"Fatalistic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... indifference, a contempt, which she might find unbearable. The feeling was acute. It was not solely due to dependence upon Toby, but was a part of her long-suffered self-disparagement and a fear, almost fatalistic, that she could never keep a man's interest. The fear grew more intense as she fell into the bitter-sweets of a lover's doubtings. The day must come, and then what would happen? She longed to twine ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... it. What he must admire, and love if he could, was "equilibrium," the void, the tabula rasa, into which, through all those apparent energies of man and nature, that in truth are but forces of disintegration, the world was really settling. And, himself a mere circumstance in a fatalistic series, to which the clay of the potter was no sufficient parallel, he could not expect to be "loved in return." At first, indeed, he had a kind of delight in his thoughts—in the eager pressure forward, to whatsoever ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... literature, and they contemplate the general religious condition of the population with absolute unconcern. It is not that they are unpatriotic or morally trivial that they stand thus disengaged; it is that they have a fatalistic belief in this higher power. Whatever troubles and abuses may arise they have an absolute faith that "in the last analysis" the People ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... only answer: "Yes, yes—" He seemed quite amazed by this extraordinary mechanism—gigantic, weird, unreal in the garish electric lights. Rrisa was frankly staring, for once shaken out of his fatalistic Mussulman tranquillity. ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... to her fatalistic calm. It relieved her sense of inferiority, which familiarity had increased rather than diminished. Yet she was beginning to persuade herself, with some success, that the propriety of Lydia's manners was at least questionable. That morning Miss Carew had not scrupled to ask a man what his profession ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... by. Now we Kurds will grow rich. But as for us"—they shrugged their shoulders like this, sahib, meaning to say that perhaps their day had gone by also. I left them with the impression they are very fatalistic folk. ...
— Hira Singh - When India came to fight in Flanders • Talbot Mundy
... dogmatic grounds, in so far as they acknowledged only the sacred books themselves and conceded authority merely, not canonicity, to the "bequests of the scribes," that is, to canonical tradition;(12) partly and especially on political grounds, in so far as, instead of a fatalistic waiting for the strong arm of the Lord of Zebaoth, they taught that the salvation of the nation was to be expected from the weapons of this world, and from the inward and outward strengthening of the kingdom of David as re-established in the glorious times of the Maccabees. Those partisans ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... herself, and gnawing its contents in privacy, and pondering the meaning without sharing her thoughts with any one, or having to decide whether the book was a good one or a bad one. This evening she had twisted the words of Dostoevsky to suit her mood—a fatalistic mood—to proclaim that the process of discovery was life, and that, presumably, the nature of one's goal mattered not at all. She sat down for a moment upon one of the seats; felt herself carried along in the swirl of many things; decided, in her sudden way, that it was time to heave all ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... one,—"War, yes, in time.... It must come.... But first we must be ready—we are not quite ready yet"; and he predicted almost to a day when Italy, finding herself ready, would enter the great conflict. He showed no enthusiasm either for or against war: his was a curiously fatalistic attitude of mind, an acceptance of the inevitable, which the American finds so ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... life of no other English poet puts upon us. The spell of the great moral problems by which the lives of so many of our poets seem to have been more or less surrounded makes itself felt in every step of Clare's career. We are tempted to speak in almost fatalistic language of the disastrous gift of the poetic faculty, and to find in that the source of all ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... of philosophy, ethics, the Mutakallimun among the Arabians discussed in connection with the justice of God. In opposition to the Jabariya and the Ashariya who advocated a fatalistic determinism denying man's ability to determine his own actions, some going so far as to say that right and wrong, good and evil, are entirely relative to God's will, the Mu'tazila insisted that man is ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... his spirits rose at the thought. Some reckless demon of adventure possessed him; some fatalistic courage was upon him. So far as the eye could see, the liquor he had drunk had done no more than darken the blue of his eye, for his hand was steady, his body was well poised, his look was direct; there seemed some strange ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... seeing what appears to be "a good Line of Fate," and in consequence rush off and predict great success and fortune, whereas, as I explained in the preceding chapter, a Fate Line unaccompanied by the Line of Sun may simply mean a fatalistic life full ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro
... succeeding as you once expected to succeed. Perhaps you have given up your case as "too tough a job." We will assume that you are not so young as you wish you were, and that you have committed to memory the fatalistic, hoary lie, "You can't teach an old dog new tricks." But recall the fixed habit of bitterness the walnut had for centuries, the color and size of the natural calla, the sour taste of the little wild prune, which the plant wizard changed most radically without using ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... story of the life of Jesus is only a chain of debts which fall due, and fulfilments which cannot be avoided." [8] In particular, it has been alleged that the Greek word translated "that," or "in order that," and prefixed to these quotations, implies this fatalistic necessity. But this particular argument is mistaken. In later Greek the use of the word was vaguer than it had been formerly.[9] It cannot be narrowed down so as to prove that the evangelist thought that events in the Old Testament only took place in ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... Pierre, who had been a soldier, and then for several years a servant at the Trappist Monastery at Staoueli; Charmian's maid; and an Arab boy whom everyone called Bibi, and who alternated between a demeanor full of a graceful and apparently fatalistic languor, and fits of almost monkeylike gaiety and mischief which Pierre strove to repress. A small Arab girl, dressed like a little woman in flowing cotton or muslin, with clinking bracelets and anklets, ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... leaps; for the third time the battalions had been brought up to something like strength, and they were full of fight. In the mud and slime of the Somme and Flanders in 1916 and 1917, when each advance was on a narrow front and ceased after a one-day effort, I always marvelled at the patient, fatalistic heroism of the infantry. A man went "over the top" understanding that, however brilliant the attack, the exultant glory of continuous chase of a fleeing, broken enemy would not be his; and that, should he escape wounds or death, ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... people down in those retreats are never tired of saying among each other in their fatalistic way: "It was to be." There lay the pity of it. An immeasurable social chasm was to divide our heroine's personality thereafter from that previous self of hers who stepped from her mother's door to try her ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... because of that as because it was Harney's wish. Since that evening in the deserted house she could imagine no reason for doing or not doing anything except the fact that Harney wished or did not wish it. All her tossing contradictory impulses were merged in a fatalistic acceptance of his will. It was not that she felt in him any ascendancy of character—there were moments already when she knew she was the stronger—but that all the rest of life had become a mere cloudy rim about the central glory of their passion. Whenever she stopped thinking about ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... the fatalistic movement he was beginning to recognize. "Father won't need a night ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... government has innate capacity to protect its people against disasters once considered inevitable, to solve problems once considered unsolvable. We would not admit that we could not find a way to master economic epidemics just as, after centuries of fatalistic suffering, we had found a way to master epidemics of disease. We refused to leave the problems of our common welfare to be solved by the winds of chance and ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... by myself. True, she never quits the general. She is more reassured, and is reassuring to him, at his side. It has an excellent moral effect on him, while I walk about and search like a beast. And she has become as fatalistic as he, and now she sings verses to the guzla, like Boris, or talks in corners with Michael, which makes the two enraged each with the other. They are curious, the young women of St. Petersburg and Moscow, very curious. We were not like that in our time, at Orel. We did not try to enrage people. ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... make him put me in a new window in the parlour—one that will open!" she said positively to Cyril, who accepted Mr. Critchlow's idea with fatalistic indifference. ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... is only for the timid and the small of fist. But I do not counsel following his two variants in the fifth and twenty-third bars. Chopin's text is more telling. Like the vast reverberation of monstrous waves on the implacable coast of a remote world is this prelude. Despite its fatalistic ring, its note of despair is not dispiriting. Its issues are larger, more impersonal, more elemental than the other preludes. It is a veritable Appassionata, but its theatre is cosmic and no longer behind the closed doors of the cabinet of Chopin's soul. The Seelenschrei of Stanislaw ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... the stoical village temper is in part accountable for this indifference. As the arrangement was presumably made over the heads of the people, they doubtless took it in a fatalistic way as a thing that could not be helped and had better be dismissed from their thoughts. Were this all, however, I think that I should have heard more of the matter. Had sudden distress fallen upon the valley, ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... permitting herself one scornful sniff, and put the missive in her pocket. Next day John Tow, the Chinaman, serenely fatalistic, smilingly perpendicular in felt-soled shoes, amidst zipping bullets, brought to the trench a ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... precisely the semi-fatalistic and wholly superstitious address which would find favour with Moslems of the present day they still prefer "calling upon Hercules" to putting their shoulders to the wheel. Mr. Redhouse had done good work in his day but of late he has ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... with whose mysterious secrets she alone, perhaps, in the world, was acquainted, resigned like the Mussulman, and as fatalistic; with the Jew, expectant of the Messiah's coming; with the Christian, a worshipper of Christ, whose beneficent morality she practised—she invested the whole in the fantastic colours and supernatural dreams of an imagination steeped in the light of the East, and, it would ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... instant. The languorous June evening, the fainting sweetness of flowers, the strange lemon-coloured afterglow, and her face, shining there like a star in the twilight—these had waited for him, he felt, since the beginning of earth. That fatalistic reliance upon an outside Power, which assumed for him the radiant guise of first love, and for Susan the stark certainties of Presbyterianism, dominated him as completely as if he were the predestined vehicle of its expression. Ardent, yet passive, Virginia leaned above him on the dim terrace. ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... you see—there's no tellin'. And, arter all my experence, with the best intentions in the world, I can't go and guarantee to you as nothink won't come of it. I wish I could, but, as a honest man, I can't. If it's to be,' moralised this fatalistic plumber, 'it is to be, and that's all about it, and no hefforts on my part or yours won't make hany difference, ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... belief in fate, which leads them, during these epidemics, to neglect or to decline the use of medical remedies. Many a Muslim perishes during such times because of his fatalistic convictions. ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... no great persuasion was needed to turn a simple, imaginative, fatalistic people from a few vague animistic deities to the systematic iconology and the elaborate ritual of the Spanish Church. An obscure Bathala or a dim Malyari was easily superseded by or transformed into a clearly defined Dios, and in the case of any especially tenacious ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... troubled feeling that her intuitions, her fatalistic leanings, were giving her a surer grasp of the subject than his, which was based upon a rather nebulous, logical process that often ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... held the doctrine of "general" redemption, and are now honourably known as General Baptists, preached ordinary Arminianism, and even Socinianism. The more earnest and educated among them clung to Calvinism, but, by adopting the unhappy term of "particular" Baptists, gradually fell under a fatalistic and antinomian spell. This false Calvinism, which the French theologian of Geneva would have been the first to denounce, proved all the more hostile to the preaching of the Gospel of salvation to the heathen abroad, as well as the sinner at home, that it professed to be an orthodox ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... saying of Imetelet is confirmed: "There is an annual balance of crime, which must be paid and settled with greater regularity than the accounts of the national revenue." However, we positivists give to this statement a less fatalistic interpretation, since we have demonstrated that crime is not our immutable destiny, even though it is a vain beginning to attempt to attenuate or eliminate crime by mere schemes. The truth is that the balance of crime is determined by ...
— The Positive School of Criminology - Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901 • Enrico Ferri
... this truth less needful in its bearing on modern theories which will have nothing to say to the supernatural, and in a fatalistic fashion regard history as all the result of an orderly evolution in which the importance of personal agents is minimised. To it Jesus, like all other great men, is a product of His age, and the immediate result ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... says the middle class will disappear, one means that it will disappear as a class. Its individuals and its children will survive, and the whole process is not nearly so fatalistic as the Marxists would have us believe. The new great organizations that are replacing the little private enterprises of the world before machinery are not all private property. There are alternatives in the matter of handling a great business. To the exact ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... guessing this, Bethune refrained from questioning, but talked gaily of books, and sunsets, and of life, and love, and the joy of living. A supreme optimist, she thought him, despite the half-veiled cynicism that threaded his somewhat fatalistic view of life, a cynicism that but added the necessary sauce piquante to ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... same Chinese characters)-signifying 'heart- death,' 'passion-death,' or 'love-death.' They most commonly occur, in the case of women, among the joro [2] class; but occasionally also among young girls of a more respectable class. There is a fatalistic belief that if one shinju occurs among the inmates of a joroya, two more are sure to follow. Doubtless the belief itself is the cause that cases of shinju do commonly ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... almost fatalistic acceptance of failure without reproach yet without despair, which Percy's letter to him had evidenced in so marked a manner—was, mayhap, somewhat beyond the comprehension of this young enthusiast, with pure Gallic blood in his veins, who was ever wont to allow his most elemental passions to ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... feelings, thoughts and resolutions. Nor, I believe, are the facts ever so presented that it seems to us as if the supreme power, whatever it may be, had a special spite against a family or an individual. Neither, lastly, do we receive the impression (which, it must be observed, is not purely fatalistic) that a family, owing to some hideous crime or impiety in early days, is doomed in later days to continue a career of portentous calamities and sins. Shakespeare, indeed, does not appear to have taken much interest in heredity, or ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... trap of horrible, vicious uproar. Instinctively I threw a questioning, perhaps an appealing, glance at my two companions. The Spahi had dropped his hand from his ear. He stood upright, as if at attention on the parade-ground of Biskra. His face was set—afterwards I told myself it was fatalistic. The murderer, on the other hand, was smiling. I remember the gleam of his big white teeth. Why was he smiling? While I asked myself the question the roar of the tom-tom grew gradually less, as if the man beating it were walking rapidly away from us in the ...
— The Desert Drum - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... certain difference of opinion between my bearers and myself, for when we reached the spot where Wambe's boundary was supposed to run, the bearers sat down and emphatically refused to go a step further. I sat down too, and argued with them, putting my fatalistic views before them as well as I was able. But I could not persuade them to look at the matter in the same light. 'At present,' they said, 'their skins were whole; if they went into Wambe's country without his leave they would soon be like ...
— Maiwa's Revenge - The War of the Little Hand • H. Rider Haggard
... there is no possibility of an enduring prophetism, which is the fundamental principle of Christianity. From this separation of God and man, the Mohammedan doctrine of predestination, in distinction from the Christian, acquires its abstract and fatalistic character, whereby man, instead of being regarded as a being in whose free activity God's power and life are glorified, is conceived as a passive instrument of a higher power. To true moral independence, therefore, the Moslem ...
— A Comparative View of Religions • Johannes Henricus Scholten
... permissible to consider the Revolution as being partly a necessity, but it was above all—which is what the fatalistic writers already cited do not show us—a permanent struggle between theorists who were imbued with a new ideal, and the economic, social, and political laws which ruled mankind, and which they did not understand. Not understanding ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... of capital punishment to wipe out its stain of national blood-guiltiness. It may be noticed, moreover, that his stern denunciation of crime and folly has by this time settled down into a philosophic mood that is almost fatalistic, as when he suggests that 'circumstance only brings out the latent defect or quality, and does not create it'; that 'our mental changes are, like our grey hairs and wrinkles, no more than the fulfilment of the plan of mortal growth and decay,' so that each ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... that happens is fast bound by a chain of causes, and therefore takes place with a strict necessity; that the future is already ordained with absolute certainty and can undergo as little alteration as the past. In the fatalistic myths of the ancients all that can be regarded as fabulous is the prediction of the future; that is, if we refuse to consider the possibility of magnetic clairvoyance and second sight. Instead of trying to explain away the fundamental truth ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... said to David. "How happy this is. No wonder they sing. Any one must sing working like this in great fields. Why, I even remember that the Shropshire Lad whistled once by mistake, while ploughing, on his own admission, until a fatalistic blackbird recalled him to ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... resignation. Out of that shock came a sensation of peace. A glowing warmth passed through all her limbs. If d'Alcacer had peered by that smoky light into her face he might have seen on her lips a fatalistic smile come and go. But d'Alcacer would not have dreamed of doing such a thing, and, besides, his attention just then was drawn in another direction. He had heard subdued exclamations, had noticed a stir on the decks ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... in industry is labour. In that territory was a population of 400,000,000 souls—one quarter of the then total population of the earth. Furthermore, the Chinese were excellent workers, while their fatalistic philosophy (or religion) and their stolid nervous organization constituted them splendid soldiers—if they were properly managed. Needless to say, Japan was prepared to furnish ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... for his unconquerable soul. On the whole, however, a fatalistic temper is much easier to trace in modern poetry than is ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... enough now. There was something slow and fatalistic in the way they folded the letter. He looked up from it at length with dark eyes that gazed unwaveringly before him, as though they saw ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... seems to me perfect. It comes forward lightly, gracefully, stylishly. It is lovable, it does not sweat. "All that is good is easy, everything divine runs with light feet": this is the first principle of my aesthetics. This music is wicked, refined, fatalistic, and withal remains popular,—it possesses the refinement of a race, not of an individual. It is rich. It is definite. It builds, organises, completes, and in this sense it stands as a contrast to the polypus in music, to "endless ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... impulse of one Gray straggler, who shook a handkerchief aloft in fatalistic submission to the inevitable, became the impulse of all. Soon a thousand white signals of surrender were blossoming. As the firing abruptly ceased, Marta heard the faint roar of the mighty huzzas of the hunters over the ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... life of the peasants there is of course fun and laughter, as there is in every human life; but at the root there is suffering, not the loud protest of the Anglo-Saxon labourer, whose very loudness is a witness to his vitality—but passive, fatalistic, apathetic misery. Life has been often defined, but never in a more depressing fashion than by the peasant in Gorki's novel, ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... He speaks of the necessity of a belief in God, by a kind of natural logic. God and matter exist in the nature of things, "Tout nous announce un tre suprme, rien ne nous dit ce qu'il est." God himself seems to be a kind of fatalistic necessity. "C'est ce que vous appellerez Nature et c'est ce que j'appelle Dieu." At the end he shifts the argument from the base of necessity to that of utility. Which is the more consoling doctrine? If the idea of ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... that he evolved was mystical and fatalistic; it was also highly unconventional. His creed, based upon the narrow foundations of Jewish Scripture, eked out occasionally by some English evangelical manual, was yet wide enough to ignore every doctrinal difference, and even, at moments, to ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... last, mechanically, and moved forward to the unrailed edge of all things. The magnetism of the depths drew him. The fatalistic strain in his ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... I incline to fatalistic submission. I suppose I had no power to leave him behind.... I wonder and I wonder. The old Utopists never had to encumber themselves with ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... immigration. There are those who take a fatalistic, or a laissez-faire, view of the subject, and declare that the problem will solve itself as the level of American wages comes to be nearly the same as that of the countries of Europe from which our immigration is coming. True enough, if this can be called a "solution." There are many who ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... It is in this fatalistic conception of life that caste is rooted; but for this belief that all things are predestined, no people would ever have been so spiritless as to submit to the tyranny of the caste system. Perhaps it should also be added that the belief in the transmigration of the ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... shell, just as you might be struck by lightning." That is the real philosophy of the soldier. "After all, we are may-be as safe here as you are in Piccadilly," says another; and when men have come unhurt out of infinite danger they grow sublimely fatalistic and cheerful. An officer in the Cavalry Division, for instance, writes: "I am coming back all right, never fear. Have been in such tight corners and under such fire that if I were meant to go I should have gone by now, I'm sure." And it is ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick
... that I shall do in the matter. I've become quite calm, fatalistic. There's nothing else to be." He gathered ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... differing vastly in the character of the man. A year after he was forced out of Lindsay by boycott because of his Scott Act campaign, the freezing of a car of potatoes on a Toronto siding almost wiped out his business. Frankly and modestly, yet with a sort of fatalistic assurance, he discusses the kind of man he thinks himself to have become since he lost those potatoes. He denies that he has ever been interesting; rather bewildered that at one time or another people have taken such ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... mean to indicate that there is necessarily any determined or fatalistic process of natural selection in these things by which one symbol rather than another gathers about it the hopes and fears of the generations. Chance no doubt plays a strange part in all this. But the concrete necessities of living human ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... thing, like his love for the mother of years ago. "It will be easy to die for her," he told Peter, and this, in the end, was what he knew he was going to do. Thought of the inevitable did not make him afraid. He was determined to keep his freedom and his life as long as he could, but he was fatalistic enough, and sufficiently acquainted with the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, to know what the ultimate of the thing would be. And yet, with tragedy behind him, and a still grimmer tragedy ahead, the soul of Jolly Roger was not dead or in utter darkness. In it, waking and sleeping, he ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... not arrive, Mrs. Dunlop went out to the front gate to see if there were signs of his approach. At the same moment Allan entered the house by the back door, and looked about for his mother. Impelled by a "fatalistic necessity" he went up to her room, the sound of his carefully modulated tread upon the stairway filling the heart of Rose with delight, for was not that her own father, who had probably been informed at the gate of the change in her ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... in the least anxious either to conceal or to obtrude them. His social philosophy as he expressed it to his friends in these days was one which contemplated great future reforms—abolition of slavery and a strict temperance policy were among them. But he looked for them with a sort of fatalistic confidence in the ultimate victory of reason, and saw no use and a good deal of harm in premature political agitation for them. "All such questions," he is reported to have said, "must find lodgment with the most enlightened souls who stamp them with their approval. In God's own time ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... with one of his fatalistic Latin gestures, drawing the attention of the passers-by to the man and woman talking so earnestly. For this reason, and because she was losing her self-command, she hastened ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... increased. She felt as though she were surveying from a great distance the details of the prize she had coveted, but the possession of which was denied her. This—this was the wealth her husband had bestowed upon her, she told herself bitterly, and some greater power, some fatalistic power, purposed to snatch it from her before it reached ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... reared amid the fatalistic influences of Arabia, she could not have more completely adopted and exemplified the marble motto: "Despair is a free man; Hope is a slave." For her the rosy mist that usually hovers over futurity had been swept rudely aside, the softening glow of the To-Come had ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... back upon tyranny. Vainly did reason expostulate that oppression could not long be exercised by hands which had lost their strength, and that peace imposed new and different labours on those who no longer triumphed in war; they would listen to nothing; and, as fatalistic when condemned to a state of peace as when they marched forth conquering and to conquer, they cowered down in magnificent listlessness, leaving the whole burden of their support on conquered peoples. Like ignorant farmers, who exhaust fertile fields by forcing crops; they rapidly ruined ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the fatalistic mood of mind. It makes those who are already too inert more passive still; it renders wholly reckless those whose energy is already in excess. All through history we find how subjectivism, as soon as it has a free career, exhausts ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... Anglo-Saxon spirit. Knowing as we do what is coming, we find ourselves involuntarily catching with hope at little incidents that seem to delay onward march. Reading these pages, it is impossible to realize that he who wrote them is dead. It is with a mournful feeling of utter and fatalistic helplessness that we follow this young and generous hero while he travels, all unconsciously, down to his death. To the very last all seems to go well with him. At Manwyne, the last city on his journey, the renowned and dreaded Li-sieh-tai, the suppressor ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... father, this had been a sin. How or why it was a sin he could not comprehend.... Labor had been willing to be friendly, but now it hated him. Orders given in his name, but not originating in his will, had caused this. His attitude became fatalistic—he was being moved about by a ruthless hand without regard to his own volition. He might as well close his eyes and his mind and submit, for Bonbright Foote VII did not exist as a rational human individual, but only as a checker on the board, to be moved from square to square with ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... Grillparzer's The Ancestress, were of great power. These plays were conditioned by something in the air. Perhaps Napoleon, the man of fate, ruling the minds and destinies of a whole continent, had something to do with the philosophical background. Werner caught the fatalistic spirit, gave it concise and logical form, and succeeded in producing a play which has both atmosphere and logic of development. In all of these plays, in so far as they are good, the effect is produced by the recognition scenes which hold the reader rapt to the end. But the weak and vulgar imitations ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... half-century towards establishing laws and theories of genetics and heredity. Unfortunately, terms such as the "integrity of the germ plasm" and "the Mendelian law," while marking great advances in biological thought and science, have become too much associated in the public mind with a depressing and fatalistic notion that heredity determines everything and that environment can play but a very insignificant part in human evolution, development, and progress—physical, mental, or moral. Such, of course, is not ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... developed it lost whatever gaiety and humour it had. After the fall of Warsaw the attitude of the Russian people in general became fatalistic. Much nonsense was talked in the foreign press about "Russia coming back again and again." "Russia, the harder she was pressed the harder she resisted," and the ghost of Napoleon retreating from Moscow was presented to every home in Europe; but the plain truth was that, after ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... least would wait until the elephants could be more easily spared from the work. The Indian went away, but the idea that his beloved mistress should be deprived of anything that would—as he had at once perceived—have given her great pleasure, roused him out of his customary fatalistic indolence. He brooded over the matter for a couple of days, and on the third he appeared with the proposal to make good the loss of time occasioned by the temporary absence of the four elephants by capturing, with the ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... so utter that his words sometimes sound almost fatalistic. His father harbored some rationalistic ideas which were even more pronounced in Mozart, so that he formed his own opinion concerning ecclesiastical ceremonies and occasionally disregarded them. His cheery temperament made it impossible ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel
... through their first one. Their second they find an interesting experience; but the third and the fourth and the rest are a series of nervous shocks in increasing progression. It is like feeling God—but a wicked, cruel God! No wonder the Japanese are so fatalistic and so desperate. It is a case of 'Eat and drink, ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... effect upon the character of the worker. Professor Foxwell has thus strikingly expressed the moral influences of this economic factor: "When employment is precarious, thrift and self-reliance are discouraged. The savings of years may be swallowed up in a few months. A fatalistic spirit is developed. Where all is uncertain and there is not much to lose, reckless overpopulation is certain to be set at. These effects are not confined to the poorer classes. The business world is equally ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... Commander of the destroyer was, of course, quite ignorant of the disaster which had befallen the battleships of the Reserve Fleet and Portsmouth, and when the captain of the cruiser told him the tidings, though he received the news with the almost fatalistic sang froid of the British naval officer, turned a shade or two paler under the bronze ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... used, and it has been adopted to some extent in this country by Socialist writers. But this term, as Professor Seligman points out, is objectionable, because it exaggerates the theory, and gives it, by implication, a fatalistic character, conveying the idea that economic influence is the sole determining factor—a view which its authors specifically repudiated. While the reasoning of Professor Seligman in the argument quoted ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... anticipate the words of their friends, they imagine whole conversations that afterward come true. The feeling of having been there is very common with them; that is, they feel under given circumstances that they have had that identical experience before in all its details. They are often fatalistic in their ideas. They indulge in day-dreams. As a rule, they ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... here that the ideals of Eugenics may be expected to work fruitfully. To insist upon the power of heredity was once considered to indicate a fatalistic pessimism. It wears a very different aspect nowadays, in the light of Eugenics. "To the eugenist," as Davenport observes, "heredity stands as the one great hope of the human race: its saviour from imbecility, poverty, disease, ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... it. Possessed of the fatalistic belief in the efficacy of mere legislation such as dominates the rural townships of the West, he grasped his companion firmly by the arm, set his sturdy legs in rapid motion, walked her from assembly hall to assembly hall through this State, that and the other, and finally fetched up with her under ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... sense of injustice, a feeling that somehow wrong was being done her; but when Rosenblatt flourished before her a formidable legal document, and had the same interpreted to her by his smart young clerk, Samuel Sprink, she, with true Slavic and fatalistic passivity, accepted her lot and bent her strong back to her burden without complaint. What was the use of complaint? Who in all the city was there to care for a poor, stupid, Galician woman with none too savoury a reputation? Many and generous were the philanthropies of Winnipeg, but as yet ...
— The Foreigner • Ralph Connor
... duke assumed a deeply sentimental air, sighing as though out of breath. "That is the portrait of my beloved Jane," he said. "It was painted by Sargent while we were on our honeymoon." The artist, with his consummate skill of characterization, had transferred a crushed, fatalistic helplessness to the canvas. Nina found herself, partly in pity, partly in contempt, scrutinizing the face of the woman who had brought herself to ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... conversiones.] is denounced by Bacon as the greatest obstacle to the advancement of knowledge, creating, as it does, diffidence or despair. He does not formally refute it, but he marshals the reasons for an optimistic view, and these reasons supply the disproof The facts on which the fatalistic doctrine of Returns is based can be explained without resorting to any mysterious law. [Footnote: Nov. Org. i. 92 sqq.] Progress has not been steady or continuous on account of the prejudices and errors which hindered men from setting to work in the right way. The ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... returned Andy Rawlinson quickly. "There's gold all around here—everybody thought Dan was mighty lucky when he staked out his claim. He may find gold yet. But," he added, and there was a fatalistic quality in his tone that chilled the girls, "you always ...
— The Outdoor Girls in the Saddle - Or, The Girl Miner of Gold Run • Laura Lee Hope
... life partners should not be unconsciously influenced to a very large extent by them. As a necessary preliminary to such a condition, intelligent people must cultivate the attitude of conscious selection, and get away from the crude, fatalistic viewpoint which is to-day so widespread, and which is exploited ad nauseam on the stage and in fiction. It must be remembered that there are two well-marked stages preceding a betrothal: the first is that of mere attraction, when reason is still operative, and ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... Street? A great time for Little Russia. You may remember how the police surrounded that little Fort Chabrol. You may remember how the deadly aim of Peter the Painter and his fellow-conspirators got home on the force again and again. You remember how the police, in their helplessness against such fatalistic defiance of their authority, appealed to Government, and how Government sent down a detachment of the Irish Guards. There was a real Cabinet Minister in it, too; he came down in his motor-car to superintend manoeuvres ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... learnt to recognise the hand of God in everything, and that even at this early stage of his career there existed the germs of that doctrine on which he spoke and wrote so much later on. It has been said by some that his so-called fatalistic views were imbibed from the Mohammedans in the Soudan. This sentence in a letter written by him before he had ever held an intimate conversation with a Mohammedan shows that such was not the case. Allusion is made to the incident here merely to show what the ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... truly," at the end. They were all there, aridly complete, the limitations of the lady to whom she was helping Lindsay to bind himself without a gleam of possibility of escape or a rift through which tiniest hope could creep to emerge smiling upon the other side. When she saw him, in fatalistic reverie, going about ten years hence attached to the body of this petrifaction, she was almost satisfied to abandon the pair, to let them take their wretched chance. But this was a climax which did not occur often; she returned, in most of her waking moments, to devising schemes by which Laura might ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... depleted powers in body, mind, and soul, is in history and in present society appalling. It is so oppressive that it has driven many thoughtful men and women to despair. Men otherwise hopeful and purposeful here become gloomy and fatalistic; they have no hope that lust will ever be ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... thus spoke and thus trampled with his live and dead feet, a sneering triumph that seemed meant for Ahab, and a fatalistic despair that seemed meant for himself—these passed over the mute, motionless Parsee's face. Unobserved he rose and glided away; while, awestruck by the aspect of their commander, the seamen clustered together on the forecastle, till Ahab, troubledly pacing ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... countless stings. Why subject her to more misery? For what other outcome could there be to the ceaseless contention of fears and hopes now hers? Oh, if she had only seen him when he was so near her in the road! That she did not, was the will of Allah, and the fatalistic Mohammedan teaching brought him a measure of comfort. In further sooth, he had found a location and a title. Thenceforward, and not fictitiously, he was the Count Corti; and so entitling himself, ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... come my way,' he thought. The mongrel represented—-! But what did Prosper Profond represent? Nothing that mattered surely. And yet something real enough in the world—unmorality let off its chain, disillusionment on the prowl! That expression Annette had caught from him: "Je m'en fiche!" A fatalistic chap! A continental—a cosmopolitan—a product of the age! If there were condemnation more complete, Soames felt that ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... of Dr. Ashton's that what Arthur Fenton became was so purely a question of environment as to leave the artist all but irresponsible. This fatalistic view he had laid before his wife with some detail, at once ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... of reasoning in a scientific spirit, namely, the importance which it attaches to a right comprehension of the practicable. The scientific view is sometimes described as fatalistic. A genuine scientific theory implies a true estimate of the great forces which mould institutions, and therefore a true apprehension of the limits within which they can be modified by any proposed change. We all remember Sydney Smith's famous illustration, in regard ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... refused with disgraceful obstinacy to allow the Princess to lock her trunks. Vanquished at last by the stress of events against which she was contending for the first time in her life, she sat down on a portmanteau and burst into tears. The Duchess, who came of a less fatalistic race, was still struggling, aided by James ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... a melancholy devoid of all violence, soft almost as the warmth upon this sea, quite as the resignation of the fatalistic East. She felt herself for a moment such a tiny, dark thing caught in the meshes of the great net of the Universe, this Universe that she could never understand. What could she do? She must just sink down upon ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... did not prevent them from actively or passively opposing positive intellectual and moral achievement, directed either towards social or individual ends. The effect of their whole state of mind was negative and fatalistic. They approved in general of everything approvable; but the things of which they actively approved were the things which everybody in general was doing. Their point of view implied that society and individuals could be made better without actually ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... but I remained an honest girl. Now it is changed. I am alone. I go into a brasserie to play and dance. I can get an engagement at the Cafe Brasserie Tissot," and then after a pause, turning her head away, she added the fatalistic words she had used before: "If faut passer par la, comme ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... windows of tragedy. Nell devoted herself entirely to the unfortunate girl; Dick exerted himself to persuade her that all would yet come well; in fact, the whole household could not have been kinder to a sister or a daughter. But their united efforts were unavailing. Mercedes seemed to accept with fatalistic hopelessness ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey |
