"Fatalism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... With the kindly fatalism which is the distinctive note of the foregoing stanza, the sentiment of our next extract is ...
— Nonsense Books • Edward Lear
... absolute sovereignty of God, who ruleth over all and designed the end from the beginning, with the freedom and responsibility of man, is an ancient problem which no answer has been found able to finally solve. Hindoo philosophy settled it by fatalism, making man nothing and deities all. Greek thought vibrated between the two extremes; and from the beginning of Christian history the problem has vexed the ingenuity and taxed the patience of the Church. It is not peculiar to Calvinism. It is a problem which has ever risen up before ...
— Joy in Service; Forgetting, and Pressing Onward; Until the Day Dawn • George Tybout Purves
... his humanity. Now it is the charge against the main deductions of the 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 ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... 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 ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... felt very light and empty, although so heavy that he could not lift it from the pillow. But he managed to shift his gaze from the window until it rested upon a man's face—a gaunt, impassive brown face illuminated by steady and thoughtful eyes, filled with that mystic, unshakable spirit of fatalism that is the real Genius of the eastern peoples. The head itself stood out with almost startling distinctness against the background of pure white. It was swathed with an immaculate white turban. The thin, stringy brown neck ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... 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 Osman ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... ideas is far greater than his power of valuating them. He generally accepts as real value any thing that bears the stamp of current opinion. His belief in the value and weight of number is without recall; his absolute trust in what Bryce calls "the fatalism of multitude" is beyond appeal. He lives and thrives on the surrounding ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... it is possible 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
... painful to hear from feminine lips a fatalism so grim as to make all prayer a mockery; and it would seem that the loss of those dear to you, would have insensibly and unavoidably drawn your heart heavenward, in ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... background. Certain elemental truths about men and women, he believed, lost sight of in the kaleidoscopic attritions of the town, might there be clearly seen. The choice of locale was thus part of an attitude toward life. That attitude or view may be described fairly well as one of philosophic fatalism. ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... by an instinctive fatalism, the people have taken their plight for granted, without harbouring resentment against the more fortunate. It may be added that most of them are convinced believers in those fallacies which cluster around the phrase "making work." It were strange if they ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... which correspond to every phase of human thought and emotion; and this stern, cloudy scenery answers to the melancholy fatalism of Greek tragedy, or the kindred mournfulness of the Book ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... fell to Ringfield's share. Crabbe was not upon his visiting list, nor 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 ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... and the presence of their new master was gratifying to the people. But he never committed the folly of ordering any solemnity. He neither learned nor repeated any prayer of the Koran, as many persons have asserted; neither did he advocate fatalism, polygamy, or any other doctrine of the Koran. Bonaparte employed himself better than in discussing with the Imaums the theology of the children of Ismael. The ceremonies, at which policy induced him to be present, were to him, and to all who accompanied him, mere matters of ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... not possible that this century, so fertile in religious sects and disputes, could escape the controversy concerning fatalism and free will, which, being strongly interwoven both with philosophy and theology had, in all ages, thrown every school and every church into such inextricable doubt and perplexity. The first reformers in England, as in other European countries, had ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... stoop to oblique measures for the gaining of her own ends. If he was here to hunt down her brother, if he was here to see the Eastern woman at the Wetmore ranch—well, "life was life," to be taken or left. Thus spoke the fatalism that was the heritage ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... with a little of the Bergsonian philosophy. Bergson himself is not pinched at all by the 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, ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... tried to shelter under it, and stay there faithfully, as the best of people do. And even now I was not brought to such a happy attitude, although delivered by these little gleams of light from the dark void of fatalism, into which so many bitter blows had once ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... high-born women who acted as dispensers to their lords first took the title Frouwa (Frau), and when, in its transition stage, the old heathenism had evolved into a religion of strong nature worship, overshadowed by fatalism, only thinly veneered by Christianity, the minds of the Christian converts of Scandinavia, like those of puzzled children, transferred to the Virgin Mary the attributes that had formerly been those of their ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... and the closer one approaches the primitive realities, the nearer this kind of fatalism he comes. Looking on the naked face of life or the crude fact of death, it is obvious to all save the most frivolous that these things were meant to be so. As the Aryan saying has it, looking forward there are a dozen ways, looking backward on the way each man has ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... 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 ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... 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 comes to Bohemia but once a year—or to us. Let us bloom ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... classes and the masses which he afterwards set forth more fully in his Country Doctor and Village Cure, partly explains why all his best work, besides being impregnated with fatalism, has such a constant outlook on the past. It was a dogma with him rather than a philosophy, and was clung to more from taste than from reasonable conviction. He believed in aristocratic prerogative, because he believed in himself, and ranked himself ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... very forceful and convincing. No matter whether the man succumbed to the dreariness of work or to the malarial fever of the Pontine swamps, all that has ever been said about Millet's man and the terrible fatalism of his facial expression is found ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... this issue, they took the opportunity to amend the generally accepted doctrinal statements of the Presbyterian churches by mitigating those utterances which seemed to them, as they have seemed to many others, to err in the direction of fatalism. ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... interrupted by outcries which seemed drawing near to the camp. In spite of the terrifying words of the old shepherd, his sang froid in the greatest perils and his resolution full of consoling fatalism, sustained the ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... some persons no better than fatalism. But, in truth, there are two popular ways of reading the history of events between 1789 and 1794, and each of them seems to us as bad as the other. According to one, whatever happened in the Revolution was good and admirable, because it happened. ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... or huddling in the lonely hovels outside Marut, the remnant of Behar Singh's great army hid from the hand of the destroyer. They had followed their god, and their god had deserted them. All hope was lost, and with the fatalism of their race they flung their weapons from ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... self-pity or self-analysis. He bears his pain, when it comes, as a dumb animal does, and forgets it as quickly when it goes. When the hour of death descends, he meets it stoically, partly because physical pain dulls his senses, partly because the instinct of fatalism is there in ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... its actual termination, to the whole order of subsequent events. But when I speak of Causes and Effects, I speak of the obvious and important agency of one fact upon another, and not of remote and fancifully infinitesimal influences. I am aware that, on the other hand, the reproach of Fatalism is justly incurred by those, who, like the writers of a certain school in a neighbouring country, recognise in history nothing more than a series of necessary phenomena, which follow inevitably one upon the other. But when, ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... -saecula-. Respecting the intellectual value which may once have belonged to this Etruscan cosmogony and philosophy, it is difficult to form a judgment; they appear however to have been from the very first characterized by a dull fatalism and an ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... forced to fall back on fatalism as an explanation of irrational events (that is to say, events the reasonableness of which we do not understand). The more we try to explain such events in history reasonably, the more unreasonable and incomprehensible do ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... baptism is the immigrants' only organised welcome into their new liberties. Occasionally some Church raises a thin protest. But the 'Anglo-Saxon' continues to take up his burden; and the floods from Europe pour in. Canadians regard this influx with that queer fatalism which men adopt under plutocracy. "How could they stop it? It pays the steamship and railway companies. It may, or may not, be good for Canada. Who knows? In any case, it will go on. Our ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... Medici—those ennobled pawnbrokers of the middle ages, whose parvenu taste engendered the fantastic gilding of the renaissance, which they naturalized in the Tuileries and at Fontainbleau, in common with the stiletto and acqua tofana of their poisoners, and the fatalism of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... 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 couplet, preserved for ages by tradition, foretold, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... him shortly afterwards professor at the Virginia Military Institute of Lexington. Here he was known as a rigid Presbyterian, and a "fatalist," if it be fatalism to believe that "what will be will ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... the language of Religion, an optimism ranging to the bounds of fatalism is the philosophy of many, especially of historians: "Le vrai, c'est, en toutes choses, le fait." Sainte-Beuve says: "Il y a dans tout fait general et prolonge une puissance de demonstration insensible"; and Scherer describes progress as "une espece de logique ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... Though the stout Cockney, harbormaster, known as "Pinkie" because of his rosy complexion, was pallid with fear, the other European residents of Sandakan seemed utterly indifferent to the danger to which they were exposed. But life in a land like Borneo breeds fatalism. As an official remarked, with a shrug of his shoulders, "After you have spent a few years out here you don't much care how you die, or how soon. Plague is as convenient a way of going out as ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... picture of that youth which we see—youth reduced to ineffectiveness by fatalism and by the egoism of the lyric nature which longs to gain dramatic freedom, but cannot achieve it. It is one of a series of portraits, wonderfully traced psychological studies of the Russian dreamers and incompatibles of last mid-century, of which the most moving figure ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... perception of the results to which it had 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 ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... pleasure with its funereal pall. Now the shops were slowly opening, money was in circulation, and people were able to laugh; they talked of the great calamity, but only at certain hours, as something that was going to be long, very long and would exact great resignation to its inevitable fatalism. ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... stood. 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 ...
— Drift from Two Shores • Bret Harte
... 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
... nor State seems to have any part in it, much less the unfortunate in this life, the poor, and the suffering. The poet never mentions slavery, or the crowded populations of great cities. It might almost be called a creed of fatalism, in which Natura plays much the same part as Fortuna did in the creed of many less noble spirits of that age.[546] Nature fights on; we cannot resist her, and cannot improve on her; it is better to acquiesce and obey than ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... that would be an exaggeration of fatalism. I rely greatly on your sagacity and on the vigilance of your servants, count. Let them watch the stupid populace—see to it that faux freres always attend the meetings of my enemies, and whenever they inform you ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... in common with so many saints, of the paradox of spiritual life. He saw that "such fervency of spirit is altogether the gift of God," and yet he adds, "I have to ascribe to myself the loss of it." He did not run divine sovereignty into blank fatalism as so many do. He saw that God must be sovereign in His gifts, and yet man must be free in his reception and rejection of them. He admitted the mystery without attempting to reconcile the apparent contradiction. ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... political progress. And yet the Roman people, had they chosen, could have given a different direction to the developments of their constitution. There was Providence in the course of events, but no fatalism. ...
— The American Republic: Its Constitution, Tendencies, and Destiny • A. O. Brownson
... 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 ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... the strangeness of Russian political life, the strangeness of her love of despotism. Only in the country that produces such types of weakness and tyranny is possible the fettering of freedom of thought and act that we have in Russia to-day. Ostrovsky's striking analysis of this fatalism in the Russian soul will help the reader to understand the unending struggle in Russia between the enlightened Europeanised intelligence of the few, and the apathy of the vast majority of Russians who are disinclined ...
— The Storm • Aleksandr Nicolaevich Ostrovsky
... the early part of the century, people generally gave in. The stronger tide was called Providence. Perhaps there was a small degree of fatalism in it. So Mrs. Leverett acquiesced, and recalled the fact that she had promised ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... hopefulness. The curse of our age is pessimism, a result and a cause of the materialistic spirit. Science, which really involves an infinite hope, has been misinterpreted by Socialists in the most foolish way, until we get a miserable languid fatalism, leading to decadence and despair. The essential of progress is Faith, and Faith can only be established by the ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... with gloomy fatalism, this religion taught bravery. None but the brave were invited to Valhalla to become Woden's guest. The brave man might perish, but even then he won victory; for he was invited to sit with heroes at the table of the gods. "None but the brave deserves the ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... of Armenia, with its remnant race of human wrecks, and after months of the demoralizing fatalism and moral laxity of the Russian, I was astounded by the miracle of stability of the tiny Czech force in establishing an economic frontier between the Germanophile sections of Russia and freedom-loving Siberia. Not only is this force the key to the military problem ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... confession read without the twitching of a facial muscle. He shrugged his shoulders, accepting the inevitable with the fatalism of his race. ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... real fault is that he is not consistently pantheistic. Pope was attacked both for his pantheism and fatalism and for having borrowed from Bolingbroke. It is curious enough that it was precisely these doctrines which he did not borrow. Bolingbroke, like most feeble reasoners, believed firmly in Free Will; and ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... was talking to you, you forgot that it was he—the man before your eyes—who had gone through these things. I did not envy him his devotion to Kurtz, though. He had not meditated over it. It came to him, and he accepted it with a sort of eager fatalism. I must say that to me it appeared about the most dangerous thing in every way he had come ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... as this, had she heard it, Edith, too religious to acknowledge any thing tending towards fatalism, would not for a moment have agreed; yet it embodied a truth destined to cause her deepest sorrow, and which was gradually forcing itself upon her. Already, although they had been married so few weeks, even her love-blinded eyes could not but ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... shipful are to be 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 in ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... living organism is said to carry in 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 ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... illustration of fatalism, such certainly as we might expect in a Stoic, but carried even to a Turkish excess; and not theoretically professed only, but practically acted upon in a case of capital hazard. That no prince ever killed his own successor, i.e., that it was vain for a prince to put conspirators to death, ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... power of the Greek than any thing modern. The striking difference is, that while fate was the radical element of those, free will is not less distinctly the basis of this. Strangely enough, while it commences with a supernatural oracle, there is not a trace of fatalism in it; but through all, a clear, distinct recognition of moral responsibility, of the power to resist evil, and the guilt of yielding to it. The theology of Shakspeare is as remarkable as his poetry. A strong and clear sense of man's moral responsibility and free agency, and of certain ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... 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." Faction was what ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... 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 ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... fertile Munster, the tall 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
... Swinburne's threnody on Baudelaire came to her mind. How often she had quoted them for their sheer pagan beauty! It was the kind of beauty which most appealed to her, which responded to the element of fatalism in her, the sense of doom always with her since she was a child, in spite of her gaiety, her wit, and her native eloquence. She had never been happy, she had never had a real illusion, never aught save the passion of living, the desire ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... water rises! rises! and any minute it may burst through! The Saints have mercy! All our things will be lost; but it is the will of God—we cannot fight against it." And Volodia crossed himself devoutly with Russian fatalism. ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... 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 ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... be inscrutable, were men to work in union and harmony instead of disunion and strife. For our ignorance of those ways—which one portion of mankind calls the ways of Providence, dark and intricate, while another sees in them the action of blind Fatalism, and a third, simple chance, with neither gods nor devils to guide them—would surely disappear, if we would but attribute all these to their ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... man. I have wondered often if the story of my tragedy, terrible as it is for me to think of it, might not help you. And yet—it might do more harm than good. At any rate, I have written it all out, and put it with the other things in the box. I feel a curious sort of fatalism concerning this letter. It is borne in upon me that if you ever need to read it you will read it. It will help you to understand your father better. It may help you to understand your husband; although, God grant, knowledge like mine may ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... self-renunciation. She wanted to do the best for him, and had not even the consolation of the knowledge that she had sacrificed herself for his advantage. All had been taken out of her hands! Yet with characteristic fatalism she did not feel rebellious. If it were ordained that she should, for fifty, perhaps sixty years, repent in sterility and ashes that first error of her girlhood, rebellion was, none the less, too far-fetched. If she rebelled, it would not be in spirit, but in action. General principles were nothing ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... 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. ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... for Emerson's works, collectively and individually, are aimed at the doctrines of Christianity. There is a grim, terrible fatalism scowling on his pages which might well frighten the reader who clasped the Bible to ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... now to fall upon Constance herself, as she sat gazing out in the sunlight. She felt the fatalism, the unconcern of a child, of a young creature. She understood perfectly all that she had heard, and was ready ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... to 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 of the Indian. ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... "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 in a man's ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... endless East India Dock Road. We passed through streets of dark melancholy, through labyrinthine passages where the gas-jets spluttered asthmatically, under weeping railway arches, and at last were free of the quarter where the cold fatalism of the East combats the wistful dubiety of the West. But the atmosphere, physical and moral, remained with us. Not that the yellow men are to blame for this atmosphere. The evil of the place is rather ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... and debonair, and seemed to swing past with a touch of recklessness in their stride, others were grave and serious, and seemed almost to plod forward to the dictates of an inevitable fatalism. ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon
... was with Blanquette I avoided the subject of the impending marriage as much as possible. She looked forward with dull fatalism to the day when another woman would take the master into her keeping and her own occupation ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... its effort, and they found the exclusiveness of the new interests an impediment to letters. Younger men remained true to the movement; but when Erasmus defended, as he had always done, the doctrine of free-will, even Melanchthon was convinced, and imputed to his friend and master the fatalism of the Stoics. Like Fisher and More in England, many of Luther's German opponents, such as Eck and Cochlaeus, were men of the Renaissance. The breach with Erasmus, the quarrel with Zwingli and his friends in the south-west, the irruption of the Anabaptists, the dispute ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... frantic contest against the principles of human nature and the laws of the physical world, against the rage of the winter and the liberty of the sea. They did not exempt him from the influence of that most pernicious of superstitions, a presumptuous fatalism. They did not preserve hint from the inebriation of prosperity, or restrain him from indecent querulousness in adversity. On the other hand, the fanaticism of Cromwell never urged him on impracticable undertakings, or confused his perception of the public good. Our countryman, inferior ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... daring and cynical of his poems. The old associations, the antiquarian charm, that lingered round this faded ancestral belief, appealed strongly to the romantic patriotism of the historian. His own religion was a sort of mild fatalism; he pauses now and then to draw rather commonplace reflections on the blindness of men destined to misfortune, or the helplessness of human wisdom and foresight against destiny. But at the same time he gravely chronicles miracles and portents, not so much from any belief in their truth ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... 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 ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... as to a problem proved. Given those qualities, in those circumstances, what else could have happened? And such a weakling as he knew himself to be could never—he thought—make effort sufficient to alter his qualities. A sense of fatalism came over him, as of one doomed. He bowed his head, and let his arms fall by the sides of his chair, dropping them like a spent swimmer ready to sink. The sudden revelation of himself to himself had taken the heart out of him. "I'm a waster!" he said aghast. ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... school of writers, of which Buckle is an admirable representative, who are so struck by the long chain of causes, extending over many centuries, that preceded and prepared Revolutions, that they teach a kind of historic fatalism, reducing almost to nothing the action of Individualities; and there is another school, which is specially represented by Carlyle, who reduce all history into biographies, into the action of a few ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... be admitted that the Kabyles, with a thousand faults, are far from the fatalism, the abuse of force and that merging of individualism which are found with the Islamite wherever he appears. Whence, then, have come these more humane tendencies, charitable customs and movements of compassion? There are respectable authorities who consider ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various |
