"Fatality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... unnecessary vows are folly, because they suppose a prescience of the future which has not been given us. They are, I think, a crime, because they resign that life to chance which God has given us to be regulated by reason; and superinduce a kind of fatality, from which it is the great privilege of our nature to be free.' Piozzi Letters, i. 83. Johnson (Works, vii. 52) praises the 'just and noble thoughts' in Cowley's lines ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... observed, that by some extraordinary arithmetical calculation, he made the interest mount up to an enormous sum: such, at least, was the popular report. The strangest thing about him, however, and which struck every body, was the fatality that seemed to attach to his loans; all who borrowed of him finished their lives in an unhappy manner. Whether this was a mere popular notion, a stupid superstitious gossip, or a rumour intentionally disseminated, has ever remained a mystery. But it is a fact that many things occurred to give ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... certainly prove exactly the same as mine. But I cannot find one word like the struggle for existence and natural selection. On the contrary, he brings in his principle (page 103) of finality (which I do not understand), which, he says, with some authors is fatality, with others providence, and which adapts the forms of every being, and harmonises them ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... returning to Argos; but Acrisius, fearing the fulfilment of the oracular prediction, fled for protection to his friend Teutemias, king of Larissa. Anxious to induce the aged monarch to return to Argos, Perseus followed him thither. But here a strange fatality occurred. Whilst taking part in some funereal games, celebrated in honour of the king's father, Perseus, by an unfortunate throw of the discus, accidentally struck his grandfather, and thereby was the innocent cause of ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... Pierce's Golden Medical Discovery has, unaided by other medicines, cured many cases of this disease. This class of medicines should be persistently employed, in order to obtain their full effects. It is a disease which progresses slowly and which is not easily turned from its course, and its fatality should warn the afflicted to ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... grudged Mary one moment of the joy she was sacrificing, yet her tears dropped upon the clay-like hands she clasped in her own; for human love and human hopes are very sweet, never perhaps more sweet than in the very hour in which we yield them up to some noble duty, or some cruel fatality. ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... than it was designed to sustain. He was 65 feet up in the air when the collapse occurred, resulting in his death. As in the case of Fernandez common-sense precaution would doubtless have prevented the fatality. ...
— Flying Machines - Construction and Operation • W.J. Jackman and Thos. H. Russell
... loss of his friends occasioned to him was proportioned to the degree of affection which he entertained for them. By a curious fatality he had the misfortune to lose at an early age, almost all those he loved. This grief reached its climax on his return from his ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... Brabant's. They got bread, and I bought some eggs and jam on commission. After camping and unharnessing, I had a good wash in the river, an orange-coloured puddle. I wonder how it is that by some fatality there is always a dead quadruped, mule, horse, or bullock, near our washing places. We don't mind them on the march; they are dotted along every road in South Africa now, I should think; but when making a refreshing toilette they jar painfully. Kipling somewhere describes ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... lit another cigar, and there was another silence, which Ethel occupied in irritating thoughts of Dora's unfortunate fatality in trouble-making. She sat at a little table standing between herself and Tyrrel. It held his smoking utensils, and after awhile she pushed them aside, and let the splendid rings which adorned her hand fall into the cleared space. Tyrrel ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... as she sped onward through the woods and by the river. To love a blind man was sheer madness, but in her was a superstitious belief that he would see again. It prevailed against the doubts and terrors. It made her resent his own sense of fatality, his own belief that he would be ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Standing in the middle of one of the gorgeous rooms, she repeated the words softly, marking as she did so their incongruity to herself and her surroundings. The note of fatality jarred on the harmony of this well-ordered life. It was preposterous, that she, who had always been hedged round and sheltered by pomp and circumstance, should now in her middle age be menaced with calamity. She dragged herself over to ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... Rome, Jerusalem, have the same classic thrill of reserved awe and infinite reverence that some of Dante's lines possess—only, with Milton, the thing is longer drawn out and more grandiloquent. Satan's speech about his own implacable fatality, "his harbour, and his ultimate repose," and that allusion to Our Lord's gentleness, like "the cool intermission of a summer's cloud" are both in the ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... concentrated infusion. As this tree grows at a great distance from Esmeralda, and was at that period as destitute of flowers and fruits as the bejuco de mavacure, we could not determine it botanically. I have several times mentioned that kind of fatality which withholds the most interesting plants from the examination of travellers, while thousands of others, of the chemical properties of which we are ignorant, are found loaded with flowers and fruits. In travelling rapidly, even within the tropics, where ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... Spray"—not from putting my foot in a man-trap shell, however, but from carelessly neglecting to look after the details of a trip across the harbor in a boat. I had sailed over oceans; I have since completed a course over them all, and sailed round the whole world without so nearly meeting a fatality as on that trip across a lagoon, where I trusted all to some one else, and he, weak mortal that he was, perhaps trusted all to me. However that may be, I found myself with a thoughtless African negro in a rickety bateau that was fitted ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... extremities, Walter. I have fortitude equal to most, but it must not be tried by a more than human test. Walter! one word, and then—we part forever. A dreadful fatality has deranged the language of our hearts. Dared I unclose these lips, Walter, I could tell thee things! I could——But cruel fate has alike fettered my tongue and my heart, and I must endure in silence, even though you revile ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... it," answered the Baron. "I was a little too hasty, I own, but since you wish to know by what fatality I came to be a galley-slave I will inform you. After I had been cured by the surgeon of the college of the wound you gave me, I was attacked and carried off by a party of Spanish troops, who confined me in prison at Buenos Ayres at the very time ...
— Candide • Voltaire
... saith, that when he was at Madrid, Anno Dom. 1575. he saw some of these strange sighted Creatures. Mr. George Sinclare, in his Book Entituled, Satans Invisible World discovered,[29] has these Words, 'I am undoubtedly informed, that men and women in the High-lands can discern Fatality approaching others, by seeing them in the Waters or with Winding Sheets about them. And that others can lecture in a Sheeps shoulder-bone a Death within the Parish seven or eight Days before it come. It is not improbable but that such ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... the hideous fatality that threatened his sovereign? It was approaching, it must come if no one—aye, if no one should be found to stand between him and the impending blow, and to receive in his own breast—in his own heart, bared to receive the wound—the spear hurled by the vengeful god. And he—he, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... presentiment is prophecy—that the two sons of my nephew, Louis, who has been King of Hungary since his father died, and Andre, whom I desired to make King of Naples, will prove the scourge of my family. Ever since Andre set foot in our castle, a strange fatality has pursued and overturned my projects. I had hoped that if Andre and Joan were brought up together a tender intimacy would arise between the two children; and that the beauty of our skies, our civilisation, and the attractions of our court would end by softening ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - JOAN OF NAPLES—1343-1382 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... are to me sure warrants for that love, and answer to me for your heart; my trust is entire on this head: but explain yourself, I entreat you, and open your soul to me; otherwise, I shall fear lest, by the fatality of my star, and by the too fortunate influence of the stars on women less tender and less faithful than I, I may be supplanted in your heart as Medea was in Jason's; not that I wish to compare you to a lover as unfortunate as Jason, and to parallel myself with a monster like Medea, ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARY STUART—1587 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... together, she thought, for better or for worse. That Van would be the fine chivalrous gentleman she had felt him to be at the very first moment of their accidental acquaintance, she felt absolutely assured. She accepted a certain inevitable fatality in the situation—-perhaps the more readily now that she knew he knew, for she ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... weeks spent by Robert Clinton in search of Fran's life- secret, a consciousness of absence and its cause was like a hot iron branding Gregory's brain. What a mocking fatality, that it should have been Grace to send Robert on his terrible errand,—an errand which must result in ruin! Whenever Gregory tried to anticipate results, he stood appalled; hour by hour his mind was ever darting forward ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... financial prosperity. While, however, this security is an essential element in success, riches would, on the other hand, be as fatal as poverty, to the true progress of such an institution. Even in the case of those foundations which have assumed a religious character, all history proves the fatality of wealth. The just and happy mean between riches and poverty is, indeed, more likely to be attained when, as in this instance, all thought of acquiring great wealth in a brief time is necessarily abandoned, as a condition of ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... By what fatality then, have the first founders of all sects given to their gods ferocious characters, at which nature revolts? Can we imagine a conduct more abominable, than that which Moses tells us his God showed towards the Egyptians, where that assassin proceeds boldly to declare, in the ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... into resistance, as by a personal provocation and insult. And if it happens that these opposite effects show themselves in cases wearing a national importance, they raise what would else have been a mere casualty into the tragic or the epic grandeur of a fatality. The superb character, for instance, of Caesar's intellect throws a colossal shadow as of predestination over the most trivial incidents of his career. On the morning of Pharsalia, every man who reads a record of that mighty event feels[D] ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... either way. When at last he did extricate himself and managed to reach the place where he had seen Antoinette, she was gone: she had struggled vainly against the human torrent that carried her along: then she yielded to it—gave up the struggle. She felt that she was dogged by some fatality which forbade the possibility of her ever meeting Christophe: against Fate there was nothing to be done. And when she did succeed in escaping from the crowd, she made no attempt to go back: she was ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... extract may be found in Grey's Hudibras, Vol. I. p. 300. The beard dwindled gradually under the two Charleses, till it was reduced into whiskers, and became extinct in the reign of James II., as if its fatality had been connected with that ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... occupied her mind, constantly recurring. She could think of but one answer to it; this saddening enough. He might never have reached the Rio Grande, but perished on the way. Perhaps his life had come to an inglorious though not ignominious end—by disease, accident, or other fatality—and his body might now be lying in some lonely spot of the prairies, where his marching comrades ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... Had Jesus Christ or Socrates dwelt in Agamemnon's palace among the Atrides, then had there been no Oresteia; nor would Oedipus ever have dreamed of destroying his sight if they had been tranquilly seated on the threshold of Jocasta's abode. Fatality shrinks back abashed from the should that has more than once conquered her; there are certain disasters she dare not send forth when this soul is near; and the sage, as he passes by, intervenes in ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... proved treacherous and hostile; how, having reached central Illinois, after incredible exertion, they found themselves in the dead of winter unable to proceed further, and surrounded by tribes incited against them by some unknown enemy. A fatality seemed to hang over them; suspicious occurrences indicated that they had a traitor among their number, but he was never discovered. La Salle did not despair or abandon the enterprise; but when six of his most trusted men mutinied and deserted, he lost hope, and became seized ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 6 • Various
... cheerful helplessness in her father on this head as on every other. There could be no more discussion among them on such a question than there had ever been, for none was needed to show that for these candid minds the newspapers and all they contained were a part of the general fatality of things, of the recurrent freshness of the universe, coming out like the sun in the morning or the stars at night or the wind and the weather ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... absent and pale as usual. Florent Chapron, after having assisted at part of the sitting, left the room, leaning upon the crutch, which he still used. His withdrawal seemed so propitious to Lydia that she resolved immediately not to allow such an opportunity to escape, and as if fatality interfered to render her work of infamy more easy, Madame Steno aided her by suddenly interrupting the work of the painter who, after hard working without speaking for half an hour, paused to wipe his forehead, on which were large drops ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... disturbed by these frequent and most ungentlemanly interruptions on the part of her husband—"'the wives and daughters of these eminent conjurers are every thing that is accomplished and refined; and would be every thing that is interesting and beautiful, but for an unhappy fatality that besets them, and from which not even the miraculous powers of their husbands and fathers has, hitherto, been adequate to save. Some fatalities come in certain shapes, and some in others—but this of which I speak has come in the shape of ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... must give up in taking the veil. But she had been offered no choice, and though she had contemplated opposition, she had not dared to revolt. Being absolutely in the power of her parents, so far as she was aware, she had accepted the fatality of their will, and bent her fair head to be shorn of its glory and her broad forehead to be covered forever from the gaze of men. And having submitted, she had gone through it all bravely and proudly, as perhaps she would have gone through other things, even to death ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... and sanitary conditions, the use of drugs and medicines of all sorts other than vaccination, have no effect whatever upon either the spread or the fatality of the disease. The author, when State Health Officer of Oregon, saw the disease break out in a highly-civilized, well-fed, well-housed community, and kill eleven out of thirty-three people attacked, just as it would have done in the "Dark Ages." Not ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... bounds of all the realities which encompass it, and that it has not a source more elevated than those realities? Listen to a thought of that weighty writer Montesquieu:[129] "Those who have said that a blind fatality has produced all the effects which we see in the world, have said a great absurdity; for what greater absurdity than a blind fatality which should have produced intelligent beings?" Without restricting ourselves to this simple and solid argument, ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... had ever been in the past: and the change had come about not because they suffered more, but because they had grown stronger. Stronger by reason of the very power of the hostile ranks of Capital, by the fatality of economic and industrial development which had banded the workers together in armies ready for the fight, and, by the use of machinery, had given weapons into their hands, and had turned every foreman into a master with power over ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... the same words and phrases as the thin. You, who have blue eyes, madame, cannot look at life, and judge of things and events as if you had black eyes. The shades of your eyes should correspond, by a sort of fatality, with the shades of your thought. In perceiving these things I have the scent of a bloodhound. Laugh if you like, but ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... theory which he had formed on the subject of electricity and galvanism, which was at once new and astonishing to me. All that he said threw greatly into the shade Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, and Paracelsus, the lords of my imagination; but by some fatality the overthrow of these men disinclined me to pursue my accustomed studies. It seemed to me as if nothing would or could ever be known. All that had so long engaged my attention suddenly grew despicable. By one of those caprices of the mind which we are perhaps most subject to in early ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... some ways . . it does. And for that very reason I doubt whether I am fitted to make them. It's a gift, an art, like everything else. Not the creating of them, of course. That's a privilege, or a fatality, as the case may be! But the moulding of them, after they are created. You can't deny that they complicate things: and even at this stage, I find marriage a far more complicated affair than I imagined it to ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... I are old friends," she says, giving her hand to the new-comer. Then, turning to her cousin, she adds, "Florence, is it not a fatality our ...
— The Haunted Chamber - A Novel • "The Duchess"
... the vibration of engines, so it follows it must have been set down during the last few minutes of his life. The officer to whom Lieutenant McDermott intrusted the farewell letters mailed them a few minutes after he heard of the fatality. ...
— The Secret of Dreams • Yacki Raizizun
... twelvemonth later it was raging in London, but as the weather grew colder its virulence abated, allowing of the resumption of the lord mayor's feast. The respite was short. In the spring of 1582 it was again rife in the city, increasing in fatality during the hot season and continuing until the winter of 1583.(1615) Business was often at a standstill, the law courts had to be removed to the country, and the sittings ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... heart of him like to break on the occurrence. By good luck, Prince Henri had set out, by invitation, on a second visit to Petersburg; and arrived there also on April 26th, [Rodenbeck, iii. 139-146.] the very day of the fatality. Prince Henri soothed, consoled the poor Czarowitsh; gradually brought him round; agreed with his Czarina Mother, that he must have a new Wife; and dexterously fixed her choice on a 'Niece of the King's and Henri's.' Eldest Daughter of Eugen of Wurtemberg, of whom, as an excellent General, though ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the end of about one week of fasting, though there is no fixed period for their appearance. They should cause no alarm for they simply indicate that the body is cleansing itself, and that is exactly what is desired. Under proper conditions I have neither seen nor heard of a fatality coming from a short fast. Those who are in such physical shape that they will die if fasted from five to ten days would die ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... I know not by what fatality it is, that all the motions made by one party are reasonable and necessary, and all that are unhappily offered by the other, are discovered either to be needless, or of pernicious tendency. Whenever a question can be clouded and ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 10. - Parlimentary Debates I. • Samuel Johnson
... of the modern English mind, its usual inability to grasp the connection between any two ideas which have elements of opposition in them, as well as of connection, is perhaps the chief. It is shown with singular fatality in the vague efforts made by our divines to meet the objections raised by free-thinkers, bearing on the nature and origin of evil; but there is hardly a sentence written on any matter requiring careful analysis, by writers who have not yet begun ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... to renew the negotiation which had so unluckily been interrupted: it was soon brought to a conclusion; for where both parties are sincere in a negotiation, no time is lost in cavilling. Everything succeeded prosperously on one side; yet, I know not what fatality obstructed the pretensions of the other. The duke was very urgent with the duchess to put Lady Denham in possession of the place which was the object of her ambition; but as she was not guarantee for the performance of the secret articles of the treaty, though till ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... necessarily, by past action. This concept gives a new and more eloquent meaning to the phrase "Character is destiny." If we carry our thought no further, we are plunged into the slough of determinism—sheer fatality. But in each reincarnation, however predetermined every act and event, their reaction upon consciousness remains a matter of determination—is therefore self-determined. We may not control the event, but our acceptance of it we may control. Moreover, each "unwinding" of the karmic coil takes ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... whether the law, as it now stands, was sufficiently stringent to have reached these cases; and though this question was decided in the affirmative, the mere entertaining of the doubt afforded another specious confirmation of the impression, that a singular fatality was attendant upon a state prosecution. This idea received another support from the case of Lord Cardigan, who, about this period, was unexpectedly acquitted, on technical grounds, from a grave and serious charge. This, however, was no state prosecution, and we do but notice ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... is a singular proof of that fatality by which the advocates of error furnish weapons for their own destruction: while it is merely assertion in respect to a justification of your aversion to Republicanism, a strong argument may be drawn from it in its favour. Mr. Burke, in a philosophic lamentation over the extinction of chivalry, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... seems to be a fatality in your royal house of Atreus, and that they are hated of Jove for their wives. For Helen's sake, your brother Menelaus's wife, what multitudes fell in ...
— THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES • CHARLES LAMB
... to compare this with Darwin's manner of writing. Darwin confessed: "There seems to be a sort of fatality in my mind leading me to put at first my statement or proposition in a wrong or awkward form. Formerly I used to think about my sentences before writing them down; but for several years I have found that it saves time to scribble in a vile ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... still haunted by the same feeling as though he had eaten soap. He was ashamed. As he undressed he looked at his long, sinewy, elderly legs, and remembered that in the district they called him the "toad," and after every long conversation he always felt ashamed. Somehow or other, by some fatality, it always happened that he began mildly, amicably, with good intentions, calling himself an old student, an idealist, a Quixote, but without being himself aware of it, gradually passed into abuse and slander, and what was most ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... merit, Alfieri is considered as the reviver of the national character in modern times, as Dante was in the fourteenth century. "Saul" is regarded as his masterpiece; it represents a noble character suffering under those weaknesses which sometimes accompany great virtues, and are governed by the fatality, not of destiny, but of ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... Jack's form disappearing with its easy step into the night, analyzed in the light of this news became the natural climax of a series of events all under the spell of fatality. ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... king, gloomily, "for it is I alone who bring misfortune on my people. A sinister fatality pursues me, and has pursued me from my earliest youth. Only one star ever rose on my troubled firmament, and that was you, Louisa. But it will not set, even though I carry out my purpose. In solitude and sorrow it will still shine hopefully upon me. My childhood ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... action. He can show his readers, behind and around the personages that for the moment occupy the foreground of his story, the continual suggestion of the landscape; the turn of the weather that will turn with it men's lives and fortunes, dimly foreshadowed on the horizon; the fatality of distant events, the stream of national tendency, the salient framework of causation. And all this thrown upon the flat board - all this entering, naturally and smoothly, into the texture of ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that war is a beneficent fatality and that all nations engaged in it are therefore equally justified. On this theory all of the now contending nations are but victims of an irresistible current of events, and the highest duty of the State is to prepare itself for the systematic extermination, when ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... managed the fatality, thought the remark very offhand from a man in his position, comic even, and ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... obscurity to the head of affairs. To this talent Osborne, by birth a simple country gentleman, owed his white staff, his garter, and his dukedom. The encroachment of the power of the Parliament on the power of the Crown resembled a fatality, or the operation of some great law of nature. The will of the individual on the throne, or of the individuals in the two Houses, seemed to go for nothing. The King might be eager to encroach; yet something constantly ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... abruptly; presently, they turned away towards the house, and I saw them no more. Yet that frail and bending form, as I too soon afterwards learned—that form, which I did not recognise—which, by a sort of fatality, I saw only in a glimpse, and yet for the last time on earth,—that form—was ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 17, No. 483., Saturday, April 2, 1831 • Various
... a knife in his hand, after the display he has made of his quality. To surrender his knife means for the Hohenzollern the abandonment of his dreams, the repudiation of the entire education and training of Germany for half a century. When we realise the fatality of this antagonism, we realise how it is that, in this present anticipation of hell, the weary, wasted and tormented nations must still sustain their monstrous dreary struggle. And that is why this thought that possible there may be a side way out, a sort of turning ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... selected for this trust was not perhaps altogether such as might have been desired. By some fatality, arising probably from some latent incompatibility between the institution itself and the eternal order of things, it would seem as if the persons entrusted with that responsible situation rarely did turn out to be exactly the right people in the right place. Perhaps ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... the valley crept that low shiver of dread; the pale sun shed its listless light on the gray rocks and dusky cedars; the silent unexpectant earth seemed to have paused; all things were wrapt in vague awe and dim apprehension; some inexpressible fatality seemed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... in a solitary village, am I set by myself, to amuse my brooding fancy as I may. Solitary confinement, you know, is Howard's favourite idea of reclaiming sinners; so let me consider by what fatality it happens, that I have so long been exceeding sinful as to neglect the correspondence of the most valued friend I have on earth. To tell you that I have been in poor health will not be excuse enough, though it is true. I am afraid that I am about to suffer ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... to sound. 'Le fauve bruit' is used in L'Ane of the battles of primeval monsters, and more mystically in La Vision d'ou sortit le livre of the passing of the Spirit of Fatality. ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... tremenduous animal; it seems that the hand of providence has been most wonderfully in our favor with rispect to them, or some of us would long since have fallen a sacrifice to their farosity. there seems to be a sertain fatality attatched to the neighbourhood of these falls, for there is always a chapter of accedents prepared for us during our residence at them. the musquetoes continue to infest us in such manner that we can scarcely exist; for my own part ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... we must consider the events of the Revolution as dominated by an imperious fatality. The readers of our works will know that we recognise in the man of superior qualities the role of averting fatalities. But he can dissociate himself only from a few of such, and is often powerless before the sequence of events which even at their origin could scarcely be ruled. The scientist knows ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... Constantine was apparently sincere and intense. In passionate exclamations they gave vent to sorrow and remorse. But Pahlen, the governor, who had led the conspiracy, calm and collected, represented that the interests of the empire demanded a change of policy, that the death of Paul was a fatality, and that nothing now remained but for Alexander to assume ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... gave place to a look of regret and uneasiness. "Let us hope, however, not too much. Heredity," he mused in sombre mood, "is a force of such fatality in our lives...." ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... applied with the happiest effect, both for the advancement of the colony and of his own personal fortunes. The people whom he brought out, chiefly mechanics and labourers, to the number of four hundred or upwards, were sufficient to have formed a settlement of their own. By an unhappy fatality, the early settlers were landed on a part of the coast the most unfavourable in the world for their purposes. The whole country around them was a mere limestone rock. Here, however, the town-site of Clarence was fixed upon, but scarcely a yard of land was to be found that afforded space for ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... want of condition to the misconduct of their leaders, who, he said, could never be kept in the right path, or made to do one-half of the work which properly belonged to them. By a strange fatality, they were generally purblind, and always shyed most fearfully when an Opposition coach approached them. Indeed, it was well known that the horses selected for these duties were, generally speaking, vicious ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... moral, or cordial, or clean, than the engines which impel those proud leviathans which you admire when they cleave the waves! Is not Paris a sublime vessel laden with intelligence? Yes, her arms are one of those oracles which fatality sometimes allows. The City of Paris has her great mast, all of bronze, carved with victories, and for watchman—Napoleon. The barque may roll and pitch, but she cleaves the world, illuminates it through the hundred mouths of her tribunes, ploughs the seas of science, rides with full ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... Limiers has had his name slipped into our biographical dictionaries. An author cannot escape the fatality of the alphabet; his numerous misdeeds are registered. It is said, that if he had not been so hungry, he would have given proofs of possessing ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... clean down, soft and plumb, into the water. Gudrun was swaying violently in her boat, the agitated water shook with transient lights, she realised that it was faintly moonlight, and that he was gone. So it was possible to be gone. A terrible sense of fatality robbed her of all feeling and thought. She knew he was gone out of the world, there was merely the same world, and absence, his absence. The night seemed large and vacuous. Lanterns swayed here and there, ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... commissioned by him from New York; Dole is also committed to Goal. My taking of Gillam was so very accidentall that I cannot forbear giving your Lordships a narrative of it, and one would believe there was a strange fatality in that m[an's] Starrs. On Saturday the 11th Instant late in the evening I had a letter from Colonel Sanford,[6] Judge [of] the Admiralty Court in Rhode-Island, giving me an account that Gillam had been there, but was come towards Boston a fortnight before, in order to ship ...
— Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period - Illustrative Documents • Various
... felt a sense of fatality bound up in these words of defiant pretense, once they had escaped him...a fatality which the blazing contempt of his wife's retort had emphasized. Even now his cheeks burned with the memory of ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... other. Marriage, the precedent condition of most parenthood, is thus regarded as the concern of the individuals and the present. Individuals and the present therefore decide what marriages shall occur; but by some obscure fatality which no one had thought of, the future appears upon the scene: and when it is actually present, or rather not only present but visible, the responsibility for it is recognized. We have not yet gone so far as to see that a girl may ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... engages her affections. Perhaps a gentleman boards in the family of her father. The simple circumstance of her being more in his society, than in that of others of his age, is the foundation of their marriage. There seems almost a fatality in these cases, they so ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... Bishop; "undoubtedly, my daughter. Unless, by some strange fatality, those vows were made under a total misapprehension. You tell me Sister Seraphine ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... had a haven of refuge, and she loved them the more ardently for their forlorn condition. Her own as they had never before been! and if the tenure were uncertain, she prized it doubly, even though, by a strange fatality, she had never had so much trouble and vexation with them as arose at once on their being made over to her! When all was settled, doubt over, and the routine life begun, Lucilla evidently felt the blank of her vanished hopes, ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... founding new Orders. An asceticism thus enforced could not always be accompanied by the ardent exaltation necessary to maintain it, and in its artificial efforts at self-preservation it frequently fell from its insecure heights to the depths of unrestrained license.[77] This fatality of all hazardous efforts to overpass humanity's normal limits begun to be realized after the Middle Ages were over by clear-sighted thinkers. "Qui veut faire l'ange," said Pascal, pungently summing up this view of the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... European war on the side of the anti-frightfulness allies, Hiawatha had become something of a military school. The girls actually drilled with guns, and they would shoot those guns with all the grim fatality of so many boys. Not that they expected to go to war and descend into the trenches and fire hail-storms of steel-coated death-messengers at the enemy. Oh, no. They might, but they were sensible enough not to let their imagination ...
— Campfire Girls in the Allegheny Mountains - or, A Christmas Success against Odds • Stella M. Francis
... lurking horrors filled the dismal hours for me, he would come soon. By some fatality I had drawn the body directly to the spot where the last fading shafts of light would hover about its face. Not for a paradise of peace would I touch the loathsome thing again to hide it in the shadows. I could neither take my eyes from it nor put my hands upon it. ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... furnace: he hadn't run clear in the casting; there were bubbles, bubbles and slag. Endless refinements—first the furnace and then the forge and then the metal. A contempt for the lesser degrees possessed him, for a flawed or clumsy forging, for weakness of the flesh, the fatality of easy surrender. An overwhelming, passionate emotion swept him to his feet, clenched his hands, filled him with a numbing desire ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... is not a voice can be attributed neither to his lack of eloquence—for he is eloquent—nor to the indifference of the younger generation of architects which has grown up since he has ceased, in any public way, to speak. It is due rather to a curious fatality whereby his memorabilia have been confined to sheets which the winds of time have scattered—pamphlets, ephemeral magazines, trade journals—never the bound volume which alone guards the sacred flame from the gusts ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... past? If the latter interpretation were the true one, he had just read the narrative of the contemplated murder of his brother, planned in cold blood by a woman who was at that moment inhabiting the same house with him. While, to make the fatality complete, Agnes herself had innocently provided the conspirators with the one man who was fitted to be the ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... Will it be in the lust of gain, conjugal jealousy, or splendid energy, or morbid wickedness? There is no knowing. It may be that she will transmit them to another creature of her blood before the time comes for the eruption. But it is an element with which we have to reckon as, like a fatality, it ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... at the contractor's tool shed, had a sense of depressing fatality. From the moment that the first spadeful of ground had been dug, it seemed to him that the foundation of his domestic peace had begun to crumble. But this depression was only an attack of the grippe, he said to himself, and he tried to take an interest in the architect's description of ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... essential part of self-development. The brain is substantially the great artist that creates our ideals in life. And yet we forget sometimes that it is the master of our destiny; and allow it to sink into that dull apathy so fatal to our hopes and aims. It would almost seem, indeed, as if a kind of fatality clung to some men in the way in which they neglect this supreme faculty of their being. You possess the power to use your brain as you choose; but not the right, morally, for society demands of you a high standard of thinking, since it is ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... describe his face and person as one does that of a man one has accurately observed. "It is a pity he was too ardent. I could have given him some good advice, which would have saved him from all his misfortunes; but he would not have followed it; for it seems as if a fatality attended Princes, forcing them to shut their ears, those of the mind, at least, to the best advice, and especially in the most critical moments." "And the Constable," said Madame, "what do you say of him?" "I cannot say much good or much harm of him," replied he. "Was ...
— Memoirs And Historical Chronicles Of The Courts Of Europe - Marguerite de Valois, Madame de Pompadour, and Catherine de Medici • Various
... all? Had the human race attained its zenith—was there nothing beyond, nothing to look forward to, and he merely the latest dreamer and enthusiast who was pursuing the same will-o'-the-wisp that others had sought through the ages? If so, then what fatality was it that encompassed him and continually urged him on? Doubt counseled him to return, but pride and confidence in self still cried forward. Come what would, he either must go on to the end or accept the humiliation that awaits him who turns ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... gash. He had swum in Lake Starnberg where Ludwig II had drowned himself; had seen the cafe in Munich where the celebrated Naked Culture was said to have originated; had bribed his way into the villa at Mayerling where Rudolph of Austria and Marie had ended that mysterious night of fatality. In short, he had done Germany ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... labor and food rendered it no difficult matter to obtain my boat and provision it for a long voyage,—for how long I did not tell the Egyptian servant whom I hired to attend me. A certain feeling of fatality caused me to make no attempt at disguise, although disguise was then much more necessary than it has been since: I openly avowed my purpose of travelling on the Nile for pleasure, as a private European. My accoutrements were simple and few. Arms, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... conjecturing. Dempsey took no notice, and his plans matured amid jokes and theories. The desire to write and reveal himself to his beloved had become imperative; and after some very slight hesitation—for he was moved more by instinct than by reason—he wrote a letter urging the fatality of the circumstances that separated them, and explaining rather than excusing this revelation of his identity. His letter was full of deference, but at the same time it left no doubt as to the nature of his attachments ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... of great fatality, often depends upon the condition of the stomach; but it is not frequent ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... being sadly out of spirits, upon that day of rain, steam and weariness, when, with the young Virginia springing by my side, I limped within the Porta al Prato and stood upon the sacred soil of the Second Athens. Quick to feel impressions, too quick to read in them signs and portents, I felt fatality press upon my brows. ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... One or another of us was forward all the time, trying to make out by what slopes the hills descended to the sea. Was it cliff of basalt, or was it reedy swamp, that was to receive us. I insisted at last on his reducing sail. For I felt sure that he was driving on under a sort of fatality which made him dare the worst. I was wholly right, for the boat now rose easier on the water, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... by his aunt's telegram. The physical pain from which he was never free was almost welcomed as a diversion from his distress of mind. He stopped in Washington only long enough to have his wound re-dressed, and pushed northward. A fatality of delays irritated him beyond measure; and it was late at night when he left the cars and was driven to ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... were called 'triers,' and, being high Calvinists, were nick-named Dr. Absolute, chairman, Mr. Fatality, Mr. Fri-babe, Mr. Dam-man, Mr. Narrow-grace, Mr. Indefectible, Mr. Dubious, and others. They turned out of their livings those clergymen who were proved to be immoral in their conduct, and others who did not come up to the orthodox standard. Of these, Mr. Walker, in his ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... By some fatality all who were doomed to sit and listen to the Countess de Saldar, were sure to be behindhand ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... by any means what Brandon had expected. There seemed to be a fatality for him about everything connected with that unfortunate trip to Grouche's. He had done his duty, and this was his recompense. Virtue is sometimes a pitiful reward for itself, notwithstanding much ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... body from the common laws of nature; and they provided those magnificent and durable habitations for the dead—sublime monuments of human folly—which have not preserved but buried the memory of their founders. By a singular fatality, the well-adapted punishment of pride, the extraordinary precautions by which it seemed in a manner to triumph over death, have only led to a more humiliating disappointment. The splendor of the tomb has but attracted the violence of rapine; the sarcophagus has ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner |
