"Fatalistic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... belief in fate, which leads them, during these epidemics, to neglect or to decline the use of medical remedies. Many a Muslim perishes during such times because of his fatalistic convictions. ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... enduring prophetism, which is the fundamental principle of Christianity. From this separation of God and man, the Mohammedan doctrine of predestination, in distinction from the Christian, acquires its abstract and fatalistic character, whereby man, instead of being regarded as a being in whose free activity God's power and life are glorified, is conceived as a passive instrument of a higher power. To true moral independence, therefore, the Moslem does not attain. His religion is legal and external, and therefore ...
— A Comparative View of Religions • Johannes Henricus Scholten
... 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
... out the main outlines of the 'Classical Political Economy': the system which to his disciples appeared to be as clear, consistent, and demonstrable as Euclid; and which was denounced by their opponents as mechanical, materialistic, fatalistic, and degrading. After triumphing for a season, it has been of late years often treated with contempt, and sometimes banished to the limbo of extinct logomachies. It is condemned as 'abstract.' Of all delusions on the subject, replies a very able and severe critic,[336] ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... 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 ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... the man indifferently, uttering the fatalistic phrase that rises to the lips of the savage African almost automatically, unless his personal loyalty has been won—"that is not my affair." He brooded on the ground for a space then looked up. "It is the business of porters to carry loads; it is the business of the white man ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... yours truly," at the end. They were all there, aridly complete, the limitations of the lady to whom she was helping Lindsay to bind himself without a gleam of possibility of escape or a rift through which tiniest hope could creep to emerge smiling upon the other side. When she saw him, in fatalistic reverie, going about ten years hence attached to the body of this petrifaction, she was almost satisfied to abandon the pair, to let them take their wretched chance. But this was a climax which did not occur often; she ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... Laissez-faire policy of immigration. There are those who take a fatalistic, or a laissez-faire, view of the subject, and declare that the problem will solve itself as the level of American wages comes to be nearly the same as that of the countries of Europe from which our immigration is coming. True enough, if this can be called ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter
... put me in a new window in the parlour—one that will open!" she said positively to Cyril, who accepted Mr. Critchlow's idea with fatalistic indifference. ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... Commodore did not arrive, Mrs. Dunlop went out to the front gate to see if there were signs of his approach. At the same moment Allan entered the house by the back door, and looked about for his mother. Impelled by a "fatalistic necessity" he went up to her room, the sound of his carefully modulated tread upon the stairway filling the heart of Rose with delight, for was not that her own father, who had probably been informed at the gate ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... his love for the mother of years ago. "It will be easy to die for her," he told Peter, and this, in the end, was what he knew he was going to do. Thought of the inevitable did not make him afraid. He was determined to keep his freedom and his life as long as he could, but he was fatalistic enough, and sufficiently acquainted with the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, to know what the ultimate of the thing would be. And yet, with tragedy behind him, and a still grimmer tragedy ahead, the soul of Jolly Roger was not dead or in utter darkness. In ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... search by myself. True, she never quits the general. She is more reassured, and is reassuring to him, at his side. It has an excellent moral effect on him, while I walk about and search like a beast. And she has become as fatalistic as he, and now she sings verses to the guzla, like Boris, or talks in corners with Michael, which makes the two enraged each with the other. They are curious, the young women of St. Petersburg and Moscow, very curious. We were not like that in our time, at Orel. ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... superstition in Bonaparte's nature, such as usually appears in gifted scions of a coast-dwelling family, cannot be denied;[101] but his usual attitude towards religion was that of the political mechanician, not of the devotee, and even while professing the forms of fatalistic belief, he really subordinated them to his own designs. To this profound calculation of the credulity of mankind we may probably refer his allusions to his star. The present writer regards it as ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... imagine, but for some reason Miles Canon and the stormy waters below it had assumed terrible potentialities and he could not shake off the conviction that they were destined to prove his undoing. This feeling he had allowed to grow until now a fatalistic apathy had settled upon him and his usual cheerfulness was replaced by a senseless irritability. He suffered explosions of temper quite as surprising to the Kirbys, father and daughter, as to himself. On the day of his arrival he was particularly ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... fell back upon tyranny. Vainly did reason expostulate that oppression could not long be exercised by hands which had lost their strength, and that peace imposed new and different labours on those who no longer triumphed in war; they would listen to nothing; and, as fatalistic when condemned to a state of peace as when they marched forth conquering and to conquer, they cowered down in magnificent listlessness, leaving the whole burden of their support on conquered peoples. ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... 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 greatness ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... their passions, they always live in supreme consciousness that every impulse, every act is decreed, that they drift without will of their own, and are the helpless creatures of destiny. Half their talk consists of invocations to Allah, the All-ruling, All-gracious Allah! This fatalistic element is a leading feature in the Nights. All that happens is accepted with submission, and with the conviction that nothing can be averted. The Wazir's eye is knocked out, "as fate and fortune decreed," the one pomegranate seed escapes destruction, and the Princess ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... permitting herself one scornful sniff, and put the missive in her pocket. Next day John Tow, the Chinaman, serenely fatalistic, smilingly perpendicular in felt-soled shoes, amidst zipping bullets, brought to the trench a ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... persons who are either fated to commit suicide or are meditating it. The funereal ideas they are turning over in their minds appear upon their foreheads in gray and cloudy tints, their smile has something fatalistic in it, their motions are solemn. These unhappy beings seem to want to suck the last juices of the life they mean to leave; their eyes see things invisible, their ears are listening to a death-knell, they pay no attention to the minor things ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... shots from the ray-guns was directed at their legs, with the intention of bringing them down—and their legs were moving very rapidly. And so, reckoning up the caliber of the two comrades, their wild fighting start, their fatalistic resolve to get as many as possible of the enemy before they died, the result of that first hectic scramble in the corridor was ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... mean to indicate that there is necessarily any determined or fatalistic process of natural selection in these things by which one symbol rather than another gathers about it the hopes and fears of the generations. Chance no doubt plays a strange part in all this. But the concrete necessities ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... moments how much he had leaned upon her, how completely she seemed to have extended over him and his troubled life some sort of sheltering influence, to which he had succumbed with an effortless, an almost fatalistic impulse, finding there, at any rate, a refuge from the horrors of his empty days. It was all abstract and impersonal at first, this jealousy which had come so suddenly to disturb the serenity of an almost too perfect day, but as the hours passed it seemed to him that his thoughts dwelt more often ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... he knew—just as vain to waste his strength, and rob himself of his calmness; so that he felt bound to call up all his fortitude, and with it the fatalistic theories of his race, so that he might die as behoved the ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... 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
... succeeding as you once expected to succeed. Perhaps you have given up your case as "too tough a job." We will assume that you are not so young as you wish you were, and that you have committed to memory the fatalistic, hoary lie, "You can't teach an old dog new tricks." But recall the fixed habit of bitterness the walnut had for centuries, the color and size of the natural calla, the sour taste of the little wild prune, which the plant wizard ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... could, was "equilibrium," the void, the tabula rasa, into which, through all those apparent energies of man and nature, that in truth are but forces of disintegration, the world was really settling. And, himself a mere circumstance in a fatalistic series, to which the clay of the potter was no sufficient parallel, he could not expect to be "loved in return." At first, indeed, he had a kind of delight in his thoughts—in the eager pressure forward, to whatsoever conclusion, of a rigid intellectual gymnastic, which was like the making of Euclid. ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... write about the problem of drink, for instance, as if it were one problem. Dickens could have told them that there is the abyss between heaven and hell between the incongruous excesses of Mr. Pickwick and the fatalistic soaking of Mr. Wickfield. He could have shown that there was nothing in common between the brandy and water of Bob Sawyer and the rum and water of Mr. Stiggins. People talk of imprudent marriages among the poor, as if it were all one question. Dickens could have told them that it is one thing ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... precisely the semi-fatalistic and wholly superstitious address which would find favour with Moslems of the present day they still prefer "calling upon Hercules" to putting their shoulders to the wheel. Mr. Redhouse had done good work in his day but of late he has devoted himself, especially ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... which the amusements of the community can be neglected or dismissed with mere condemnation. In the husbandry of the country every factor must be counted. We are dealing no longer with a fatalistic country life, but with the economy of all resources. Therefore the neglecting of the play life and ignoring the leisure occupations of a country people are inconsistent with ...
— The Evolution of the Country Community - A Study in Religious Sociology • Warren H. Wilson
... reached Salonica most miraculously. Their crews would relate with the fatalistic serenity of men of the sea how the torpedo had passed at a short distance from their hulls. A damaged steamer lay on its side, with only the keel submerged, all its red exterior exposed to the air; on its water-line there had opened a breach, angular ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... pursued by obstinate misfortune against which she became as fatalistic as an Oriental: the habit of seeing her dreams fade away and destroy her hopes made her afraid to undertake anything; and she waited whole days to accomplish the most simple affair, convinced that she would always take the wrong way to do it, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... men were playing for big stakes, and would hesitate at nothing to accomplish their purpose. They had already killed without remorse, and that I still survived was itself a mere accident. Yet the very fact that I lived yielded me fresh confidence, a fatalistic belief that my life had thus been spared for a specific purpose. It might yet be my privilege to foil these villains, and rescue Mrs. Henley. It was my belief she was also on board this vessel. I had no reason ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... heart! she would be all unaware. I had quite stopped bemoaning the affair; perhaps the comments of my husband, who treated it with broad approval and satisfaction, did something to soothe my sensibilities. At all events, I had gradually come to occupy a high fatalistic ground towards the pair. If it was written upon their foreheads that they should marry, the inscription was none of mine; and, of course, it was true, as John had indignantly stated, that Dacres might do very much worse. One's interest in Dacres Tottenham's ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... the will of his commander. For the time being his own will was almost paralyzed. The reaction from his long-sustained rage had left him dazed and nerveless. He had sunk into a state of fatalistic indifference. He moved quickly downstream from turning-point to turning-point, driven by Blake's will, but with a heedless recklessness that all Blake's ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... occasional exceptions, and of these Mozart is the most radiant. The qualities of eternal youth and of juventine gaiety; of intimate tenderness; of swagger that winks while it swaggers; of love that is ever deep but sunlit to the depth; and of tragedy with a touch of fatalistic horror,—all those qualities that are found scattered through his sonatas and symphonies and his various operas—all the qualities that are combined in "Don Giovanni," are the qualities of Mozart's own nature, always excepting the ruthlessness and ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... scientific investigation, is that it is not charity that is needed to support invalids who once stricken must fade away, but preventive action to give the patient hope and fresh air. Most important of all, the experience already gained shows how far from the truth was the old fatalistic notion of the necessary ...
— Euthenics, the science of controllable environment • Ellen H. Richards
... afternoon, two days later, Hilda came, with an air of reproach, into her mother's empty bedroom. Mrs. Lessways had contracted a severe cold in the head, a malady to which she was subject and which she accepted with fatalistic submission, even pleasurably giving herself up to it, as a martyr to the rack. Mrs. Lessways' colds annoyed Hilda, who out of her wisdom could always point to the precise indiscretion which had caused ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... the still lingering doubt that whispered that she had gone beyond her prerogative. And what she had done was in a way inexplicable even to herself. All through she had felt that involuntary forceful impulse that had been almost fatalistic, she had urged through the prompting of an inward conviction. She had perhaps attached too much importance to it, her own wish had been magnified until it assumed the ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... after messenger approaches, and informs the Sultan of the revolutionary risings in different parts of his empire, he refuses to hear more, and takes refuge in that fatalistic philosophy which is an unfailing resource of the followers of the ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... man thus spoke and thus trampled with his live and dead feet, a sneering triumph that seemed meant for Ahab, and a fatalistic despair that seemed meant for himself—these passed over the mute, motionless Parsee's face. Unobserved he rose and glided away; while, awestruck by the aspect of their commander, the seamen clustered together on the forecastle, till Ahab, troubledly pacing the deck, shouted ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... is fatalistic, but it is a brave one. It does not fall back on weak substitutes for reality; it does not throw the glamor of history and the aesthetics of industry around trades with the poor hope that they make up for the content which ...
— Creative Impulse in Industry - A Proposition for Educators • Helen Marot
... tension of nerves. Old Mok, sturdy and unconsciously fatalistic, was more self-contained than the youth at his side, bow-armed and with flint ax and knife ready for instant use. At last an open space was reached across which ran the well-worn path. Now the danger must reveal itself. The ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... uproar. Instinctively I threw a questioning, perhaps an appealing, glance at my two companions. The Spahi had dropped his hand from his ear. He stood upright, as if at attention on the parade-ground of Biskra. His face was set—afterwards I told myself it was fatalistic. The murderer, on the other hand, was smiling. I remember the gleam of his big white teeth. Why was he smiling? While I asked myself the question the roar of the tom-tom grew gradually less, as if the man beating it were ...
— The Desert Drum - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... 'shinju'—(both words being written with the same Chinese characters)-signifying 'heart- death,' 'passion-death,' or 'love-death.' They most commonly occur, in the case of women, among the joro [2] class; but occasionally also among young girls of a more respectable class. There is a fatalistic belief that if one shinju occurs among the inmates of a joroya, two more are sure to follow. Doubtless the belief itself is the cause that cases of shinju do commonly occur in ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... of course, quite ignorant of the disaster which had befallen the battleships of the Reserve Fleet and Portsmouth, and when the captain of the cruiser told him the tidings, though he received the news with the almost fatalistic sang froid of the British naval officer, turned a shade or two paler under the bronze of ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith
... the men became accustomed to the nerve-trying duties in the firing-line. Fortunately for Tommy, the longer he is in the army, the greater becomes his indifference to danger. His philosophy is fatalistic. "What is to be will be" is his only comment when one of his comrades is killed. A bullet or a shell works with such lightning speed that danger is passed before one realizes that it is at hand. Therefore, men work doggedly, carelessly, and in the background ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... of philosophy, ethics, the Mutakallimun among the Arabians discussed in connection with the justice of God. In opposition to the Jabariya and the Ashariya who advocated a fatalistic determinism denying man's ability to determine his own actions, some going so far as to say that right and wrong, good and evil, are entirely relative to God's will, the Mu'tazila insisted that man is free, that good and evil are absolute and that God is just ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... 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
... Hermione came a melancholy devoid of all violence, soft almost as the warmth upon this sea, quite as the resignation of the fatalistic East. She felt herself for a moment such a tiny, dark thing caught in the meshes of the great net of the Universe, this Universe that she could never understand. What could she do? She must just sink down upon the breast of this mystery, let ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... friends and guardians of everything admirable in human life; but their good intentions did not prevent them from actively or passively opposing positive intellectual and moral achievement, directed either towards social or individual ends. The effect of their whole state of mind was negative and fatalistic. They approved in general of everything approvable; but the things of which they actively approved were the things which everybody in general was doing. Their point of view implied that society and individuals could be made better without actually planning the improvement or building ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... the impulse of one Gray straggler, who shook a handkerchief aloft in fatalistic submission to the inevitable, became the impulse of all. Soon a thousand white signals of surrender were blossoming. As the firing abruptly ceased, Marta heard the faint roar of the mighty huzzas of the hunters over ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... backbone of industrial civilization. Given natural resources, the other great factor in industry is labour. In that territory was a population of 400,000,000 souls—one quarter of the then total population of the earth. Furthermore, the Chinese were excellent workers, while their fatalistic philosophy (or religion) and their stolid nervous organization constituted them splendid soldiers—if they were properly managed. Needless to say, Japan was prepared to furnish ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... such perhaps as the life of no other English poet puts upon us. The spell of the great moral problems by which the lives of so many of our poets seem to have been more or less surrounded makes itself felt in every step of Clare's career. We are tempted to speak in almost fatalistic language of the disastrous gift of the poetic faculty, and to find in that the source of all Clare's ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... the counsel of the fatalistic sea lady. He asked her how he could reach Pir-napishtim, his ancestor, saying he was prepared to cross the Sea of Death: if he could not cross it he would die ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... destructiveness. The spectacle of wasted manhood and womanhood, of depleted powers in body, mind, and soul, is in history and in present society appalling. It is so oppressive that it has driven many thoughtful men and women to despair. Men otherwise hopeful and purposeful here become gloomy and fatalistic; they have no hope that lust ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... sat at the tiller smoking. He was in that mood of vacant obliviousness of the ordinary affairs of life which long drifting on calm seas induces. The helplessness of man in a sailing-ship, when the wind fails him, begets a kind of fatalistic acceptance of the inevitable, which is the nearest thing to peace that any of us ever attain. Indeed to drift along the tide is peace, and no conviction of the inevitableness of the worries which lurk in ambush for us on the ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... and exclusive side of the island, it was none the less enchanting in Sally's vision. A measure of confidence reinfused her mood. She surrendered absolutely to fatalistic enjoyment of the gifts the gods had sent. Half closing her eyes, she drank deep of salt-sweet air vibrant with the living warmth of a ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... on Providence was so utter that his words sometimes sound almost fatalistic. His father harbored some rationalistic ideas which were even more pronounced in Mozart, so that he formed his own opinion concerning ecclesiastical ceremonies and occasionally disregarded them. His cheery temperament made ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel
... sees that he is wanting in this kind of perception," I said, "what can he do? How is he to learn to love what he does not admire and to abhor what he does not hate? It all seems so fatalistic, so irresistible." ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Another gesture—the fatalistic sweep of the lifted palms. "The next ten days will tell—the fight is on, as Wyant says. And if any one can do it, that young fellow can. There's stuff ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... of novelty, and brave, but ineffective in practical affairs; second, a somewhat fantastic but sincere and delicate sensitiveness to beauty. Into impetuous action they were easily hurried; but their momentary ardor easily cooled into fatalistic despondency. To the mysterious charm of Nature—of hills and forests and pleasant breezes; to the loveliness and grace of meadow-flowers or of a young man or a girl; to the varied sheen of rich colors—to all attractive objects of sight and sound and motion their fancy responded keenly ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... the words "what is called chance" that he had already learnt to recognise the hand of God in everything, and that even at this early stage of his career there existed the germs of that doctrine on which he spoke and wrote so much later on. It has been said by some that his so-called fatalistic views were imbibed from the Mohammedans in the Soudan. This sentence in a letter written by him before he had ever held an intimate conversation with a Mohammedan shows that such was not the case. Allusion is made to ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... conversiones.] is denounced by Bacon as the greatest obstacle to the advancement of knowledge, creating, as it does, diffidence or despair. He does not formally refute it, but he marshals the reasons for an optimistic view, and these reasons supply the disproof The facts on which the fatalistic doctrine of Returns is based can be explained without resorting to any mysterious law. [Footnote: Nov. Org. i. 92 sqq.] Progress has not been steady or continuous on account of the prejudices and errors which hindered men from setting ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... perfect. It comes forward lightly, gracefully, stylishly. It is lovable, it does not sweat. "All that is good is easy, everything divine runs with light feet": this is the first principle of my aesthetics. This music is wicked, refined, fatalistic, and withal remains popular,—it possesses the refinement of a race, not of an individual. It is rich. It is definite. It builds, organises, completes, and in this sense it stands as a contrast to the polypus in music, to "endless melody". ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... glitter of an ephemeron in a moment's sunshine? Doubtless many a one has at times felt the stupendous truths of astronomy thus palsying him with a crushing sense of his own nothingness and burying him in fatalistic despair. Standing at night, alone, beneath the august dome studded from of old with its ever blazing lights, he gazes up and sees the innumerable armies of heaven marshalled forth above him in the order and silence of their ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... had come to an end, and the Mullets had not succeeded in selling the Brogue. There had been a kind of tradition in the family for the past three or four years, a sort of fatalistic hope, that the Brogue would find a purchaser before the hunting was over; but seasons came and went without anything happening to justify such ill-founded optimism. The animal had been named Berserker ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... a fatalistic tendency in Luther's teaching of justification by faith without works. They declare that Luther's theory of the utter depravity of man by reason of inherited sin and his incapacity to perform any work that can be accounted good in the sight of God kills every ambition to virtuous living ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... November, and the sailors were prepared to make handsome bets on it. With experience the ordinary soldier came to regard this news as a topic for conversation only, remaining incredulous and accepting actual facts with the best grace possible in view of his rapidly developing fatalistic spirit. ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... has been going into Persia to bribe the Bakhtiari Khans and such like, but that day is gone by. Now we Kurds will grow rich. But as for us"—they shrugged their shoulders like this, sahib, meaning to say that perhaps their day had gone by also. I left them with the impression they are very fatalistic folk. ...
— Hira Singh - When India came to fight in Flanders • Talbot Mundy
... painful, and the future is an impenetrable cloud. In the 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
... to consider the Revolution as being partly a necessity, but it was above all—which is what the fatalistic writers already cited do not show us—a permanent struggle between theorists who were imbued with a new ideal, and the economic, social, and political laws which ruled mankind, and which they did ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... 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 ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... thank the gods for his unconquerable soul. On the whole, however, a fatalistic temper is much easier to trace in modern poetry ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... that the ideals of Eugenics may be expected to work fruitfully. To insist upon the power of heredity was once considered to indicate a fatalistic pessimism. It wears a very different aspect nowadays, in the light of Eugenics. "To the eugenist," as Davenport observes, "heredity stands as the one great hope of the human race: its saviour from imbecility, poverty, disease, immorality."[40] ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... Mohammedanism is so largely fatalistic that it tends to deprive the individual of personal initiative. "The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord," is a general attitude of mind, and this, combined with their long ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... that afterward come true. The feeling of having been there is very common with them; that is, they feel under given circumstances that they have had that identical experience before in all its details. They are often fatalistic in their ideas. They indulge in day-dreams. As a rule, they ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... enjoyment, for he is garrulous, metaphysical, and argumentative. In money matters careless and extravagant, dilatory and venal in affairs; fond, especially in the peasant class, of singing, dancing, and carousing; but his irresponsible gaiety and heedlessness of consequences balanced by a fatalistic courage and endurance in the face of suffering and danger. Capable, besides, of high flights of idealism, which result in epics, but rarely in actions, owing to the Slavonic inaptitude for sustained and organised effort. The Englishman by contrast appears cold and calculating, incapable of rising ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... the feeling lingers that social events are fore-ordained. Many people feel to-day about social disaster as the men of the middle ages felt about the plague—that it is outside the field of man's preventive power. Another fatalistic school of thought holds that men learn their social lessons only through failure and disaster. According to the first line of thought it is useless to interfere with social processes because they are in the hands of the gods; according to the second, men will not interfere until ...
— The Next Step - A Plan for Economic World Federation • Scott Nearing
... did I think of turning back. I am fatalistic in temperament. What is to be, is to be, that is not my outlook. If at last we should get bound up in a drift, well and good, I should then see what the next move would have to be. While the wind blows, snow drifts; while ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... war developed it lost whatever gaiety and humour it had. After the fall of Warsaw the attitude of the Russian people in general became fatalistic. Much nonsense was talked in the foreign press about "Russia coming back again and again." "Russia, the harder she was pressed the harder she resisted," and the ghost of Napoleon retreating from Moscow was presented to every home ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... already brought political science into that unbreathable atmosphere of fatalism which is the characteristic blight of Darwinism. Long before Darwin published a line, the Ricardo-Malthusian economists were preaching the fatalistic Wages Fund doctrine, and assuring the workers that Trade Unionism is a vain defiance of the inexorable laws of political economy, just as the Neo-Darwinians were presently assuring us that Temperance Legislation is a vain defiance ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... her shoulders with the fatalistic movement he was beginning to recognize. "Father won't need a night ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... enough now. There was something slow and fatalistic in the way they folded the letter. He looked up from it at length with dark eyes that gazed unwaveringly before him, as though they saw ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... I first joined it. But as I became much attached to Brigadier-General Clifford I may perhaps be forgiven for describing him rather closely. Tall and dignified, with a cold exterior and a penetrating grey eye, he had the power of commanding the respect and obedience of all. His fatalistic contempt of danger took him into the trenches wherever shelling was hottest; and it is difficult to imagine how he escaped being sniped at Hill 60 or on the ...
— Q.6.a and Other places - Recollections of 1916, 1917 and 1918 • Francis Buckley
... a storm on their departure from Lisbon, the fleet again assembled at Corunna, their victuals already rotten, and their water foul and short. Medina Sidonia even now counseled abandonment; but religious faith, the fatalistic pride of Spain, and Philip's dogged fixity of purpose drove them on. Putting out of Corunna on July 22, and again buffeted by Biscay gales, they were sighted off the Lizard at daybreak of July 30, and a pinnace scudded into ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... Sicily blue, crowned with a garland of golden flowers. She and PARIS stand riveted, looking at each other. Their attitude might be described as fatalistic. ANALYTIKOS watches them for a moment and then with hands and head lifted to heaven he goes ...
— Washington Square Plays - Volume XX, The Drama League Series of Plays • Various
... slight in its effect upon conduct here, as it is in the rest of the field of our moral motives. It is covered too thickly over and constantly neutralised by the multitudinous growths of use, by the many forms of fatalistic or ascetic religious sentiment, by physical apathy of race, and all other conditions that interpose to narrow or abrogate the authority of pure reason over human conduct. Rousseau, expounding his conception of a normal political state, was no doubt warranted ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... the Socialism of condescension, so also do I disavow the Socialism of revolt. There is a form of Socialism based upon the economic generalizations of Marx, an economic fatalistic Socialism that I hold to be rather wrong in its vision of facts, rather more distinctly wrong in its theory, and altogether wrong and hopeless in its spirit. It preaches, as inevitable, a concentration of property in the hands of a limited number of property ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... am bound to say that there are also many Mahomedans who, though professing similar apprehensions, show no disposition towards fatalistic resignation. For they believe that, whatever may be the fate of the British raj, the future must belong to the more virile peoples of India, and certainly those who do not merely put their trust in the fighting traditions of a conquering race may find a good deal of encouragement for the faith ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... Foxwell has thus strikingly expressed the moral influences of this economic factor: "When employment is precarious, thrift and self-reliance are discouraged. The savings of years may be swallowed up in a few months. A fatalistic spirit is developed. Where all is uncertain and there is not much to lose, reckless overpopulation is certain to be set at. These effects are not confined to the poorer classes. The business world is equally demoralised by industrial speculation, careful prevision cannot reckon upon receiving ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... creature cannot understand. Regina, roused to act and face to face with danger, was brave, clever, and quick, but under the mysterious oppression of her forebodings she was the Roman hill woman, apathetic, hopeless, unconsciously fatalistic ...
— Whosoever Shall Offend • F. Marion Crawford
... small of fist. But I do not counsel following his two variants in the fifth and twenty-third bars. Chopin's text is more telling. Like the vast reverberation of monstrous waves on the implacable coast of a remote world is this prelude. Despite its fatalistic ring, its note of despair is not dispiriting. Its issues are larger, more impersonal, more elemental than the other preludes. It is a veritable Appassionata, but its theatre is cosmic and no longer behind the closed doors of the cabinet of ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... been brought up to something like strength, and they were full of fight. In the mud and slime of the Somme and Flanders in 1916 and 1917, when each advance was on a narrow front and ceased after a one-day effort, I always marvelled at the patient, fatalistic heroism of the infantry. A man went "over the top" understanding that, however brilliant the attack, the exultant glory of continuous chase of a fleeing, broken enemy would not be his; and that, should he escape wounds or death, it would not be long before he went "over ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... curiously interesting to study, a 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 ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... appears in the door. She has her house skirt on and a loose bodice of cotton cloth. She keeps herself erect by sheer force of will. Her hair hangs down, partly loose, partly braided. There is in her face an expression of terrible, fatalistic calm and of bitter defiance. For several moments she lets her eyes wander over the room, over OLD BERND sitting there with his Bible, over AUGUST who has slowly turned from the door and pretends to be looking intently out of the window. Then, groping for some support, she begins ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... represented by his father, this had been a sin. How or why it was a sin he could not comprehend.... Labor had been willing to be friendly, but now it hated him. Orders given in his name, but not originating in his will, had caused this. His attitude became fatalistic—he was being moved about by a ruthless hand without regard to his own volition. He might as well close his eyes and his mind and submit, for Bonbright Foote VII did not exist as a rational human individual, but only as a checker on the board, to be moved from square to square with ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... of several kinds,—the punal (a wedge-bladed knife), the campalon (a long broadsword), and the sundang (a Malay kriss). They also use head-axes, spears, and dirks. Being Mohammedans, they show a fatalistic bravery in battle. It is a disgrace to lose the weapon when in action; consequently it is tied to the hand. Many of their knives were made by splitting up the steel rails laid at Iligan. The brass work of the Spanish ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... blood of the Latin and the cold, phlegmatic blood of the Slav. He was like a schoolmaster with two students too big for him to handle. Always the Latin was dispossessing the Slav or the Slav was ousting the Latin. With fatalistic confidence that nevermore would he look upon the kindly face of Stefani Gregor, alive, he went ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... his hand with one of his fatalistic Latin gestures, drawing the attention of the passers-by to the man and woman talking so earnestly. For this reason, and because she was losing her self-command, she hastened to take ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... His fatalistic resignation somewhat moved me. He was inwardly convinced that he was going to his death. But I appreciated his sparing a little of his bare ten minutes to give me a parting visit. I also thank him for remembering me as he had promised. ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... in preparation, I will now confess my own Utopia. I devoutly believe in the reign of peace and in the gradual advent of some sort of a socialistic equilibrium. The fatalistic view of the war-function is to me nonsense, for I know that war-making is due to definite motives and subject to prudential checks and reasonable criticisms, just like any other form of enterprise. And when whole nations are the armies, and the science of destruction ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... home to her father. She said something the other day which puzzled me. I can't remember just what it was but she seemed to have some fatalistic idea, about her old life having a hold upon her which she couldn't shake off. Pure morbidity, as I pointed out. But she has gone back. I have a ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... second they find an interesting experience; but the third and the fourth and the rest are a series of nervous shocks in increasing progression. It is like feeling God—but a wicked, cruel God! No wonder the Japanese are so fatalistic and so desperate. It is a case of 'Eat and drink, ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... not atheistical, 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 ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... say how this myth of progress came to take hold of the imagination, in the teeth of science and experience. Quinet speaks of the 'fatalistic optimism' of historians, of which there have certainly been some strange examples. We can only say that secularism, like other religions, needs an eschatology, and has produced one. A more energetic generation than ours looked forward ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... punishment to wipe out its stain of national blood-guiltiness. It may be noticed, moreover, that his stern denunciation of crime and folly has by this time settled down into a philosophic mood that is almost fatalistic, as when he suggests that 'circumstance only brings out the latent defect or quality, and does not create it'; that 'our mental changes are, like our grey hairs and wrinkles, no more than the fulfilment of the ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... did so under violent and lawless political circumstances, in which evil seemed often to win a splendid and lasting victory, their belief in God began to waver, and their view of the government of the world became fatalistic. And when their passionate natures refused to rest in the sense of uncertainty, they made a shift to help themselves out with ancient, Oriental, or medieval superstition. They ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... felt secure under this cover, and only prayed for night to come. As the shadows began to creep down the sides of the cliffs, he indulged in hope. If he could slip out in the dark he had a good chance to elude the borderman. In the passionate desire to escape, he had forgotten his fatalistic words to Legget. He reasoned that he could not be trailed until daylight; that a long night's march would put him far in the lead, and there was just a possibility of Zane's having gone ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... she took was irrevocable, that in three days she would be Kemper's wife, that there was no possible escape from it now, produced a sudden sickening terror in her heart. Then with a desperate clutch at her old fatalistic comfort, she told herself that it would all come right if she were only patient—that with her marriage everything would be ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... had judged himself fortunate since the affair that Helen had been so absorbed in her new environment that she had not thought to call upon him for an accounting of the family funds. But even so, all along he had had a sort of fatalistic fear that in the end she would know ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... to himself at last, with a fatalistic humor, "if it comes that way, it comes. If I am to be the goat, I shall be, and that's ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... careless and reckless fatalistic relatives is attracted to a child's stammering, they labor under the mistaken illusion that the child 'will outgrow it.' A more harmful doctrine has never been perpetuated than the one contained in that stock phrase. As a matter ...
— Stammering, Its Cause and Cure • Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue
... of the ultimate identity of "might and right" never leads, with him, to its worst consequence, a fatalistic or indolent repose; the withdrawal from the world's affairs of the soul "holding no form of creed but contemplating all." That he was neither a consistent optimist nor a consistent pessimist is apparent from his faith in man's partial ability ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... that little Fort Chabrol. You may remember how the deadly aim of Peter the Painter and his fellow-conspirators got home on the force again and again. You remember how the police, in their helplessness against such fatalistic defiance of their authority, appealed to Government, and how Government sent down a detachment of the Irish Guards. There was a real Cabinet Minister in it, too; he came down in his motor-car to superintend ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... L. Stevenson markedly deficient in grip on other sides—common sides, after all, of human nature. This was so far largely due to a dreamy, mystical, so far perverted and, so to say, often even inverted casuistical, fatalistic morality, which would not allow him scope in what Carlyle would have called a healthy hatred of fools and scoundrels; with both of which classes—vagabonds in strictness—he had rather too much of a sneaking sympathy. Mr Pinero was wrong—totally and incomprehensibly ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... Roger's sheer, dominant virility had imbued her with a fatalistic sense of her total inability to escape him. She had had a glimpse of the primitive man in him—of the man with the club. Even were she to violate her conscience sufficiently to end the engagement between them, she knew ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... I incline to fatalistic submission. I suppose I had no power to leave him behind.... I wonder and I wonder. The old Utopists never had to encumber themselves with this ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... tried to do. But instead of raking in the credit, I am more inclined to be grateful for my good fortune. I feel as if I had found something valuable rather than made something beautiful; as if I had stumbled on a nugget of gold or a pearl of price. I am very fatalistic about writing; one is given a certain thing to say, and the power to say it; it does not come by effort, but by a pleasant felicity. After all, I reflect, the book is only a good story, well told. I do not feel like a benefactor of the human race, but at the best like a skilful minstrel, who ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... for several years a servant at the Trappist Monastery at Staoueli; Charmian's maid; and an Arab boy whom everyone called Bibi, and who alternated between a demeanor full of a graceful and apparently fatalistic languor, and fits of almost monkeylike gaiety and mischief which Pierre strove to repress. A small Arab girl, dressed like a little woman in flowing cotton or muslin, with clinking bracelets and ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... the Brewsters heard him say, and marked the fatalistic gesture of the upturned hands. "They disappear. One does not ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... Princess to lock her trunks. Vanquished at last by the stress of events against which she was contending for the first time in her life, she sat down on a portmanteau and burst into tears. The Duchess, who came of a less fatalistic race, was still struggling, aided by James ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... 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 ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... needful in its bearing on modern theories which will have nothing to say to the supernatural, and in a fatalistic fashion regard history as all the result of an orderly evolution in which the importance of personal agents is minimised. To it Jesus, like all other great men, is a product of His age, and the immediate result of the conditions under which He appeared. But when we look far ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... both had been of the least avail in trimming down my proportions, but on the contrary had augmented them to the extent of nearly ten pounds, live weight, that I would let well enough alone. If 'twere my ordained fate to be fat—why, then so be it; I'd be fatly fatalistic and go on through life undulating and rippling. If an all-wise Providence meant to call me to the estate of being the bulkiest writing man using the English language for a vehicle, then let Hilaire Belloc look to his laurels and Gilbert K. Chesterton to his unholsterings. There was one consolation: ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... surprised to hear that my Mother's attention was drawn to the fact that I was looking 'delicate'. The notice nowadays universally given to the hygienic rules of life was rare fifty years ago and among deeply religious people, in particular, fatalistic views of disease prevailed. If anyone was ill, it showed that 'the Lord's hand was extended in chastisement', and much prayer was poured forth in order that it might be explained to the sufferer, or to his relations, in what he or they had sinned. ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... For what other outcome could there be to the ceaseless contention of fears and hopes now hers? Oh, if she had only seen him when he was so near her in the road! That she did not, was the will of Allah, and the fatalistic Mohammedan teaching brought him a measure of comfort. In further sooth, he had found a location and a title. Thenceforward, and not fictitiously, he was the Count Corti; and so entitling himself, he determined to make Brindisi, and take ship for Genoa ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... whether priests or scribes, was so radical that his death might well seem inevitable; yet it was possible that his people might repent, and Jerusalem consent to accept him as God's anointed. Neither prophecy, nor the actual conditions of his life, therefore, would give Jesus any fatalistic certainty of his coming death. In Gethsemane his heart pleaded against it, while his will bowed still to God in perfect loyalty. It is not for us to explain his prediction of death by appealing to the connection which the apostolic thought established between the death of Christ and the ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... the middle class will disappear, one means that it will disappear as a class. Its individuals and its children will survive, and the whole process is not nearly so fatalistic as the Marxists would have us believe. The new great organizations that are replacing the little private enterprises of the world before machinery are not all private property. There are alternatives in the matter of handling a great business. To the exact nature of these ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... moral questions we are still dominated by the idea of the fatalistic power of inanimate things. We cannot think it possible to be just or good, not to speak of being cheerful, without looking at some physical fact and saying humbly "By your leave." We personify our tools and machines, and the occult symbols of trade, and then as abject idolaters ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... like Grillparzer's The Ancestress, were of great power. These plays were conditioned by something in the air. Perhaps Napoleon, the man of fate, ruling the minds and destinies of a whole continent, had something to do with the philosophical background. Werner caught the fatalistic spirit, gave it concise and logical form, and succeeded in producing a play which has both atmosphere and logic of development. In all of these plays, in so far as they are good, the effect is produced by the recognition scenes which hold the reader rapt ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... 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 ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... that the modern world has done deep treason to the eternal intellect by believing in the swing of the pendulum. A man must be dead before he swings. It has substituted an idea of fatalistic alternation for the mediaeval freedom of the soul seeking truth. All modern thinkers are reactionaries; for their thought is always a reaction from what went before. When you meet a modern man he is always coming from a place, not ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... fatalistic mood of mind. It makes those who are already too inert more passive still; it renders wholly reckless those whose energy is already in excess. All through history we find how subjectivism, as soon ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... VON, German philosopher and mathematician, born at Breslau; was appointed professor at Halle in 1707, but was in 1723 not only removed from his chair, but banished from Prussia by Frederick William on account of his opinions, which, as fatalistic, were deemed socially demoralising, but was recalled by Frederick the Great on his accession, and afterwards promoted to the rank of baron of the empire; he was a disciple of Leibnitz, and the father of ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... of his conduct and its consequences was fatalistic: he was meant to have just so much misery every day of his life; for three years it had been withheld, had been piling up somewhere, underground, overhead; now the accumulation burst over him. He had come to pay his respects to me, he said, to declare his undying ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... you see—there's no tellin'. And, arter all my experence, with the best intentions in the world, I can't go and guarantee to you as nothink won't come of it. I wish I could, but, as a honest man, I can't. If it's to be,' moralised this fatalistic plumber, 'it is to be, and that's all about it, and no hefforts on my part or yours won't make hany difference, will ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... there is a slight confusion or divergence in the various works that recount the heroic deeds of Daniel Boone. The men of that day were making history rather than recording what they did. There is, however, a striking uniformity in all the records as to the simple faith and almost fatalistic conviction of Daniel Boone that he was called to be a pathfinder for the new nation in America. His courage, reverence, rugged honesty, and unselfishness, his childlike simplicity that was mixed with a certain shrewdness, at least ...
— Scouting with Daniel Boone • Everett T. Tomlinson
... correlative with it—had not dominated them as it had Jean. Bill and Guy Isbel were born cattlemen—chips of the old block. Jean began to hope that his father's letter was an exaggeration, and particularly that the fatalistic speech of last night, "they are goin' to kill me," was just a moody inclination to see the worst side. Still, even as Jean tried to persuade himself of this more hopeful view, he recalled many references to the peculiar reputation of Texans for gun-throwing, for feuds, for never-ending ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... is at the bottom of that man's strange nature. Cold, indifferent, and fatalistic, apparently one of the most selfish of men, he nevertheless seems to possess somewhere a kind of devoted heroism, an untainted quality of friendship only too rare ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... represented—-! But what did Prosper Profond represent? Nothing that mattered surely. And yet something real enough in the world—unmorality let off its chain, disillusionment on the prowl! That expression Annette had caught from him: "Je m'en fiche!" A fatalistic chap! A continental—a cosmopolitan—a product of the age! If there were condemnation more complete, Soames felt that he did not ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Jack at the sound of his approach, it was not in surprise, but rather in preparedness for the expected appearance of another character in a drama. This was also Mary's attitude. They had heard of his coming and they received his call with a trace of fatalistic curiosity. The Doge suddenly dropped on a bench, as if overcome by the weariness and depression of spirits that he had been defying; but there was something unyielding and indomitable in ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... 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 ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... and chapter 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
... philosophy as he expressed it to his friends in these days was one which contemplated great future reforms—abolition of slavery and a strict temperance policy were among them. But he looked for them with a sort of fatalistic confidence in the ultimate victory of reason, and saw no use and a good deal of harm in premature political agitation for them. "All such questions," he is reported to have said, "must find lodgment with the most enlightened souls who stamp them with their approval. In God's own time they will be ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... 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 of becoming cramped in its primitive forms; certain Foraminifera ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... those "come-outers" who then multiplied exceedingly in his neighborhood, would be infinitesimal. He had not, however, yet engaged with this problem so closely as he was to do. So far one would discern only that fatalistic and pessimistic trait indicated by "The Scarlet Letter" and found in "The House of the Seven Gables" in the hard conclusion that there was no remedy for the harm that had been done in the long past. The curse was done with now, it is true, by the marriage of Phoebe ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... civilisation and structural character. Under his top dressing of Western learning, the Chinese remains true to type, instinctively detached from the practical and scientific attitude, contemplatively philosophical, with the fatalistic philosophy of the prophet Job, concerned rather with the causes than the results of things. Your barrister at Lincoln's Inn, after ten years of cosmopolitan experience in London or Washington, will revert in six months to the ancestral type of morals and ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring |
