Inevitability

“ If a vision was granted to you, if you saw, beforehand, what would be in the future, and if now the vision is followed by what is, or appears to be, a reality, is that any reason why your strength and presence of mind should desert you?' A pause, and then, answering the thought of his heart, the voice went on, 'Fate! That is true. Everything is fate. But our resistances are predicted and foreseen as well as our trials. Arise and be of good cheer. ”

“ I am alone and dull and wondering, and in a blind revolt. Why should all things change so, and what is this death which comes? There must be some future world. If there be not, what a failure is all the brutal material scheme. ”

“ If Fate should bring a nasty shock, if Life should give the real hard knock, if everything should go awry—it's Failure urges us to try. 'Tis Failure says, "I won't give in. I have a second chance to win." ”

“ Moments such as those have no place in my life. There is one purpose there more intense than anything else, that very purpose which by some grim irony of fate it seems to be within your power to destroy. ”

“ What men call the chances of fate -- namely, ruin, change, circumstances -- I have fully anticipated, and if any of these should overtake me, yet it will not overwhelm me. Unless I die, I shall always be what I am, and therefore it is that I utter the things you have never heard, even from the mouths of kings -- for kings have need, and other persons have fear of you. ”

“ It is now time I should come to the grand revolution of my destiny, to the catastrophe which has divided my life in two parts so different from each other, and, from a very trifling cause, produced such terrible effects. ”

“ So many things seem to us, until those two great magicians, chance and crime, complete the trick, and make the impossible only too actual. I candidly confess to you that, when my sound reason leaves me for a moment, I also hear a voice within me crying: 'It is impossible!' And yet it must be so--and we can do nothing but kick our bleeding heels against the thorns of fate. What is the matter with you all at once? ”

“ These contradictions,—these differences of seeing,—these returns,—this stormy flow and ebb, are so many effects of hope, which plays upon us and never ceases. It is inherent in human nature to hope in adversity for a favorable change of fate, however the appearances may be ill-grounded of an end to its pain and suffering. ”

“ I do not repent that I roused you from your dream, though your present position is painful. I have done nothing more than hasten a crisis, which every soul like yours has sooner or later to pass through, and where the essential thing is, at what time of life it is endured. ”

“ Surely it was Fate—maybe a Power even higher—that ordained the appearance, at the very moment I was stricken down, of the very man whom I should have chosen out of all the world as the one best fitted to carry on the work I had begun. That the work is not free from danger, my own fate will be sufficient proof; whether the end justifies the risk you must judge for yourself. ”

“ Why must fate be like that, so heavy, so ruthless and crushing? Why had it not all come earlier, including the thing which advanced with such a threatening roar and under which she, too weary now, too weak and too old, would succumb when it passed over her, when it reached her at last out of the roaring, threatening, distant, distant eternity, wherein all the things of the future are born. ”

“ A millionth of a second—less perhaps—but in it chance, and whatever power it is that rules chance, had checked the thing whose illimitable growth would have swept our universe before it in an avalanche of destruction. ”

“ But the sudden and violent change in your whole disposition, has proved only too plainly, that some concealed and unfortunate event—some mysterious adventure, at which we cannot guess, is the cause of your melancholy; which cause, however remote, still continues to exercise over you the same destructive influence. ”

“ When things get to the worst they must mend, as the old adage goes. Our situation, if the adage is true, must soon be in a better condition. I hope this may be the case! I can not see how we would, or could, be in a worse condition. ”

“ Oh, my soul is at times engaged in terrible conflict with itself, and gloomy doubts frighten it. But I feel now that we are on the eve of the crisis, and that the present day will decide our whole future. ”

“ It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever. ”

“ It is an evil sign of the times,—of the times that are in so many respects hopeful,—that the greatest inventions of the day should always take the shape of engines of destruction! But what could I do in the agony of the moment? ”

“ When I judge that in so far as in me lies I shall realise a certain end, the endeavour to realise that end becomes ipso facto an integral part of the conception of myself. Failure to realise it is regarded as my failure, my defeat. ”

“ Will it require a mighty struggle, an agony of soul, a summoning of all concentrated power of will? Then summon the power and form the high resolve without a moment's delay, for life and death tremble in the balance. ”

“ Let us die, since the great experience is the one that follows now upon all the rest, death, which is the next great crisis in front of which we have arrived. If we wait, if we baulk the issue, we do but hang about the gates in undignified uneasiness. ”

“ How frightful a thing it is to consider what—under an overruling hand and will omnipotent—may be the consequences of the smallest deed we do. The consequences immediate, proximate, future! How many lives, what an amount of misery, how much damnation, may depend upon a light word, an idle jest, a sportive trick! ”

“ Of the present state, whatever it be, we feel, and are forced to confess, the misery, yet, when the same state is again at a distance, imagination paints it as desirable. But the time will surely come, when desire will be no longer our torment, and no man shall be wretched but by his own fault. ”

“ Is it not strange how fate seems to play with us, when once we are fairly embarked upon life's great current? I am now completely wound up in perplexities and embarrassments, which, a week ago, I never once thought of. ”

“ There are events, seemingly adverse, which in themselves are transient, and inflict no permanent discomfort, but which necessitate the surrender of cherished expectations, the change of favorite plans, it may be, the life-long abandonment of aims and hopes that had held the foremost place in the anticipated future. ”

“ By the consequences I do not mean what the world will think of you, but, rather, the personal results of your action—what you must suffer while you are in the world, and what you must suffer when far beyond the world. ”

“ It is the fate of all things to ripen, and then to decay. ”

“ And when we consider the least ill Consequence, it can be no less than looking on their own Condition as Years advance, with a disrelish of Life, and falling into Contempt of their own Persons, or being the Derision of others. ”

“ But the unseen dangers—the consequences that may always pursue and overtake you when you least think of them. It is such terrible deeds as that which fill me with dismay and dread of the future. How can a cause hope to prosper, the foundations of which are secret murder, implacable violence, and such desperate bloodshed? ”

“ But this alternative—what is it but a wild forlorn hope? A desperate step with scarce a chance of success? May not the consequences be a thousandfold worse than the worst that can come of doing nothing? ”

“ Your born dominion of a life made vain
By three spheres of insidious ivory.
You dwindle to the lesser tragedy—
Content, you say. We call, but you remain.
Nothing alive gone wrong could be so plain,
Or quite so blasted with absurdity. ”

“ Eternity! how shall I grapple with the misery that I must meet with in eternity,"—says the man in the iron cage of Despair. This finite world has indeed great power to stir man, but the other world has an infinitely greater power. ”

“ If life had not to finish, in fulfilment of a solemn, universal, and inevitable decree, the constraint that I have put upon myself might at length become oppressive, and my yoke prove somewhat heavy. But all that will finish soon, for all undertakings come to an end. ”

“ You say you are chained by circumstances; you cry out for better opportunities, for a wider scope, for improved physical conditions, and perhaps you inwardly curse the fate that binds you hand and foot. ”

“ Where the present and the future are not opposed, of course there can be no question. I am here, therefore, referring only to cases, such as those which I have been considering, in which the endurance of a present pain or inconvenience will be the cause of a future benefit, or the gratification of a present desire will lead to eventual evil. ”

“ It implies consequences which cannot be foretold. It is calculated to upset all our ideas of man's past and all our conceptions of his future. Not since the beginning of the world has there been an event to compare with this. ”

“ Fate announces love, happiness, and death. You have the privilege of not continuing the enterprise you have begun. The spotted cards say you will not succeed. The water predicts death! For whom? That we cannot learn. ”

“ The world, as it is now, wants to die, it wants to perish, and it will.” ”

“ What a hallowed and important crisis is that, when a glimpse of the intellectual or moral world breaks in upon the mind—what complicated reflections of regret and astonishment arise, while it strives to arrange and disclose its conceptions and ideas! ”

“ It should be a crisis and turning-point in the life of humanity, a period pregnant with momentous issues, a period in which the old order and the new are contending for mastery, or in which the old is melting into the new. ”

“ Another is a conviction of the inevitableness of things; not fatalism, nor any approach to it, in the vulgar sense, but a reflection that is borne in on most people in considering any grave calamity, that it is the natural consequence of many things that have happened before. ”

“ Infinite, indeed, are their attacks, and innumerable the forms that they assume; but of all the shapes of misery, what is to be more dreaded, what is more terrible than thought to a vicious mind? And there he sat in thought, with the morning sunshine streaming around him, calm, and pure, and tranquil. ”

“ I forgot that the moment when fate knocks at our door, is the time to show that one is capable of receiving it and, if necessary, of throwing it downstairs; otherwise circumstances, confident of our weakness, might easily take to masking under the cloak of fate. ”

“ Such may well to themselves seem to be blown about by all the winds of chaos and the limbo—which winds they call chance? Even then and there it is God who has ordered all the generals of their condition, and when they are sick of it, will help them out of it. ”

“ The impious, you say, deprived of the flattering hope of another life, wish to be annihilated. Very well: may they not then as justly conclude, from their desire, that they shall be annihilated, as you may conclude from your desire, that you shall exist for ever. ”

“ This inevitableness of destiny can only be illustrated in terms of human life by incidents which in fact involve unhappiness. For it is only by them that the futility of escape can be made evident in the drama. ”

“ It is our expression that the flux between that which isn't and that which won't be, or the state that is commonly and absurdly called "existence," is a rhythm of heavens and hells: that the damned won't stay damned ”