Fatalist Quotes & Sayings

What he was now seeing was the street lonely, savage, and cool. That was it: cool; he was thinking, saying aloud to himself sometimes, "I better move. I better get away from here."
But something held him, as the fatalist can always be held: by curiosity, pessimism, by sheer inertia. — William Faulkner

Someone told me I'm a cynical fatalist but I prefer the term realist. — Wade Kelly

Or maybe I'd do what I always do - hang out and see what develops. Fatalist to the core. — Dennis Lehane

Whether you like it or not, you're forced to come to the realisation that death is out there. But I don't fear death, I'm a fatalist. I believe when it's your time, that's it. It's the hand you're dealt. — Clint Eastwood

I am an optimistic fatalist. This world and all its beginnings will pass on into something better. — George MacDonald

In the bigger scheme of things, we are two pawns... waiting for life to make its move.
#Fatalist — Saru Singhal

Like most Chinese, I am basically a fatalist - too sophisticated for religion and too superstitious to deny the gods. — Bette Lord

I'm not a fatalist; even if I were, what could I do about it? — Emo Philips

I had always been a fatalist about my career. What was to be was to be. — Randolph Scott

Of the big horror movies of the '70s, you have 'The Omen,' 'The Sentinel,' 'Rosemary's Baby,' 'The Stepford Wives,' 'Burnt Offerings' - these are all romantic fatalist movies where there's a sort of glimmer of hope ... but darkness wins. — Chuck Palahniuk

{The Progressives] outlook was activist and optimistic, not fatalist and despondent. The distinctive characteristic of the Progressives was their conviction that social evils would not remedy themselves and that it was foolhardy to wait passively for time's cure. As Herbert Croly put it, they did not believe that the future would take care of itself. Neither should we. — Robert D. Putnam

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

Man is never honestly the fatalist, nor even the stoic. He fights his fate, often desperately. He is forever entering bold exceptions to the rulings of the bench of gods. This fighting, no doubt, makes for human progress, for it favors the strong and the brave. It also makes for beauty, for lesser men try to escape from a hopeless and intolerable world by creating a more lovely one of their own. — H.L. Mencken

I'm a fatalist ... I consider I am rejected in principle. My work is and, through my work, I am. If it's accepted, it's miraculous or the result of a misunderstanding. — Arthur Miller

She did not believe Fate as painstaking as her husband; she was more inclined to take matters into her own hands. She had ample reason for doing so. For a Jew in Russia to be a fatalist was tantamount to inviting disaster. Nabokov trusted in a thematic design which could not have looked quite so dazzling, so sure-handed, to someone who was in the habit of gingerly tiptoeing one step ahead of destiny. — Stacy Schiff

If I have sinned so much, if I have been since then so solitary, if my soul has taken such a swirling and solitary movement, if I have doubted everyting, if I have been fatalist and have been a pessimistic child who awaits death every day and who almost seeks it out, if I have opened myself slowly and late to happiness, and if I am still a somber man incapable of laughing wholeheartedly it is because you left me ... — Malcolm Gladwell

I am not a fatalist. I have just been reading War and Peace and Tolstoy is such a fatalist. I think people can make a difference ... I am an optimist who worries a lot. — Madeleine Albright

I'm a fatalist. I believe things happen for a reason, that you attract people and situations that are meant to fulfil your path. — Isabel Lucas

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

It is a strange misunderstanding to make Paul either a fatalist or a particularist; he is the strongest opponent of blind necessity and of Jewish particularism, even in the ninth chapter of Romans. But he aims at no philosophical solution of a problem which the finite understanding of man cannot settle; he contents himself with asserting its divine and human aspects, the religious and ethical view, the absolute sovereignty of God and the relative freedom of man, the free gift of salvation and the just punishment for neglecting it. Christian experience includes both truths, and we find no contradiction in praying as if all depended on God, and in working as if all depended on man. This is Pauline theology and practice. — Philip Schaff

Some of us seem to accept the fatalist position, the fatalist attitude, that God accorded to us a certain position and condition, and therefore there is no need trying to be otherwise. The moment you accept such an attitude, the moment you accept such an opinion, the moment you harbor such an idea, you hurl an insult at the great God who created you, because you question Him for His love, you question Him for His mercy. — Marcus Garvey

Life isn't meant to be easy. It's hard to take being on the top - or on the bottom. I guess I'm something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things ... Life is one crisis after another. — Richard M. Nixon

A pear should come to the table popped with juice,
Ripened in warmth and served in warmth. On terms
Like these, autumn beguiles the fatalist. — Wallace Stevens

Most of the time, I'm not scared. I get on with life, not because I'm a fatalist, but because that's the most congenial way of dealing with things. Indeed, most of the time, I'm not conscious of dealing with anything. — John Diamond

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

Nothing makes one so easily a fatalist as indifference. — Sylvia Thompson