are in direct intercourse with reality, the senses with external material objects, and the arcanum of the mind, the basis of the soul, the intellect, with spiritual truths and ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... thought of Madame Vauchelet's disappointment by promising herself to call to-morrow. She sat watching the boats and the water and the gay banks of the river with a sense of relief, and a curious sort of fatalism, partly suggested perhaps, by the persistent movement of the boat, and the interminable succession of new scenes, all bubbling with human life, full of the traces of past events. One layer of consciousness was busily engaged in thinking ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... unsaid,—not even imagining in the least what the result of it was to be. He was but a voice, but an instrument,—the passive instrument through which an almighty will was to reveal itself; and the sublime fatalism of his faith made him as dead to all human considerations as if he had been a portion of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... will, however, be clear, for every one of us must be acquainted with angling brothers for whom everything seems to go wrong. Nay, a pretty heavy percentage of even the very first rank have their bad days, and believe in them with a species of fatalism that of course helps on the result they dread. Endless are the angler's troubles if he will but devote himself to developing them. The worst victim is the man who does not take things patiently, who is ever turning the tap of impetuosity on at the main, who begins the day ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... interested. This was the talk of old space hands. They had given the high vacuum of empty space a personality, calling it "high vack," or "Old Man Nothing." With understandable fatalism, they believed—or said they believed—that when high vacuum really wanted you, there ...
— Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet • Blake Savage
... things which impeded him, torturing himself with fears and regrets and fancies, until at last, in a calmer moment, he realized that he was working himself up into an absurd state of nerves over something which was done and could not now be helped. The man had an odd streak of fatalism in his nature—that will have come of his Southern blood—and it came to him now in his need. For the work upon which he was to enter with the morrow he had need of clear wits, not scattered ones; a calm judgment, not disordered nerves. So he took himself in hand, and it would ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... hurried on his business with an activity which nothing could discourage, neither Oriental discursiveness—that refined fair-spoken politeness, under which is hidden ferocity—nor coolly indifferent smiles, nor averted looks, invoking divine fatalism when human lies fail. The self-possession of this southerner, in whom was condensed, as it were, all the exuberance of his compatriots, served him as well as his perfect knowledge of French law, of which the Code of Tunis is only a ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... signals—apparatus enough to put all New York into darkness, or to annihilate it in an instant by the unloosing of terrible cohorts of volts!—and faced an enormous white hall, sparsely peopled by a few colossal machines that seemed to be revolving and oscillating about their business with the fatalism of conquered and resigned leviathans. Immaculately clean, inconceivably tidy, shimmering with brilliant light under its lofty and beautiful ceiling, shaking and roaring with the terrific thunder of its own vitality, this hall in which no common voice could make itself heard produced nevertheless ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... The doctrine of Fatalism seems at first sight to be bound up in the acceptance of Lombroso's theory: but such is not the case. Lombroso himself declares that the type belongs to the born criminal only, and that the born criminal can be nothing more than an epileptic; criminality being a neurosis. It ...
— A Plea for the Criminal • James Leslie Allan Kayll
... of the term, he certainly is, but it is of the earlier type. Cyrenaic would be a juster epithet, the "carpe diem" doctrine of the poem is too gross and sensual to have commended itself to the real Epicurus. Intense fatalism, side by side with complete agnosticism, this is the keynote of the poem. Theoretically incompatible, these two "isms" ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... hoped that leprosy may be "stamped out" by these stringent measures, but the leprous taint must be strong in many families, and the social, gregarious natives smoke each other's pipes and wear each other's clothes, and either from fatalism or ignorance have disregarded all precautions regarding this woful disease; and now that measures are being taken for the isolation of lepers, they are concealing them under mats and in caves and woods. This forlorn malady, called here Chinese leprosy, in the ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... occasions of life, as to amount almost to a play upon words. The associations derived from the ordinary sense of the term will adhere to it in spite of all we can do; and though the doctrine of Necessity, as stated by most who hold it, is very remote from fatalism, it is probable that most necessitarians are fatalists, more ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... equilibrium gives the Law of right and wrong, 859-m. Free will, categorical questions concerning man's, 649-u. Free will consistent with God's Omnipotence and Omniscience, 855-u. Free will coupled with Chance, or Fatalism coupled With Omniscience, 694-l. Free will of God can not formulate an effect without a cause, 736-u. Free will of man influences his life and conversation, 643-u. Free will the essential attribute of the will itself, 723-m. Freedom, civil and religious, must go hand in hand, 33-u. ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... dyed in the illusions of your race,—mystery—fatalism. They become you well. But here among the roses of Konopisht there is no room in my heart or yours for anything but happiness. See how they nod to each other in the sunlight, Marishka. Like us, they love and are loved. June ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... the usual wiredrawn argument for fatalism. Man cannot imagine the universe being created, and therefore is "compelled by his reason" to think the universe without beginning or end, which (I may remark) he cannot imagine either. But the letter ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... reply. "You have a perfect right to be wrong!" There was here a great deal more than a felicitous epigram. This acknowledgment of every man's right to be wrong underlay Townsend's philosophy of life and his religious attitude. Though, curiously enough, he had borrowed a certain touch of fatalism from his intercourse as a young man with the philosophies of the East, he felt very strongly the essential freedom of the will. But that freedom he saw could not exist, could not be worthily exercised, could not, as it were, have its full reward ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... Be the old legend true or false, it is certain that to this day the northern Mujik shows an even more marked religious enthusiasm than his brother of the central governments. Fanaticism, mysticism, and fatalism go ever hand in hand in Northern Russia. The Empire of the Tsars being so vast in area and so embracive of races affords space for all forms of belief, or want of belief, within her boundaries. All creeds are represented, from the pagan Samoyede of ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... conclusions of positive science. He sees that we, as human beings, cannot live in this universe without supplementing our science with some sort of philosophy that will help us to escape from the fatalism of matter and force into the freedom of the spiritual life. If we are merely mechanical and chemical accidents, all the glory of life, all the meaning of our moral and spiritual natures, go ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... fruitful field of history, their success was even more equivocal. They seem to have been wholly destitute of the philosophical spirit, which gives life to this kind of composition. They were the disciples of fatalism and the subjects of a despotic government. Man appeared to them only in the contrasted aspects of slave and master. What could they know of the finer moral relations, or of the higher energies of the soul, which are developed only under ...
— History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella V1 • William H. Prescott
... quite artlessly indignant I fear, with the college authorities, barbarously irresponsible, as it struck me; for when I broke out about them to poor Mother she surprised me (though I confess she had sometimes surprised me before), by her deep fatalism. "Oh, I suppose they don't pretend not to take their students at the young people's own risk: they can scarcely pretend to control their affections!" she wonderfully said; she seemed almost shocked, moreover, that I could impute ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... and literature of both. Past events have unnerved me; and all I can now do is to make life an amusement, and look on while others play. After all, even the highest game of crowns and sceptres, what is it? Vide Napoleon's last twelvemonth. It has completely upset my system of fatalism. I thought, if crushed, he would have fallen, when fractus illabitur orbis, [11] and not have been pared away to gradual insignificance; that all this was not a mere jeu of the gods, but a prelude to greater changes ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... the curtained window only to find iron bars and the glint of a gun barrel. Isidro held the gun, and admonished the storming captive with the gentle fatalism ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... all such matters, both in conversation and action, with levity and even derision. In his subsequent career, like most men exposed to wonderful vicissitudes, he professed, half in jest and half in earnest, a sort of confidence in fatalism and predestination. But on some solemn public occasions, and yet more in private and sober discussion, he not only gravely disclaimed and reproved infidelity, but both by actions and words implied his conviction that a conversion ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... clear light of morning, when the mountain side is dotted with smoke puffs, and every ridge sparkles with bright sword blades, the spectator may observe and accurately appreciate all grades of human courage—the wild fanaticism of the Ghazi, the composed fatalism of the Sikh, the stubbornness of the British soldier, and the jaunty daring of his officers. He may remark occasions of devotion and self-sacrifice, of cool cynicism and stern resolve. He may participate in moments of wild enthusiasm, or of savage anger ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... lack of 'sweet reasonableness.' It claims no attention from the student of English literature, neither would Warburton himself were it not for his association with Pope. Allusion has been already made to Crousaz's hostile criticism of the Essay on Man (1737) on the ground that it led to fatalism, and was destructive of the foundations of natural religion. Warburton, who had previously denounced the 'rank atheism' of the poem, now endeavoured to defend it, and how effectually he did so in Pope's judgment is seen in his grateful acknowledgment ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... the least regard to the information. According to his system of fatalism he would have considered it beyond his power to alter the predetermined course of things, but it is not probable that his mind dwelt upon the thought of personal security. He went straight forward to the village, calling at places where he thought he would most likely find customers for ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... he was discussing religion with the booking-office clerk, and had almost got his head through the hole in his excitement. When we dragged him away it was some time before he would talk of anything but the growth of an Oriental fatalism in modern thought, which had been well typified by some of the official's ingenious but perverse fallacies. At last we managed to get him to understand that we had made an astounding discovery. When he did listen, he listened attentively, ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... ground in a paroxysm of madness, seemed to have something of diabolic origin. A story was told of a demon ancestress of the Angevin princes: "From the devil they came, and to the devil they will go," said the grim fatalism of the day. ...
— Henry the Second • Mrs. J. R. Green |
