"Fatalist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is for 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
... 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; they no ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... me down before the Opera, I was really almost astonished to see it still standing! But I am something of a fatalist, like all good Orientals, and I entered ready, ...
— The Phantom of the Opera • Gaston Leroux
... me, then, for a fool, and a Fatalist? Pardie! a bad creed for a monarch, the distributor of rewards ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... fine for us to excuse ourselves, and patch with promises. We shall do as before, and science is a fatalist. I follow, I find, the fortunes of my Country, in my privatest ways. An American is pioneer and man of all work, and reads up his newspaper on Saturday night, as farmers and foresters do. We admire the [Greek], and mean to give our boys the grand habit; but we only sketch what they may do. ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the 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 the ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... inside of Murphy, something a psychologist might be able to describe in vague scientific terms. He became possessed of a desperate courage far greater than he had ever dreamed of having. In that moment of metamorphosis he became a fatalist. He realized that whether he gave "Slim" the information he sought or not the result would be the same. The life would be kicked and beaten out of him. The "Gink," to save himself and Gibson at all hazards, would not take a further chance ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... let out of prison as she followed him down into the dining-room. For the moment she was no longer the fatalist, foreseeing inevitable exposure and punishment. Nothing had come of their meeting with Peterson—an incident which had taken her wholly by surprise, and which had threatened for an instant to result disastrously. She had spent wakeful ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... 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 prince, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... a combination of optimist and fatalist, I judge. He thinks nothing matters much, for everything is coming out ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... observers see results; parents see 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, and the gusty temper of three ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... sense in which the poet taught. The religion of the East is fatalism. A fatalist who endeavours to shun ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... residence in the East has rendered me something of a fatalist, Cavanagh! Beyond keeping my door locked, I have taken no steps whatever. I fear ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... is a true claim when the individual rationalist is what is called a man of feeling, and when the individual empiricist prides himself on being hard- headed. In that case the rationalist will usually also be in favor of what is called free-will, and the empiricist will be a fatalist— I use the terms most popularly current. The rationalist finally will be of dogmatic temper in his affirmations, while the empiricist may be more sceptical ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... am a fatalist. Everything is ordained, so why should I bother? I will live for the day. I will live for ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... and made it stare forth doubly ghastly. He had made no effort to get away from the very first. Perhaps he understood the uselessness of it, with that strong hand gripped on his ragged neckband. Perhaps he was, in his way, something of a fatalist—London breeds so many among such as he: starved things that find every boat chained, every effort thrust back upon them unrewarded. At any rate, from the moment he had heard the girl give to this man a name which every soul in England had heard at one ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... his hands 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 by, 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 still be partly ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 waited for doom ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... steadily ascending dome of the capitol, nor remark, during the thunders of Gettysburg, the as energetic stroke of the pile-drivers upon the piers of the great Susquehanna bridge. We built while we desolated. No fatalist convert to Mohammed had so sure faith in the eternity of his institutions. More masonry has been laid along the border during the war than in any five previous years. We have finished the Treasury, raised the bronze gates on the Capitol, double-railed all the roads between New York and the ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... a fatalist, but this may be due less to the teachings of the prophet than to the peculiar quality of the Arab nature, which makes him stake everything, even his own liberty upon the cast ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... absolute drench. I rode, all the same, for exercise, and on the way back the enemy proceeded to shell the road; at the very extremity of their range, I fancy. It is curious how one takes the shelling nowadays. One becomes a fatalist! "If it hits me, it must hit me; I cannot escape, but I hope it will not" sort of thing. We return to the trenches this afternoon. Our General leaves to-night, but before then he has elected to inspect ...
— Letters of Lt.-Col. George Brenton Laurie • George Brenton Laurie
... be thought that, on account of his indifferent attitude toward life and death, the Filipino has no feelings or emotions. He is a stoic and a fatalist by nature, but an emotionalist as well. While easily affected, the impressions are not deep, and are forgotten as they slip into the past. Although controlled by passion, he will hold himself in, maintaining a proud reserve, especially in the presence of Americans. A subtle change ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... better let matters take their course, Adele," I answered. "Though not much of a fatalist, I believe that when a person's time is to come, it comes. It avails nothing to hurry—nothing to endeavour to retard it. I shall fare, I doubt not, as my friends before me, dear Adele; and, if I can consult as well for myself as I seem to have done ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat
... a fatalist in the sense you mean," returned his friend. "Everything has been fixed ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... grasping at the fatalist's consolation. "If we are ripe for the gardeners hand, the gardener ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... long evening with John Harrington on the ice, she had made every effort to avoid his society. Like many very young women with a vivid love of enjoyment and a fairly wide experience, she was something of a fatalist. That is to say, she believed that her evil destiny might spring upon her unawares at any moment, and she felt something when she was with Harrington that warned her. For the first time in her life she knew what it was to have moods of melancholy; she caught ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... sky, Fates, Parcae, Sisters three, book of fate; God's will, 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. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... a pretty little moral," said the Fatalist, "for it certainly proves that do what we will, we cannot get away from our natures. It was inherent in that man's nature to tend bees. Bee-ing was the occupation chosen for him by Fate, and had the beneficent Fairy changed him a dozen times, he ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... with his hands 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 still be ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... she 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
... That Joffre was a fatalist is evinced by another incident of this march in Soudan. An insect's sting had poisoned his left eye so severely that the sight was threatened. The doctor of the force advised him to wear a bandage. ...
— Boys' Book of Famous Soldiers • J. Walker McSpadden
... doubtless inherited from his unknown ancestors the peculiar mental qualities that made him a leader. From Abel he had absorbed the Eskimo's apparent contempt of danger. Abel, like all Eskimos, was a fatalist. If he was caught in a perilous position he believed that if the worst came it would be because it was to be. If he escaped unharmed, so it was to be. Therefore why be excited? Bobby had as completely accepted this creed as though he, too, were an Eskimo, for his life and ...
— Bobby of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... 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 Will. "I commend," ...
— Gloria Crucis - addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907 • J. H. Beibitz
... read aright His commands, blazoned across the breasts of billions of worlds, and by the same token he knew that humanity on earth was doomed. Yet he was urged on by that unconquerable spirit which had made man king of all. He set up his rain-making machinery with the smile of a fatalist. For hundreds of miles its sinuous beams sprang into the sky, writhed about like great, hungry serpents with their tremendous sucking and receiving maws, then coiled back to earth bringing not a drop. But one day the Mirror again showed small, ...
— Omega, the Man • Lowell Howard Morrow
... fatalist, but he did believe that he would live to complete his specific work and that he would not live beyond that. Perhaps he was wise in this. Had he surrounded himself with pomp and defense after the manner of Fremont he could not have done his work at all, for his special ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... chauffeur had started the car again, and was getting in by Lois's side. Doubtless he was a fatalist by profession. She ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... 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 father in a proper ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... among the 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
... purpose, it reaches the appalling position of Spinoza, that nothing in the universe could possibly be otherwise than it is. And if this be so, then let the Calvinist decide whether he will join with the Pantheist and fatalist, or give some little quarter to the Arminian. Let him decide whether he will continue to employ an argument which, if it proves anything, demonstrates the dependency of the divine will as well as of the human; and instead ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... by some persistent ill luck and was like an oriental fatalist, and having seen her dreams all fade away and her hopes crushed, she would sometimes hesitate a whole day or longer before undertaking the simplest thing, for fear she might be on the wrong road and it would turn ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... 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 the East? ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... was about; life was a trap into which all mortals walked sooner or later, and her particular trap had a treadmill,—a round of household duties she kept whirling with an energy that might have made their fortunes if she had been the head of the family. It is bad to be a fatalist unless one has an incontrovertible belief in one's destiny,—which Hannah had not. But she kept the little flat with its worn furniture,—which had known so many journeys—as clean as a merchant ship of old ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Had the Carlists succeeded 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 ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... 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, ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee
... for his services, Society, bad as she is, has given not only food and raiment (of a kind), but books, tobacco and gukguk, we expected more gratitude to his benefactress; and less of a blind trust in the future, which resembles that rather of a philosophical Fatalist and Enthusiast, than of a solid householder paying scot-and-lot in ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... is a delightful 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 ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... Arabs. She was as much a fatalist as any one of them. She looked at the stranger. What ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... not afraid of the storm. Life with the circus had made her quite impervious to the crash of thunder; the philosophy of Vagabondia had taught her that lightning is not dangerous unless it strikes. The circus man is a fatalist. A person dies when his time comes, not before. It is all marked down ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... believe we will begin that," she said. "It's like a game and we could go on indefinitely mentioning names on the strength of finding a mutual acquaintance. No, I am something of a fatalist. I think I will let events take their course. If we are to meet again, why, we are. If not, why, all our poor efforts can not compass it. Ah, it is nine o'clock, on the very stroke! Good night." She smiled graciously, charmingly. "And thank you again for ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... a fatalist and never wanted anything. But if you condescend to want me to do something, your slave obeys. You see I'm learning the proper way ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... superstition, you say? Aye, it may be! But in the region of the front everyone you meet has become superstitious, if that is the word you choose. That is especially true of the soldiers. Every man at the front, it seemed to me, was a fatalist. What is to be will be, they say. It is certain that this feeling has helped to make them indifferent to danger, almost, indeed, contemptuous of it. And in France, I was told, almost everywhere there were shrines ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... his shoulders and raised his brows to the sky, with the resignation of the fatalist. ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... him to a sudden approach he might not have ventured on maturer consideration; to her it seemed to carry on the experience of the day and, unguessed by Raymond, brought less amazement than he imagined. She was a fatalist—perhaps, had always been so, as her mother before her; yet she knew it not. They had passed and repassed many times during the vanished years; but since the moment that she had dismissed him with scorn and hoped her child would live to insult his ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... with so much energy by St. Paul (Romans ix. 15-24), and all the world over men act upon the former while theoretically holding to the latter. Hence "Chinese Gordon," whose loss to England is greater than even his friends suppose, wrote "It is a delightful thing to be a fatalist," meaning 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 but also a Moslem whose contradictory ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... And why not, after all? On the day his memory came back he had resisted the idea in this very room. As the fatalist he had resisted it then. Now how poor seemed the reasons for not having ended it all that day! If his appointed time had been come, the river would have ended him then—that had been his argument. Was that argument not ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the police agent—if only they, too, were here, the place would have been world enough for him. But then, he felt, the time for the reckoning must come,—it lay somewhere in the certain future. Unconscious fatalist, he nourished the conviction as he nourished the ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... 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 ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... are a fatalist, Unorna," observed her companion, still stroking and twisting his beard. "It is strange that we should differ upon so many fundamental questions, you and I, and yet be such good ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... afternoon. It would be a crisis.... She felt within her such vitality, such power, such domination, that she believed that to-day she could command anything.... She was, poor child, supremely confident, and that not through conceit or vanity, but simply because she was a fatalist and believed that destiny had brought Lawrence ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... been found; who under such circumstances would have recognised, described, and testified to its existence? Even at Sunderland, amongst ourselves, its existence was long hotly disputed by the learned of the faculty; and the fatalist barbarian of these regions would have dismissed the enquiry with a prayer of resignation, while he bowed his head to the grave, or if his strength permitted, with a stroke of his dagger against the impious enquirer who had dared to interfere with the immutable decrees of fate. The stories too ...
— Letters on the Cholera Morbus. • James Gillkrest
... himself is said to have been a fatalist, believing in destiny and in the influence of his star, he knew nothing, probably, of the prediction of a negro sorceress, who, while Marie Joseph was but a child, prophesied she should rise to a dignity greater than that of a queen, yet fall from it before her death.[10] This was one of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Supplementary Number, Issue 263, 1827 • Various
... '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 think that the daily use of ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... 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 ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... enjoying the unbearable pain which your coldness gives me. Do you know a very strange thing? It is that, with every day, my love for you increases—though that would seem to be almost an impossibility. Why should I not become a fatalist? Remember how, on the third day that we ascended the Shlangenberg, I was moved to whisper in your ear: 'Say but the word, and I will leap into the abyss.' Had you said it, I should have leapt. Do you ...
— The Gambler • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... life, for I wanted him to be satisfied that, if I had at 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 ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... infinitely less mischievous than on the other, no vehement error can exist in this world with impunity; and it does appear that in our common view of these matters we have closed our eyes to certain grave facts of experience, and have given the fatalist a vantage ground of real truth which we ought to have considered and allowed. At the risk of tediousness we shall enter briefly into this unpromising ground. Life and the necessities of life are our best philosophers if we will ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... his fears. He was certain that they were about to perish and sought consolation in the constant practice of religion, which was edifying but scarcely improved him as a companion. As for Otter, he also believed that the hour of death was nigh, but being a fatalist this did not trouble him much. On the contrary, in spite of Leonard's remonstrances he began to live hard, betaking himself freely to the beer-pot. When Leonard remonstrated with ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... was looking rather pale and worried, but she greeted him with frank pleasure, and, in a few minutes, she was her usual self again. As Jimmy learned later, she had in a peculiar degree the art of seeing the best side of things. In a sense, she was almost a fatalist, and though she made no disguise about the regret she felt for her ruined life, a moment later she always seemed to put the regrets aside as useless. "I try to keep as respectable as I ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... would hardly seem possible to avoid becoming a fatalist? But who knows for certain whether he is convinced of anything or not? And how often is a deception of the senses or an error of the reason accepted as a conviction!... I prefer to doubt everything. ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... 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 be,"—Jackson's ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... irresistibly fascinating. In him there was a complete novelty to appeal to her jaded appetites, rendered capricious and uneasy by years of so-called pleasure. A few minutes ago, when he had spoken of death, he had been a mysterious and cruel fatalist. Now he was a deliciously absurd child, but a child with the frame of ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... made it ready. Why did she feel that it was Shiel Crozier's bed which should be made ready? Or did she not feel it? Was it only a dazed, automatic act, not connected with the person who was to lie in the bed? Was she then a fatalist? Were trouble and sorrow so much her portion that to her mind this tragedy, whatever it was, must touch the man nearest to her—and certainly Shiel Crozier was far nearer than Jesse Bulrush. Quite apart from wealth or position, personality plays a part more ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... overrode it. But to expect this contented girl to renounce her faith and become my wife, was expecting her to share with me nothing, unless it was the chance of a felon's cell, and I remounted my horse and rode away under a starry sky, somewhat of a fatalist myself. But I derived contentment from my decision, and on reaching home no one could have told that I had loved and lost. My parents were delighted to see me after my extended absence, my sisters were growing fast ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... practical philosophy. The philosopher then has no option whether he will remove the apparent contradiction or leave it untouched; for in fhe latter case the theory respecting this would be bonum vacans into the possession of which the fatalist would have a right to enter, and chase all morality out of its supposed domain as occupying ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... believes, or half believes (for nobody is a consistent fatalist), not only that whatever is about to happen will be the infallible result of the causes which produce it (which is the true necessitarian doctrine), but moreover that there is no use in struggling against it; that it will happen, however we ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... cared. This certitude would have made her put up with worse torments. For, of course, she too was being tormented. She felt also helpless, as if the whole enterprise had been too much for her. This is the sort of conviction which makes for quietude. She was becoming a fatalist. ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... melodies, and from my one death arise a hundred lives. Why, through the thin partition of this consolation Pantheism can hear the groans of its neighbour, Pessimism. Better almost the black resignation which the fatalist draws from his own hopelessness, from the fierce kisses of misery ...
— Shelley - An Essay • Francis Thompson
... 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
... duty, have the courage of your thought, and walk off with the old fatalist's verse soothing your soul and brain, and let the disturbed ones clamor. The clamor will cease in time and turn to applause. And whether it does or not is a matter of absolutely no importance if ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... 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
... 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 ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... been on the point of going to Ballard's office and making a clean breast of Jerry's plans, hoping that Clancy might be bought off and the match canceled. But I could not bring myself, even now, to the point of betraying the boy. I am not a fatalist by profession or philosophy, but Miss Gore had made me pause and I had resolved to see the thing through, trying to believe as she believed that Jerry could only be toughened to the usages of life by the rigor of circumstance. And ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... 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 expect, like Orpheus, to change ...
— On the Duty of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... tongue-tip from red lips peep forth! Can viciousness cap that? Horrid's the word. Yet there she is. There is that Little Girl, Her goodness and her badness, side by side, Like bacon, streak o' fat and streak o' lean. Ah, Fatalist, she must be ...
— The Re-echo Club • Carolyn Wells
... lost them just in the manner they did. If they had only avoided this or that particular investment, all would have been well. This is nonsense. Undoubtedly, a great deal of money is lost very foolishly, but though no fatalist, I do not believe that all the care and prudence in the world will materially alter the great Scriptural law, that the riches of this world will often take wings to themselves and flee away. There is far too much recklessness, far too much of what is called ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the roman heart? A stoic he, but even more: The iron will and lion thew Were strong to inflict as to endure: Who like him could stand, or pursue? His fate the fatalist followed through; In all his great soul found to ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... the good of beating up the dust On the world's highway, vexed with droughty heat? Oh, I grow fatalist—what must be must, Seeing that ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... bubbles danced on the surface and raced joyously together in the sunshine; then they were broken—did it matter how, by savage sword or lingering ailment? They vanished—absorbed again by the rushing waters—and other bubbles rose in precarious iridescence. It was a fatalist view of life, a dim and obscurantist groping after truth induced by the overpowering nature of present difficulties. The famous Tentmaker of Naishapur blindly sought the ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... think that she can stand against that 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 to the possibility of her ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... trumpet. Europe ought rather to emphasize possible perdition; and Europe always has emphasized it. Here its highest religion is at one with all its cheapest romances. To the Buddhist or the eastern fatalist existence is a science or a plan, which must end up in a certain way. But to a Christian existence is a STORY, which may end up in any way. In a thrilling novel (that purely Christian product) the hero is not ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... evidenced in the letters to his brother, but, heartened by the success which had at last crowned his efforts, he buckled on his armor ready to do battle to such foes, both within and without, as should in the future assail him. Fatalist as we must regard him, he believed in his star; or rather he went forward with sublime faith in that God who had thus far guarded him from evil, and in his own good time had given him the victory, and such a victory! For twelve years he ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... 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
... it"—Henri was a fatalist—in his speech, at least, he lived up to his creed. "Honfleur is far—Monsieur Renard has not the good digestion when he is tired—he suffers. Il passe des nuits d'angoisse. Il souffre des fatigues de l'estomac. Il se fatigue aujourd'hui!" ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... "'I am no fatalist, son. But I believe in the just law of retribution, as taught in the holy scriptures. There is resentment against you in the jungle family; sometime it may ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... Voltaire and given him another ground for quizzing English moderation even in negation. I thought then, and have often thought since, how far the principle of moderation might be extended, and whether you could be a moderate agnostic or a moderate fatalist or a ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... it as a convenient place of meeting. In any case, the Dictator was not by nature a suspicious man, and he was not scared by any thoughts of plots, and mystifications, and personal danger. He was a fatalist in a certain sense—not in the religious, but rather in the physical sense. He had a sort of wild-grown, general thought that man is sent into the world to do a certain work, and that while he is useful ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... 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
... the colonel; "but he will find more silent and still harder men up against him. If you think we are going to lie down and submit like the fatalist nobles of Petrograd, ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... 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 those unruly passions which are not ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... of complaints. Do not allow this letter to affect you too much, and do not think that I give way to dejection or despondency; no, I am a fatalist, and I believe in my star. I do not know yet what my calling is, nor for what branch of polite literature I am best fitted; I do not even know whether I am, or ever shall be, fitted for any: but what matters it? I suffer, I labor, I ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... cool head. His religion had done one thing for him: it had made him a fatalist, and ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... it was that in a short time the epidemic was raging in practically every village within our lines. The American Red Cross and medical officers of the expedition at once set to work to combat the epidemic as far as the means at their disposal would permit. The Russian peasant, of course, in true fatalist fashion calmly accepted this situation as an inevitable act of Providence, which made the task of the Red Cross workers and others more difficult. The workers, however, devoted themselves to their errand of mercy night and day and gradually the epidemic was checked. This voluntary ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... he has known a "bad man" he cannot content himself with mere disapproval. Take, for example, his friends the murderers, Haggart and Thurtell. He shows Haggart as an ambitious lad too full of life, "with fine materials for a hero." He calls the fatalist's question: "Can an Arabian steed submit to be a vile drudge?"—nonsense, saying: "The greatest victory which a man can achieve is over himself, by which is meant those unruly passions which are not convenient to the time ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... being something of a fatalist, did not interfere. On this cockleshell of a craft, among these rude spirits of alien races, he was powerless. On land a diplomat and strategist of high order, here he was a cipher. Moreover, he was ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... The Fatalist is not calm. He is the coward slave of his environment, hopelessly surrendering to his present condition, recklessly indifferent to his future. He accepts his life as a rudderless ship, drifting on the ocean ...
— The Majesty of Calmness • William George Jordan
... already said, one is a fatalist when one is a Bonaparte. Napoleon the Great had his star, Napoleon the Little ought surely to have a nebula; the astronomers are certainly something of astrologers. So take the oath, gentlemen. It goes without saying that ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... up his hands with a nonchalant gesture. He was a fatalist worthy of his city, which is now being besieged and ruined not for the first time. The Vandals (I mean the original Vandals) laid waste Arras again and again. Then the Franks took it. Then, in ...
— Over There • Arnold Bennett
... John Randolph's mother died, and his first grief swept over him in an overwhelming torrent. The boy of fifteen spent bitter nights, his face buried in the grass, sobbing over his mother's grave. Years afterward, he wrote to a friend, "I am a fatalist. I am all but friendless. Only one human being ever knew me. She only ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... mates, being small contractors and not pressed for time, had dispensed with the services of a labourer, and had done their own mixing and hod-carrying in turns. They didn't want a labourer now, but the Oracle was a vague fatalist, and Mitchell a decided one. So ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... one falls, another steps into the vacant place,—perhaps the Commandeur himself: these dark swordsmen never retreat; all the blades swing swiftly as before; there is hardly any emotion; the travailleur is a fatalist.... [32] ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... well as the rest of the world: the giver was about to assume a new role,—that of the "man of destiny,"—to work for a time on the imagination and superstition of his age. Sometimes he forgot his part, and displayed the shrewd, calculating, hard-working man behind the mask, who was less a fatalist than a personified fate, less a child of fortune than its maker. "Great events," he wrote a very short time later from Italy, "ever depend but upon a single hair. The adroit man profits by everything, neglects nothing which can increase his chances; the less adroit, by ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... he had submitted himself to the inevitable course of this fate that had fallen on him, and the whole tone of his temper and his breeding lent him the quiescence, though he had none of the doctrine of a supreme fatalist. There were carriages standing before the hotel, waiting for those who were going to the ballroom, to the theater, to an archduke's dinner, to a princess' entertainment; he looked at them with a vague, strange sense of unreality—these ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... him through, he retained his unshaken faith in many things which to me were at that time the merest legends. I remember very well the arguments we used to have on the vexed question of 'Free-will,' and being myself more or less of a fatalist, it annoyed me that I never could in the very slightest degree shake his convictions on that point. Moreover, when I plagued him too much with Herbert Spencer, he had a way of retaliating, and would foist upon me his favourite authors. He was never a worshipper of any one writer, but always ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... wonder at their existence. He was neither elated nor depressed, but found himself confronting fancies he had not confronted before, and at times regarding the course of events with something of the feeling of a fatalist. There was a thing it seemed from which he could not escape, yet in his deepest being was aware that he would have preferred to avoid it. No man wishes to encounter unhappiness; he was conscious remotely that this preference for avoidance arose from a vaguely defined knowledge ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... you know, a fatalist,' explained Marion. 'She places her faith in cards, which, I am repeatedly telling ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... she 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 lead me into a ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... 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 ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... disappointment had made him a fatalist—he looked the part. Admiral Hood at this time said: "Nelson is the only absolutely invincible fighter in the navy. I only fear his recklessness, because he never counts ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... God's will that they should be accomplished. This burden, almost as heavy as a world, which I had raised, and I had thought to bear to the end, was too great for my strength, and I was compelled to lay it down in the middle of my career. Oh, shall I then, again become a fatalist, whom fourteen years of despair and ten of hope had rendered a believer in providence? And all this—all this, because my heart, which I thought dead, was only sleeping; because it has awakened ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Bixiou, with a facetious look; "they have Providence on their side, and Providence will bring them back without you and in spite of themselves. A manufacturer ought to be a fatalist." ...
— Unconscious Comedians • Honore de Balzac
... much matter," said Kate, "as 'where.' I'm enough of a fatalist to believe that Mother is here because she was old and worn out. Polly had a clear case of uric poison, while I'd stake my life Nancy Ellen was gloating over the picture she carried when she ran into that loose sand. In each of their cases I am satisfied as to 'why,' as ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... attentive—I repeated the words over two or three times; they were nice, quiet, cool sort of words, and suited the view I was anxious to take of the case particularly well). Besides, I might be of some use to her, poor girl, by combating her strange, melancholy, half-fatalist opinions; at all events, it was my duty to try, decidedly my duty (I said that also several times); and, as to my feeling such a deep interest about her, and thinking of her continually, why there was nothing else to think about at Elm Lodge—so that was easily accounted for. All this, ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... remember saying to your wife," Artois answered. "We were talking about human nature—a small subject, monsieur, isn't it?—and I think I expressed the view of a fatalist. At any rate, I did say that—that our blood governs us ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... 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
... 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, fate itself or ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... Anne in precisely the same way that Miss Wharton has 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 ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... scattered shots and a faint sound of yelling. The one hasty glance told him all that he needed to know; he had not thought this move would come so soon, but luck seemed to be against him all around. Something of a fatalist, in the final analysis, he no longer wasted time in anger or regrets. He was not particularly alarmed, and would not have been so could he have known the truth, that the yelling he had heard marked the passing of Tug Bailey, who had confessed but had made his confession too late to please ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... himself. But a more fatalist believer in liberty than Ashe doesn't exist—liberty especially to damn ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Almighty, but he saw too the corruption around him. It was for such as he that the light of the new faith shone with an alluring radiance, and soon there was no voice that spoke more loudly for the truth than that of Godefrey de la Mothe. A fatalist above all things, even now, when everything seemed lost, he did ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... of naked face, in which you see the brain always working, with an almost painful simplicity—just saved from being painful by a humorous sense of external things, which becomes also a kind of intellectual criticism. He is a fatalist, and he studies the workings of fate in the chief vivifying and disturbing influence in life, women. His view of women is more French than English; it is subtle, a little cruel, not as tolerant as it seems, thoroughly a man's point of view, and not, as with Meredith, man's and woman's ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... 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 who am the cause of this: it is Zeus, and ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce |
