"Fatalistic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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, who ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... possible, into rival competing groups and making each feel that the one was the cause of the other's troubles. The neutrality of the white people of the North was secured through their fear for the safety of large investments in the South, and through the fatalistic attitude common both in America and Europe toward the possibility of real advance on the part of the ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... blundering Sultan in the fatalistic East have put things together for them with more utter contempt of fitness? It is all in the Turkish ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... immediate evidence, for we cannot deny that the history of life is revealed to us under the aspect of a progress and an ascent. And this impulse implies initiative and choice, constituting an effort which we are not authorised by the facts to pronounce fatalistic: "A simple glance at the fossil species shows us that life could have done without evolution, or could have evolved only within very restricted limits, had it chosen the far easier path open to it ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... This is not a Celtic word; it is the Anglo-Saxon faege retained in Lowland Scotch, which is the most northerly English dialect. The word appears frequently in descriptions of battles, the Anglo-Saxon fatalistic philosophy teaching that, certain warriors entered the conflict faege, "doomed." Now the meaning is altered slightly: "You are surely fey," would be said in Scotland, as Professor Masson remarks, to a person observed to be in extravagantly high spirits, or in ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... repast each gave way to his own reflections. I wondered what were those of Hans—the man of the extreme north, who was yet gifted with the fatalistic resignation of Oriental character. But the utmost stretch of the imagination would not allow me to realize the truth. As for my individual self, my thoughts had ceased to be anything but memories of the past, and were all connected with that upper world which I never ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... nor even wholly fatalistic. When his first wife was lying dead, he saw her in a dream with one of her dead babies in her arms, and he is convinced that that meant something very spiritual, although what it meant he does not care to enquire. The agnosticism ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... 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 ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... by the materialistic or fatalistic doctrines which seem to follow this conception, I beg you to suspend your judgment for a moment, as I shall soon have something more to say about the matter. But, meanwhile yielding one's self to the mechanical conception of the psychophysical organism, nothing ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... I think it cannot be doubted by any one who looks at the nature of the human mind, and the power exercised over it by its belief, that the worship of these and similar gods, along with the prevalent pantheistic and fatalistic views, which strike at the very root of moral distinctions, have done much to deprave the Hindu mind. The people, indeed, often assert "to the powerful there is no fault." The gods had the power and the opportunity to do what they did, and therefore no fault attached ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... 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 Clare's woe. ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... was sorry, as her panther-in-a-cage movements were exceedingly beautiful, and she gazed at me with a tragic air, wringing her hands. I was puzzled to find an adequate reason for this sudden emotional outburst. Hitherto she had accepted the prospect of a resumption of married life with a fatalistic calm. Now when the man is either dead or has vanished into space, she pins all her hopes of happiness on finding him. And why had her salvation from destruction nothing to do with Dale? There is obviously another range of emotions at work beneath it all; ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... built of wood. Should it once fairly catch alight in a high wind, all that will be left of this town will be a few charred timbers and some dazed human beings. The inhabitants know their own danger, and endeavor to meet it in their fatalistic manner. Each village has its fire organization. Each "soul" has his appointed place, his appointed duty, and his special contribution—be it bucket or rope or ladder—to bring to the conflagration. But no one ever dreams of being sober ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... would none of 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 ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... woman whose influence has left such deep impressions upon France. Those words are: Power and Astrology. Exclusively ambitious, Catherine de' Medici had no other passion than that of power. Superstitious and fatalistic, like so many superior men, she had no sincere belief except in occult sciences. Unless this double mainspring is known, the conduct of Catherine de' Medici will remain forever misunderstood. As we picture her faith in judicial astrology, the light will fall upon two personages, ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... (comrades), we shall not live through coming events in fatalistic indifference; we shall remain true to our cause; we shall hold firmly together, permeated by the sublime ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... after chapter of facts of this nature, each brought up to illustrate some fatalistic theory which Marx professes to have proved by exact reasoning, cannot but stir into fury any passionate working-class reader, and into unbearable shame any possessor of capital in whom generosity and ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... truth that democratic 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 ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various |
