Quotes & Sayings About Fatalism

The Suffering Pilipino: We Pinoys suffer collectively from a cultural inferiority complex. We are doomed by our need for assimilation into the West and our own curious fatalism...He describes us as a complex nation of cynics, descendants of warring tribes which were baptized and colonized to death by Spaniards and Americans, as a nation betrayed and then united only by our hunger for glamour and our Hollywood dreams. — Jessica Hagedorn

Old men are dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the world. — George Bernard Shaw

There's no such thing as probability," she says, slowly, with minimal movement of her jaw. "Things turn out the way they do. — Johnny Rich

He could be boastful in a way pleasantly at odds with his native fatalism, and his youthful stubbornness had a way of ameliorating into a sort of wounded dignity, which was centered in the darting passes of his deep-set, dark eyes. — Dan Lopez

When I was up there, stranded by myself, did I think I was going to die? Yes. Absolutely, and that's what you need to know going in because it's going to happen to you. This is space. It does not cooperate. At some point everything is going to go south on you. Everything is going to go south and you're going to say 'This is it. This is how I end.' Now you can either accept that or you can get to work. That's all it is. You just begin. You do the math, you solve one problem. Then you solve the next one, and then the next and if you solve enough problems you get to come home. — Andy Weir

It's never too late for fatalism. — Zachary Thomas Dodson

Let us eat and drink neither forgetting death unduly nor remembering it. The Lord hath mercy on whom he will have mercy, etc., and the less we think about it the better. — Samuel Butler

The African Americans' story is one that seems to be a repeated commitment to a scenario for success and failure. With each failure, the blow is that much more traumatizing until finally one reaches a point where there is to some degree an internalization, skepticism, fatalism, and expectation that it isn't going to work. — David Levering Lewis

It is a singular fact that most men of action incline to the theory of fatalism, while the greater part of men of thought believe in providence. — Honore De Balzac

[in the]..curious way that my idealism has been mixed with my fatalism, so that I can possess the soul of a dreamer and that of a cynic at the same time ... I possess a power of magic ... [to] destroy the balance of a well-designed destiny with my diabolical mind ... — Anais Nin

Fatalism accounts for life as a whole. Whatever happens can be fit within the large generality of individuation, or my journey, or growth. Fatalism comforts, for it raises no questions. There's no need to examine just how events fit in. — James Hillman

The challenge to Asia is to discard the dry, meatless bone of mysticism and fatalism. — Ferdinand Marcos

My tomb shall be in a spot where the north wind may scatter roses over it. — Omar Khayyam

I've been accused of having a death wish but I think it's life that I wish for, terribly, shamelessly, on any terms whatsoever. — Tennessee Williams

I have been definitely influenced more by Latin American writers than by any other type of writer. They are very close in terms of voice - their humor, their fatalism, their ... well, that over-used term 'magical realism.' It's a wonderful term that's just been used so much, we don't know what it means anymore. — Jessica Hagedorn

The fatalism of the limits-to-growth alternative is reasonable only if one ignores all the resources beyond our atmosphere, resources thousands of times greater than we could ever obtain from our beleaguered Earth. As expressed very beautifully in the language of House Concurrent Resolution 451, 'This tiny Earth is not humanity's prison, is not a closed and dwindling resource, but is in fact only part of a vast system rich in opportunities ... ' — Gerard K. O'Neill

Passive fatalism can never be the role of a revolutionary party, like the Social Democracy. — Karl Liebknecht

The Eagles's 1977 hit "Hotel California" was a flawless piece of craftsmanship, but it was about upscale fatalism and gilded cages, about the hotel you can check into but never leave. It sounded as though Joan Didion had started writing lyrics. As — Rebecca Solnit

They want me to do something, and I'll do it, or I won't do it, and it'll work or not, and I'll survive or not. — Jo Walton

Surrendering to God is not passive resignation, fatalism, or an excuse for laziness. — Rick Warren

Those whose eyes twenty-five and more years before had seen "the glory of the coming of the Lord," saw in every present hindrance or help a dark fatalism bound to bring all things right in His own good time. The mass of those to whom slavery was a dim recollection of childhood found the world a puzzling thing: it asked little of them, and they answered with little, and yet it ridiculed their offering. Such a paradox they could not understand, and therefore sank into listless indifference, or shiftlessness, or reckless bravado. There were, however, some - such as Josie, Jim, and Ben - to whom War, Hell, and Slavery were but childhood tales, whose young appetites had been whetted to an edge by school and story and half-awakened thought. Ill could they be content, born without and beyond the World. And their weak wings beat against their barriers, - barriers of caste, of youth, of life; at last, in dangerous moments, against everything that opposed even a whim. — W.E.B. Du Bois

As an African-American, we stand on the shoulders of people who fought despite not seeing victories in their lifetime or even in their children's lifetime or even in their grandchildren's lifetime. So fatalism isn't really an option. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

The terrible fatalism which had overcome me of late had taken on an even more terrible form; drowning in the disintegration of family, of both countries to which I had belonged, of everything which can sanely be called real, lost in the sorrow of my filthy unrequited love, I sought out the oblivion of - I'm making it sound too noble; no otorund phrases must be used. Baldly, then: I rode the night-streets of the city, looking for death. — Salman Rushdie

The problem with Fate is that no matter how many times you call out to her, she has her own timing that's irrelevant to whatever anyone else happens to be doing — Amy Neftzger

The Greek idea of fate is moira, which means "portion." Fate rules a portion of your life. But there is more to life than just fate. There is also genetics, environment, economics, and so on. So it's not all written in the book before you get here, such that you don't have to do anything. That's fatalism. — James Hillman

Being sick is itself a kind of ressentiment. - Against this the invalid has only one great means of cure - I call it Russian fatalism, that fatalism without rebellion with which a Russian soldier for whom the campaign has become too much at last lies down in the snow. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The past doesn't change no matter how much time you spend thinking about it. Good and bad all add up to the whole. Take away one piece, no matter how small, and the whole changes. Whether it's optimism, pessimism or fatalism, I don't spend my time wishing for the past to be different so present would be different, too. I control my future with what I choose now. — Megan Hart

To accept a little death is worse than death itself. — Frank Herbert

All through the night, men looked at the sky and were saddened by the stars. — Joseph Heller

War reporter Lawrence Sheets's edgy memoir evokes exactly the fatalism, confusion, and centrifugal forces that suddenly broke up the Soviet Union two decades ago. Refreshingly free of faraway theorizing, this book focuses on what people actually saw and experienced in those years. — Hugh Pope

The night I left home I felt that I had been tricked or trapped into going - and not even by Mrs Winterson, but by the dark narrative of our life together.
Her fatalism was so powerful. She was her own black hole that pulled in all the light. She was made of dark matter and her force was invisible unseen except in its effects.
What would it have meant to be happy? What would it have meant if things had been bright, clear, good between us? — Jeanette Winterson

Or was that fatalism another good move in design space? Did the universe evolve eyes and wings and sense organs and bitter amusement at the prospect of death all the same way? — James S.A. Corey

To talk of probability is to suggest that events might happen differently from the way they do, whereas events themselves will unfold according to an inevitable path. — Johnny Rich

It is necessary that the weakness of the powerless is transformed into a force capable of announcing justice. For this to happen, a total denouncement of fatalism is necessary. We are transformative beings and not beings for accommodation. — Paulo Freire

When people die and especially when they die tragically, others can't help but get carried away. They come up with their implausible interpretation and usually resort to cheap psychology. A sense of fatalism is the only form of relief left. — Francesca Marciano

Fatalism's a weak antidepressant, but there's nothing stronger at Dr. Kumar's. — David Mitchell

To live in high spirits but not recklessly, to be lighthearted without swaggering or rampaging, to show trust and truthfulness but not unconditionally and not naively, and to face uncertainty with imagination instead of fatalism - this is the art of living.
— David A. Nyberg

First, all I could see was this beautiful face, this beautiful girl's face; like a white, slightly luminous mask, swimming detachedly against enfolding darkness. As if a little private spotlight of its own was trained on it from below. It was so beautiful and so false, and I seemed to know it so well, and my heart was wrung.
There was no danger yet, just this separate, shell-like face mask standing out. But there was danger somewhere around, I knew that already; and I knew that I couldn't escape it. I knew that everything [ was about to do, I had to do, I couldn't avoid doing. And yet, oh, I didn't want to do it. I wanted to turn and flee, I wanted to get out of wherever this was. ("Nightmare") — Cornell Woolrich

But I do like Scotland. I like the miserable weather. I like the miserable people, the fatalism, the negativity, the violence that's always just below the surface. And I like the way you deal with religion. One century you're up to your lugs in it, the next you're trading the whole apparatus in for Sunday superstores. Praise the Lord and thrash the bairns. Ask and ye shall have the door shut in your face. Blessed are they that shop on the Sabbath, for they shall get the best bargains. Oh yes, this is a very fine country. — James W. Robertson

Only after making intelligent and thorough use of his human powers had he trusted himself to the divine will, thereby clarifying for us the meaning of at-tawakkul ala Allah (reliance on God, trusting oneself to God): responsibly exercising all the qualities (intellectual, spiritual, psychological, sentimental, etc.) each one of us has been granted and humbly remembering that beyond what is humanly possible, God alone makes things happen. Indeed, this teaching is the exact opposite of the temptation of fatalism: God will act only after humans have, at their own level, sought out and exhausted all the potentialities of action. That is the profound meaning of this Quranic verse: "Verily never will God change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves."1 — Tariq Ramadan

Lately, I've become sort of a fatalist. Well, that was bound to happen. — Alex Bosworth

I believe in fatalism, the positive one. — Bangambiki Habyarimana

The author says people are guilty of wrecking the present because the future was bound to be a wreck. — T.H. White

He is a curious avatar. Passion and pain, made manifest. The dreams he had are gone. All that is left is this unflinching need to prove the world false. Does he truly understand his own actions? Or does he merely flail about as marionettes do without skilled hands to guide them? — Grant Smuts

You can't change the past. You can't even change the future, in the sense that you can only change the present one moment at a time, stubbornly, until the future unwinds itself into the stories of our lives. — Larry Wall

Britain is rich in radicalism, and anyone who says that our society has drifted into fatalism and apathy should get out more. — Geoff Mulgan

Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw smelled the Malthusian morbidity underlying natural selection, lamenting, "When its whole significance dawns on you, your heart sinks into a heap of sand within you." Shaw lamented natural selection's "hideous fatalism," and complained of its "damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence, of strength and purpose, of honor and aspiration."4 — Christopher Ryan

Jody had watched other classmates, including many in college prep, enter such a life with an impatient fatalism. They got pregnant or arrested or simply dropped out. Some boys, more defiant, filled the junkyards with crushed metal. Crosses garlanded with flowers and keepsakes marked roadsides where they'd died. You could see it coming in the smirking yearbook photos they'd left behind. — Ron Rash

The award for excessive success is eternal doubt and eventual failure."
"So what, it's stupid to even try?"
"No. It's unwise to hope."
- Something Like Stardust — Genevieve Ross

Horror grows impatient, rhetorically, with the Stoic fatalism of Ecclesiastes. That we are all going to die, that death mocks and cancels every one of our acts and attainments and every moment of our life histories, this knowledge is to storytelling what rust is to oxidation; the writer of horror holds with those who favor fire. The horror writer is not content to report on death as the universal system of human weather; he or she chases tornadoes. Horror is Stoicism with a taste for spectacle. — Michael Chabon

Mass education, because it produces hosts of badly educated people liberated from fatalism, will contribute to instability (p. 123). — Robert D. Kaplan

I'm Canadian, so I'm an expert at mundane fatalism. — MCM

Then the prophetess said to the witcher: "I shall give you this advice: wear boots made of iron, take
in hand a staff of steel. Then walk until the end of the world. Help yourself with your staff to break the land before you and wet it with your tears. Go through fire and water, do not stop along the way,
do not look behind you. And when the boots are worn, when your staff is blunt, once the wind and the heat has dried your eyes so that your tears no longer flow, then at the end of the world you may
find what you are looking for and what you love...

The witcher went through fire and water, he did not look back. He did not take iron boots or a staff
of steel. He took only his sword. He did not listen to the words of prophets. And he did well because she was a bad prophet. — Andrzej Sapkowski

Criticism alone can sever the root of materialism, fatalism, atheism, free-thinking, fanaticism, and superstition, which can be injurious universally; as well as of idealism and skepticism, which are dangerous chiefly to the Schools, and hardly allow of being handed on to the public. — Immanuel Kant

Determinism gives you the freedom to do whatever you like. — Raheel Farooq

It is evident that we are hurrying onward to some exciting knowledge - some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction. — Edgar Allan Poe

It is well that Indians are unable to look at their country directly, for the distress they would see would drive them mad. And it is well that they have no sense of history, for how then would they be able to continue to squat amid their ruins, and which Indian would be able to read the history of his country for the last thousand years without anger and pain? It is better to retreat into fantasy and fatalism, to trust to the stars in which the fortunes of all are written — V.S. Naipaul

Your life must now run the course that's been set for it. — Kazuo Ishiguro

We Irish have a gift for resignation. Or, put another way, fatalism." He — Emma Donoghue

When you have been born in a war like me, living in a war as a child, when you have been in wars as a war correspondent all your life - trust me! You develop a form of fatalism; you are always ready to die. — Oriana Fallaci

Dostoyevsky's indignation at Afanasy Fet's innocent lyrics, "Whispers, timid breath, the nightingales trilled," is well known. This is simply disgraceful, wrote Dostoyevsky indignantly, and he speculated what an insulting impression such empty verses would have made if they'd been given to someone to read during the Lisbon earthquake! Some people protested: Yes, of course, Dostoyevsky is right, but we aren't having an earthquake, and we aren't in Lisbon, and after all, are we not allowed to love, to listen to nightingales, to admire the beauty of a beloved woman? But Dostoyevsky's argument held sway for a long time. It did so because of the way Russians perceive Russian life: as a constant, unending Lisbon earthquake. — Tatyana Tolstaya

Realism; fatalism; phlegm. To live in the Fens is to receive strong doses of reality. The great flat monotony of reality; the wide empty space of reality. Melancholia and self-murder are not unknown in the Fens. Heavy drinking, madness and sudden acts of violence are not uncommon. How do you surmount reality, children? How do you acquire, in a flat country, the tonic of elevated feelings? — Graham Swift

But everyone disappears, no matter who loves them. — Dave Eggers

The fatalism of the Filipino is usually passive, expressed in the classic proverb about our fortune coming to us though we seek it not. But the more complex form of that fatalism sees a man as being steered in a certain direction by one circumstance after another until he finally reaches a point when, though he acts voluntarily - or he thinks he acts voluntarily - he is actually being pushed by the circumstances that brought him to the point of action. The fatalist, as he looks back before he acts, sees everything as having conspired to make him perform that particular act, and therefore sees it as inevitable, as "fate". This is the amok mentality. Afterwards, what others regard as an act of will, the fatalist regards quite sincerely as a product of circumstances. — Nick Joaquin

The English have always been greedy for news of times past, with that mixture of fatalism and melancholy which is part of the national character. — Peter Ackroyd

He talked about luck and fate and numbers coming up, yet he never ventured a nickel at the casinos because he knew the house had all the percentages. And beneath his pessimism, his bleak conviction that all the machinery was rigged against him, at the bottom of his soul was a faith that he was going to outwit it, that by carefully watching the signs he was going to know when to dodge and be spared. It was fatalism with a loophole, and all you had to do to make it work was never miss a sign. Survival by coordination, as it were. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but to those who can see it coming and jump aside. Like a frog evading a shillelagh in a midnight marsh. — Hunter S. Thompson

I am not a prophet in any sense of the word, and I entertain an active and intense dislike of the foregoing mixture of optimism, fatalism, and conservatism. — Herbert Croly

I've known one thing for a long time: there's a role in the big machine even for someone who makes fun of it. — Christa Wolf

Fatalism is the lazy man's way of accepting the inevitable. — Natalie Clifford Barney

In the last days before the attack a strange feeling, not so much of confidence as of fatalism, pervaded the German tank forces- if this strength, this enormous agglomeration that surrounded them on every side, could not break the Russians, then nothing would. — Alan Clark

The concurrence of innumerable circumstances was needed without any one of which the event could not have taken place. It was necessary that millions of men in whose hands lay the real power - the soldiers who fired, or transported provisions and guns - should consent to carry out the will of these weak individuals, and should have been induced to do so by an infinite number of diverse and complex causes. We are forced to fall back on fatalism as an explanation of irrational events (that is to say, events the reasonableness of which we do not understand). The more we try to explain such events in history reasonably, the more unreasonable and incomprehensible do they become to us. — Leo Tolstoy

Hope is more the consequence of action than its cause. As the experience of the spectator favors fatalism, so the experience of the agent produces hope. — Roberto Mangabeira Unger

We are forced to fall back on fatalism as an explanation of irrational events (that is to say, events the reasonableness of which we do not understand). — Leo Tolstoy

One of the big lies with sin is that we are already waist-deep and might as well just plunge in. — Matt Chandler

Fatalism is the creed of a will that is dying to its possibilities and seeks to drag the imagination with it. — Ravi Zacharias

The same word passed through three minds, simultaneously, philosophical, fatalistic, the eternal refuge of the Italian: Pazienza ... — Violet Trefusis

There were hundreds of varieties of orchids, each with a history of its own. Royalty had been known to die for the sake of orchids. Orchids had an ineffable aura of fatalism. And on the article went. To all things, philosophy and fate. — Haruki Murakami

Some things you simply accepted, the way you accepted the sunrise or the winter cold. They called it lupine fatalism, but in reality it was plain common sense. — Ilona Andrews

The tragic sense of life is ironically not tragic at all, at least in the Big Picture. Living in such deep time, connected to past and future, prepares us for necessary suffering, keeps us from despair about our own failure and loss, and ironically offers us a way through it all. We are merely joining the great parade of humanity that has walked ahead of us and will follow after us. The tragic sense of life is not unbelief, pessimism, fatalism, or cynicism. — Richard Rohr

I know that I'm doomed and I'm not going to struggle against my fate. I am only writing this down so that when you do not see me any more you will know that my enemy has finally triumphed. — Anna Kavan

Fuck fate and David's fatalism. I was going to make destiny my bitch. — Jaye Wells

Submission, when it is submission to the truth - and when the truth is known to be both beautiful and merciful - has nothing in common with fatalism or stoicism as these terms are understood in the Western tradition, because its motivation is different. According to Fakhr ad-Din ar-RazT, one of the great commentators upon the Quran: The worship of the eyes is
weeping, the worship of the ears is listening, the worship of the tongue is praise, the worship of the hands is giving, the worship of the body is effort, the worship of the heart is fear and hope, and the worship of the spirit is surrender and satisfaction in Allah. — Fakhr Al-Din Al-Razi

They have no business administering government policies in a country that favors freedom and equality ... Can you imagine having the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as defense minister, or Mahatma Gandhi as minister of health, education, and welfare The Hindu and Buddhist idea of karma and the Muslim idea of kismet, or fate condemn the poor and the disabled to their suffering ... It's the will of Allah. These beliefs are nothing but abject fatalism, and they would devastate the social gains this nation has made if they were ever put into practice. — Pat Robertson

Unlike determinism, fatalism does not proceed by contemplating the causal mechanics of the universe-the implications for human freedom of Newtonian physics or thermodynamics or quantum mechanics. Instead, the fatalist argues that his doctrine can be established by mere reflection on the logic of propositions about the future. In simplified form, a version of the argument might run as follows: If I fire my handgun, one second from now its barrel will be hot; if I do not fire, one second from now the barrel will not be hot; but the proposition one second from now the barrel will be hot is right now either true or false. If the proposition is true, then it is the case that I will fire the gun; if it's false, then it is the case that I won't. Either way, it's the state of affairs in the future that dictates what I will or won't do now. — David Foster Wallace

When you really want something, when you lust, seek, desire, await, anticipate or expect, when you sit in front of the TV after the late news twirling a plastic spoon in a bowl of lukewarm skim milk and saturated puffs of Special K, praying for nine or so hours to pass so that you can check the morning mail to see if the college accepted, the one-night stand wrote, the tax refund arrived or Publisher's Clearing House made you the winner of a dream house in Wisconsin, when you're really looking forward to something, that's when Fortuna dispatches a couple of her handmaidens to drop a load of shit on you. — Martin Fillmore Clark

What interest hath this empty world in me? and what is there in it that may seem so lovely, as to entice my desires and delight from thee, or make me loth to come away? When I look about me with a deliberate, undeceived eye, methinks this world is a howling wilderness, and most of the inhabitants are untamed, hideous monsters. All its beauty I can wink into blackness, and all its mirth I can think into sadness ; I can drown all its pleasures in a few penitent tears, and the wind of a sigh will scatter them away (650). — Richard Baxter

The villagers were speeding up the circling of events because she was too shortsighted to see that her infidelity had already harmed the village, the waves of consequences would return unpredictably, sometimes in disguise, as now, to hurt her. This roundness had to be made coin-sized so that she would see is circumference: punish her at the birth of her baby. Awaken her to the inexorable. People who refused fatalism because they could invent small resources insisted on culpability. Deny accidents and wrest fault from the stars. — Maxine Hong Kingston

The future is certain. It is just not known. — Johnny Rich

Lincoln was equidistant from the heresy which makes a person believed that he can do nothing, and the opposite heresy which makes them suppose that he is the master of his own fate. — Elton Trueblood

The knowledge of His sovereignty is meant to be an encouragement to pray, not an excuse to lapse into a sort of pious fatalism. — Jerry Bridges

The difference between the Russian character and the Western is that we Russians have learned to live our days in the full knowledge that whatever transpires in the interim, the sun will eventually expand and humanity will be incinerated. It's a way of life precisely opposite to the American Dream. Call is Russian fatalism if you like. But it gives us a sense of perspective, a sense of humor, and perhaps a certain dignity. — Edward Docx

, I found the whole modern world talking scientific fatalism; saying that everything is as it must always
have been, being unfolded without fault from the beginning. The leaf on the tree is green because it could
never have been anything else. Now, the fairy-tale philosopher is glad that the leaf is green precisely because
it might have been scarlet. He feels as if it had turned green an instant before he looked at it. — G.K. Chesterton

There I was, casually wishing that I could stop existing in the same way you'd want to leave an empty room or mute an unbearably repetitive noise. — Allie Brosh

There's nothing wrong with making the best of one's declining years, but what does annoy me is the fatalism. Now that we're seriously in range of finding therapies that actually work against ageing, this apathy, of course, becomes an enormous part of the problem. — Aubrey De Grey

I do not accept history as determinism. I embrace history as possibility [where] we can demystify the evil in this perverse fatalism that characterizes the neoliberal discourse in the end of this century. — Paulo Freire

This is our country. He was rejecting Adrian's offer of help. It was this that had stung so much, the idea he was neither wanted nor needed. It had simply never occurred to him.
Attila. The man is right, of course. People here don't need therapy so much as hope. But the hope has to be real- Attila's warning to Adrian. I fall down, I get up. Westerners Adrian has met despise the fatalism. But perhaps it is the way people have found to survive. — Aminatta Forna

To live lightheartedly but not recklessly; to be gay without being boisterous; to be courageous without being bold; to show trust and cheerful resignation without fatalism - this is the art of living. — Jean De La Fontaine

Like the doctrine of determinism, its better-known metaphysical cousin, fatalism holds that it is not in our power to do anything other than what we actually end up doing. — David Foster Wallace

I don't believe that it's true that the poor will always be with us. I think that kind of pious fatalism is just an excuse for keeping things the way they are. — Margaret Culkin Banning

The American Dream has become a death sentence of drudgery, consumerism, and fatalism: a garage sale where the best of the human spirit is bartered away for comfort, obedience and trinkets. It's unequivocally absurd. — Zoltan Istvan