"Fatalist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... feelings, without claiming any authority for them. But I am sure I was never in a country where I perceived fewer indications of any spiritual life. Every one is busy; every one seems to be happy or at any rate not discontented; every one chatters and laughs and is, one feels, a fatalist. Sufficient unto the day! After all, it is the women of a nation that chiefly keep burning the sacred flame and pass it on; but in Japan, I understand, the women are far too busy in pleasing the men to have time for such duties; Japan is run by men for men. It is an ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... said at last. "It is making a fatalist of me. I am beginning to think things happen as they are ordained from the beginning, this plainly indicating that there is to be no college, at least, this year, for me. My life is all mountain-top or canon. I wish some one would ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... now, dearest friend, an approximate view of my life and work. That I should be happy you can scarcely expect, but I feel the calm of the fatalist who surrenders himself to his fate, astonished perhaps a little at the often curious manner in which it disposes of me and leads me into unexpected paths, and saying to myself: "So it ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... people. Although she was so enmeshed in family cares most of the time, she could emerge serene when she was away from them. For a mother of seven, she had a singularly unprejudiced point of view. She was, moreover, a fatalist, and as she did not attempt to direct things beyond her control, she found a good deal of time to enjoy the ways of ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... was promptly and efficiently spoiled for anything else but the station in life which should have been mine—but never has been and, now, never can be. I used to have high aspirations, but promises never kept shattered most of my ideals. The hard knocks of life have made me a fatalist, so now I shrug my shoulders. "Che sara sara." I have had to lead my own life and, all considered, I have enjoyed it. I have crowded into thirty-nine years more sensations than fall to the lot of the average ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... preoccupied and they soon fell silent. The Colonel indeed, was nervously sensible that fate was closing in about him, and that he might, at any moment, be betrayed into a false step. For, despite his practical, Yankee common-sense, the old soldier was something of a fatalist, and in the one most critical relation of his life, he had always felt himself subject ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... moral perfections of God, the turpitude of sin, and the necessity of a renewed heart as being essential to religion here and happiness hereafter. But all these considerations are totally independent of the speculations of the fatalist, and are rendered powerless as incentives to action exactly in proportion to the practical influence of these speculations on ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... whose singing generally wakened them, was not to be coaxed into speech, and when Pierre entered the room she rose and left the breakfast-table. The sad eyes of Jim Boone followed her and then turned to Pierre. No explanation was forthcoming, and he asked for none. The old fatalist had accepted the worst, and now he ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... Ajivikas. Their leader Gosala had a personal quarrel with Mahavira but his teaching was almost identical except that he was a fatalist.] ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... helpful circumstances, any definite plan of action arranged beforehand became simply an impossibility. Still, striving to make allowances for the unexpected, I managed to put together a chain of details, trusting, with the blind faith of a fatalist, that these would somehow fall into line when the hour came. If they failed, as was likely, I determined to shift them about in any way possible as each fresh emergency arose. I realized how small a part any preliminary survey holds in such an enterprise as now fronted me, an enterprise to ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... would or not, and even provided that they would, could I retrace my steps from the beginning, after failing to find my own people, and return to the far northern land of Galus? I doubted it. However, I was learning from Ajor, who was more or less of a fatalist, a philosophy which was as necessary in Caspak to peace of mind as is faith to the devout ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Frischemont to Braine l'Alleud. It seemed to him as if destiny had made an appointment with him on a fixed day and was punctual. He stopped his horse and remained for some time motionless, looking at the lightning and listening to the thunder. The fatalist was heard to cast into the night the mysterious words, 'We are agreed.' Napoleon was mistaken; ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... The fatalist, and those who conceive every human volition and action to be the effect of divine agency, have no rational motive, to do, or suffer for religion. "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... tried to rise, turned blindly to seize the jaws that clutched him; and suddenly crouched, loose-jointed, cringing like a trapped wolf—the true fatalist among ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... necessarily hatched a brood of usurers, brokers, contractors, and stock-jobbers, to prey upon the vitals of their country. He entailed upon the nation a growing debt, and a system of politics big with misery, despair, and destruction. To sum up his character in a few words—William was a fatalist in religion, indefatigable in war, enterprising in politics, dead to all the warm and generous emotions of the human heart, a cold relation, an indifferent husband, a disagreeable man, an ungracious ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... him no "one far-off, divine event to which the whole creation moves." Nothing for him but Power. Good and evil concern him not. He recited what we call a crime as impassively as he recited a virtue. So-and-so did such and such. This followed. That is all. He is a fatalist with no more sound philosophy than this: "It is better to be adventurous than cautious, for Fortune is a woman, and to be mastered must be boldly handled. He was a republican, but he believed that strength was the secret of government—strength in ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... rose instantly the remembrance that he had never particularly liked Tommy Rutherford. He was one of the wild men of the battalion. When they went up the line Rutherford was damnably cool and efficient, a fatalist who went about his grim business unmoved. Back in rest billets he was always pursuing some woman, unearthing surplus stores of whisky or wine, intent upon dubious pleasures,—a handsome, ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... exclaimed an obliging fatalist. "The sequence of every one of those cards was determined when ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... To the fatalist, John Stevens would seem to be one of those unfortunate beings doomed to be made the sport of a capricious fortune. His domestic relations in Virginia were a strange intermixture of good and bad. His business had been decidedly prosperous, he had married into a respectable family, and his wife was ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... gain the ascendancy over common sense. Though rather reticent about expressing his religious views, he is in many respects intensely religious. He may admit being superstitious and even boast about it, or declare himself to be a fatalist. Fatalism in the vocabulary of the soldier is just ...
— Over the Top With the Third Australian Division • G. P. Cuttriss
... Hicks, Jr., perching beside the despondent Butch on the Senior Fence. "I am not a fatalist, old man, but it does seem that fate hasn't destined Thor to play football for old Bannister this season! Here, after he won the Ham game, and we expected him to waltz off with Ballard's scalp and the Championship, he has to tumble ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... care little whether I die or continue in the world for some few added years. Lastly, the excitement of adventure has become a kind of necessity for me. I do not think that I could live in England for very long. Also I'm a fatalist. I believe that when my time comes I must go, that this hour is foreordained and that nothing I can do will either hasten or postpone it by one moment. Your circumstances are different. You are quite young. If you stay here and approach your ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... and vigorous. Perhaps he repented his distrust of me. My silver chain was on his neck, and he fingered it. He said that where I led the Malhominis would follow. His wild imagery swept like the torrent of an epic. The man was warrior, dreamer, fatalist. He called on the chiefs of the tribes to witness what I was, what I had done. Water could not drown me, arrows could not harm me. I wore the French garb and my face was white, but I was something more universal than any race. I spoke all tongues. I was like the air which belonged to ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... accustomed; for years they had been my daily food by day and by night, and, as I think I have said elsewhere, I am a fatalist, one who knows full well that when God wants me He will take me; that is if He can want such a poor, erring creature. Nothing that I did or left undone could postpone or hasten His summons for a ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... He was a fatalist, he told her; what would be would be, and mortals like himself and herself were just scattered leaves, like barks floating down a current where were ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... will of Heaven; wheel of Fortune, Ides of March, Hobson's choice. last shift, last resort; dernier ressort [Fr.]; pis aller &c (substitute) 147 [Fr.]; necessaries &c (requirement) 630. necessarian^, necessitarian^; fatalist; automaton. V. lie under a necessity; befated^, be doomed, be destined &c, in for, under the necessity of; have no choice, have no alternative; be one's fate &c n.. to be pushed to the wall to be driven into a corner, to be unable to help. destine, doom, foredoom, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... dinner. It seemed to him that he had awakened from a sort of stupor. Life, so gray yesterday, now appeared full of color and possibilities. Most men who either from choice or necessity have knocked about the world for any length of time are more or less fatalists. Jimmy was an optimistic fatalist. He had always looked on Fate, not as a blind dispenser at random of gifts good and bad, but rather as a benevolent being with a pleasing bias in his own favor. He had almost a Napoleonic faith in his star. At various periods of his life (notably at the ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... very respectable inn, the Sandals, Lockerbys, and Piersons became three possible sources of interest. While his thoughts were drifting in this direction, the squire's letter was received; and the young man, who was something of a fatalist, accepted it as the solution of ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... upon his hips, and his head bent forward. 'I am a fatalist,' he replied, 'and just now (if you insist on it) an experimentalist. Talking of which, by the bye, who painted out the schooner's name?' he said, with mocking softness, 'because, do you know? one thinks it should be done again. It can ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... Alhambra would be totally out of place and contemptible beside the great temple-palace of Karnak. No less would the granite works of Egypt be considered monuments of ill-directed labor if placed in the palace of the gay and luxurious Arab fatalist, to whom the present was everything, and with whom the enjoyment of the passing hour was ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... the meal was done, we each of us fell deep into thought. What was Hans thinking of - that man of the far West, but who seemed ruled by the fatalist doctrines of ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... behaved toward me, simply because she disliked her. But come on, old comrade, we mustn't stand out here all night with the wind howling in our ears. Let us try and forget our troubles. What is to be, will be. I am nothing, if not a fatalist." Grace forced herself to smile with her usual brightness, and the two girls entered the house arm in arm, each endeavoring, for the sake of the other to ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... murmured. "Allah-Akbar! I am a fatalist. Everything is ordained, so why should I bother? I will live for the day. I will live for the ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... gathered from the version here given without much difficulty. It turns on the marriage of Fair Mary, who is one of seven sisters fated to die of their first child. Fair Mary seems to be a fatalist, and, after vowing never to marry, accepts as her destiny the hand of Sir William Fenwick of Wallington. Three-quarters of a year later she sends to fair Pudlington for her mother. Her mother is much affected ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... vindictive and jealous, ordering Abraham to sacrifice his own son to prove his faith, causing whole tribes to be annihilated, even drowning the whole of humanity by the flood, while the God of the Christians is milder and more conciliating; Allah rules as a fatalist and orders the massacre of the Christians and abstinence from alcohol, while Jesus Christ tells men to love their enemies and allows wine; the god of the Hindus orders the widow to follow her husband to the grave; a number of other gods exact human sacrifice; ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... Arabian steed submit to be a vile drudge?" cries the fatalist. Nonsense! A man is not an irrational creature, but a reasoning being, and has something within him beyond mere brutal instinct. The greatest victory which a man can achieve is over himself, by which is meant ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... thing to be a fatalist, not as that word is generally employed, but to accept that, when things happen and not before, God has for some wise reason so ordained them. We have nothing further to do, when the scroll of events is unrolled, than to accept them as being for the ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... me return to a point raised in the first Book in Chapter 1.9. Is the whole of this scheme of things settled and done? The whole trend of Science is to that belief. On the scientific plane one is a fatalist, the universe a system of inevitable consequences. But as I show in that section referred to, it is quite possible to accept as true in their several planes both predestination and free will. (I use free will in the sense ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... to it all. Camille learns to love sometimes, and Oakhurst, the gambler, does not want to part with one who has stood a friend in an emergency. But Camille knows that, for her, few flowers are even annual, and Oakhurst is practical and a fatalist. ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... article in the Annual Review, regards 'vice' and 'misery' as desirable; thinks that the 'gratification of lust' is a 'physical necessity'; and attributes to the 'physical constitution of our nature' what should be ascribed to the 'existing system of society.' Malthus, that is, is a fatalist, a materialist, and an anarchist. His only remedy is to abolish the poor-rates, and starve the poor into celibacy. The folly and wickedness of the book have provoked him, he admits, to contemptuous indignation; and Malthus may be a good man personally. ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... first entered the career of the holy priesthood, it had not been through any vocation of mine. He seemed pleased with my recital, spoke of natural vocations as a Stoic philosopher, and I saw that he was a fatalist; but as I was careful not to attack his system openly, he did not dislike my objections, most likely because he thought himself strong enough to ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... fire, and I have only myself to blame. If I could convince myself that I have any right to be satisfied with men as they are, and to treat them accordingly, and not according, in some respects, to my requisitions and expectations of what they and I ought to be, then, like a good Mussulman and fatalist, I should endeavor to be satisfied with things as they are, and say it is the will of God. And, above all, there is this difference between resisting this and a purely brute or natural force, that I can resist this with some effect; but I cannot ...
— On the Duty of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... in apprehending me, I should instantly have been shot, and my body cast on the rocks to feed the vultures and wolves. But "it was not so written," said Antonio, who, like many of his countrymen, was a fatalist. The next night we had another singular escape: we had arrived near the entrance of a horrible pass called "El puerto de la puente de las tablas," or the pass of the bridge of planks, which wound through a black and frightful ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... however, was not the case. I had not the slightest fear for my own safety: not that I was redeemed from the common lot by any superior courage, but simply that I had confidence in my resources. Though sufficiently reckless in my temperament, I have never been a fatalist. I have saved my life more than once by acts of volition—by presence of mind and adroitness. The knowledge of this has freed me from the superstitions of fore-ordination and fatalism; and therefore, when not too indolent, I take ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... a fatalist," he went on. "Ah, you laugh at me! My people must have been owners of the second sight, I have often told you. Humor me, Will, bear with me. Don't question me too deep. Your flag, Will, I know ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... 'I'm a fatalist. I've lived too long among people with whom it is the deepest rooted article of their faith, to be anything else. When my time comes, I cannot escape it.' He smiled whimsically. 'But I believe in quinine, too, and I ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... the Kentish mainland. First came a kind of gentlemen-at-large breeze, which took him seawards; then a rival gust drove him back; finally the balloon stopped for a couple of minutes to think out the situation. Reginald Hampton, being by nature a fatalist and by training an aeronaut, awaited the decision without any appearance of impatience or anxiety; when his vehicle was ready to move on, he would try to fall on his feet if possible, but not for the world would he ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... occasion Gordon wrote, "It is a delightful thing to be a fatalist"—meaning, commented Burton, "that the Divine direction and pre-ordination of all things saved him so much trouble of forethought and afterthought. In this tenet he was not only a Calvinist ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... processes. They notice the trivial movements and accents which betray the blood of this or that ancestor; they can detect the irrepressible movement of hereditary impulse in looks and acts which mean nothing to the common observer. To be a parent is almost to be a fatalist. This boy sits with legs crossed, just as his uncle used to whom he never saw; his grandfathers both died before he was born, but he has the movement of the eyebrows which we remember in one of them, ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Tony will blame the tide, the hour, the weather, the boat, the sail, the leads, the line, the hooks, the bait, the fish, his mate—anything rather than accept the one fact that, for reasons unknown, the fish are off the bite. A thoroughgoing fatalist would blame, if he did not acquiesce in, ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... company boarded the small cars, which shot through an opening in the wall and into a street of that strange subterranean city. Breckenridge, in the last car to leave the portal, studied his surroundings with interest as his conveyance darted through the gateway. More or less a fatalist by nature and an adventurer, of course, since no other type existed among the older spacehounds of the IPC, he was intensely interested in every new phase of their experience, and was ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... victim and not the agent. Did Madame de Florac play you false when she married her husband? It was her fate, and she underwent it. We all bow to it, we are in the track and the car passes over us. You know it does, father." The Colonel was a fatalist: he had often advanced this Oriental creed in his simple discourses with his son ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... hope and despondency produced by the near approach to the object of his journey, and then finding it elude him, which had occurred twice in the last few weeks. Without knowing it, he was becoming a practical fatalist, inclined to do what seemed best at the moment, and let things slide, forming no plans for a future which was so very uncertain. Not a bad state of mind this for a hot country, where worry of mind is especially trying. Perhaps that is why ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... to make for their being so much less demonstrative in their emotions, and more inured to suffering. They are most eminently a religious people, according to their light, and always refer their sufferings to Divine Providence, though without the stoical or fatalist ideas of their Mohammedan brethren, whom I got to know pretty ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... Makame, the diver — knowing full well what it meant — Fatalist, gambler, and stoic, smiled a broad smile of content, Flattened in mainsail and foresail, and off to ...
— Rio Grande's Last Race and Other Verses • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... earnest scrutiny hidden by the thick lashes that curved downwards to his swarthy cheek, he gazed intently through half-closed eyes at the friend whose presence he found for the first time embarrassing. Fatalist though he was in all things that concerned himself, western influence had bitten deep enough to make him realise that the same doctrine did not extend to Craven. He recognised that self-determination came more largely into the Englishman's creed than into his own. Whether he himself ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... in the man and the situation at the moment was that, through all these gathering necessities, he was by no means continuously anxious or troubled in his mind. During these days of July he gave himself, indeed, whenever he could, to a fatalist oblivion of the annoyances of life, coupled with a passionate pursuit of all those interests where his chances were still good and the omens ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Lord Byron, is the facility which is offered to him of proving the truth of this fatalist philosophy which appears at every ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... burst of popular fury should it break out. But he looks on as a devout man believing God's promises, and seeing past all instruments; he warns her that 'deliverance and enlargement shall arise.' He is no fatalist; he believes in man's work, therefore he urges her to let herself be the instrument by which God's work shall be done. He is no atheist; he believes in God's sovereign power and unchangeable faithfulness, therefore he looks without dismay ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... imputation on either party. Another is, that the allegation that a calamity was inevitable is one so easy to make and so hard to refute that it is constantly employed to close an embarrassing discussion. You cannot argue with a fatalist, any more than with a prophet. Nations whose conscience is clear, statesmen who have foresight and insight, do not throw the blame for their failures upon Destiny. The chieftain in Homer, whose folly has brought disaster, says, "It is not I ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... stupefied. Who would have believed that this trinket that he had found among his father's old traps had come to him from Princess Gulof? that it was the price she had paid for Samuel Brohl's ignominy and shame? Samuel was a fatalist; he felt that his star had set, that Fate had conspired to ruin his hopes, that he was found guilty and condemned. His ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... this news we debated whether it would not be well for us to follow their example and, trekking westwards, try to find a pass in the mountains. Upon this point there was a division of opinion among us. Marais, who was a fatalist, wished to go on, saying that the good Lord would protect us, as He ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... dying words of the Son of God breathe no spirit of mere passive resignation. That is the spirit of the Oriental fatalist, not of the son conscious of his sonship, of his heirship. Even the Lord's Death was not the yielding to inexorable necessity, to the inevitable working of the laws of nature. It was, if anything in His Life was, the deliberate act of His conscious ...
— Gloria Crucis - addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907 • J. H. Beibitz
... anything but a fatalist, yet he had a happy and useful way of taking short views of life. In times of extreme depression he used to say to himself, "Things seem black just now, but I know when I get over the trouble I shall look over the black gap of misery and try to imagine ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... replied, "our houses are, so to say, parasols; in those cities they must be iron shrouds. Ainsi soit il!" she added, and shrugged her shoulders like a little fatalist. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... misplaced name of Fatalism is sometimes substituted for acquiescence, in criticisms of this stamp. In any such sense anybody is a fatalist who believes in a relation between cause and effect. If it is fatalism to assume that, given a certain chain of social or political antecedents, they will inevitably be followed by a certain chain of consequences, then ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... gives to each and all a subtlety and inscrutability corresponding to his exalted estimation of his own craft in the chase and war; and, conceiving himself to live and move only at the mercy of his multitudinous associates, he becomes a fatalist—kismet is his watchword, and he meets defeat and death with resignation, just as he goes to victory with complacence; ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee
... his counsel had an air of easy confidence; Mrs. Saylor the set face and look of an unhappy fatalist; Mary's expression was one of worried interest and sadness; ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... like of which were never known before. There were no Ifrits or Genii to come to his aid, as in the 'Thousand Nights and a Night.' 'Antar' is the epic of success crowning human valor; the tales in the 'Arabian Nights,' at their best, are the fond fancies of the fatalist whose best endeavor is at the mercy ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... yet from somewhere upstairs he heard the half smothered cry of a woman. He gripped his revolver in his fingers. He was a fatalist, and although for a moment he regretted having come single-handed to such an obvious trap, he prepared for his task. He took a quick step forward. The ground seemed to slip from beneath his feet. He staggered wildly to recover himself, and failed. The floor had given from ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... round at the Arabs. She was as much a fatalist as any one of them. She looked at the stranger. ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens |
