Fatalism Quotes

“The train is roaring toward you and the villain is twirling his moustache and you're fussing that he's tied you to the tracks with the wrong kind of rope.”
― Robin McKinley, Sunshine

“[T]his readiness to assume the guilt for the threats to our environment is deceptively reassuring: We like to be guilty since, if we are guilty, it all depends on us. We pull the strings of the catastrophe, so we can also save ourselves simply by changing our lives. What is really hard for us (at least in the West) to accept is that we are reduced to the role of a passive observer who sits and watches what our fate will be. To avoid this impotence, we engage in frantic, obsessive activities. We recycle old paper, we buy organic food, we install long-lasting light bulbs—whatever—just so we can be sure that we are doing something. We make our individual contribution like the soccer fan who supports his team in front of a TV screen at home, shouting and jumping from his seat, in the belief that this will somehow influence the game's outcome.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“Your life must now run the course that's been set for it.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“From Orient Point

The art of living isn't hard to muster:
Enjoy the hour, not what it might portend.
When someone makes you promises, don't trust her

unless they're in the here and now, and just her
willing largesse free-handed to a friend.
The art of living isn't hard to muster:

groom the old dog, her coat gets back its luster;
take brisk walks so you're hungry at the end.
When someone makes you promises, don't trust her

to know she can afford what they will cost her
to keep until they're kept. Till then, pretend
the art of living isn't hard to muster.

Cooking, eating and drinking are a cluster
of pleasures. Next time, don't go round the bend
when someone makes you promises. Don't trust her

past where you'd trust yourself, and don't adjust her
words to mean more to you than she'd intend.
The art of living isn't hard to muster.

You never had her, so you haven't lost her
like spare house keys. Whatever she opens,
when someone makes you promises, don't. Trust your
art; go on living: that's not hard to muster.”
― Marilyn Hacker

“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was not convincing the world that he didn’t exist; the greatest trick he ever pulled was making us believe we have free will.”
― Abhaidev, The Meaninglessness of Meaning

“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

“Seriously, what is the source of our thoughts? How do artists create art? How do writers write? What is it that is doing the creating?”
― Abhaidev, The Influencer: Speed Must Have a Limit

“Was die Menschen täglich ihre Entscheidungen nennen, ist nichts weiter als ein gut einstudiertes Spiel.”
― Juli Zeh, Spieltrieb

“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, War and Peace

“La verdad, es que en el fondo soy un fatalista. Si a uno le llega la hora, da lo mismo un Boeing que la puntual maceta que se derrumba sobre uno desde un séptimo piso”
― Mario Benedetti, La muerte y otras sorpresas

“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

“La fatalité triomphe dès que l'on croit en elle.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, America Day by Day

“Qu'importe, mon Dieu, que je brûle toute l'éternité en enfer, si c'est ta volonté.”
― Thérèse de Lisieux

“Goodness is no weapon against the possessed.”
― Soman Chainani, Beasts and Beauty: Dangerous Tales

“One of the most agonizing problems of human experience is how to deal with disappointment. In our individual lives we all too often distill our frustrations into an essence of bitterness, or drown ourselves in the deep waters of self-pity, or adopt a fatalistic philosophy that whatever happens must happen and all events are determined by necessity. These reactions poison the soul and scar the personality, always harming the person who harbors them more than anyone else. The only healthy answer lies in one’s honest recognition of disappointment even as he still clings to hope, one’s acceptance of finite disappointment even while clinging to infinite hope.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

“There is one universally incorrect choice: do nothing. This didn't work when humans thought that plagues were a punishment sent by angry gods. Nor does a laissez-faire approach help stop disease when it is a deliberate policy choice.”
― Jonathan Kennedy, Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues

“De modo que cuando deseaba que me arrollase un tren lo hacía bastante en serio”
― Truman Capote, Breakfast At Tiffany's

“It seemed to him that in this world probably it was the fate of everybody at some time to have his head cut off.”
― Lu Xun, The True Story of Ah Q

“But man will never be gone," she said, with insidious, diabolical knowledge of the horrors of persistence. "The world will go with him.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love

“Death for a noble cause, I understand, but...death for its own sake? Death as the...as the noble cause? That's not a good answer, either. It's not as bad as theirs, not as bad as those who are marching against you out there, but that...the fact that it's the worst answer doesn't make it a good answer. Isn't...isn't worshiping the inevitability of death just, like, just another bullshit way of trying to have the illusion of control over it?”
― Phillip Andrew Bennett Low, Monsters in a Mirror: Strange Tales from the Chapel Perilous

“To know the place of his grave from early childhood has an effect on a man. To place flowers on the ground where he himself will one day lie makes him fatalistic, pessimistic. Ambition and ideas for life atrophy - after all, what is the point? Life’s point, on this island, was always clearly visible, up there on the hillside.”
― Anne Zouroudi, The Messenger of Athens

“There's no spring in his step. No smile on his face. There's just a grim determination, grown strong over the years due to the weight of its burden.”
― Shawn P. McCarthy

“It's politics. You are angry with politics. I understand that. Truly, I do. As powerful as I am, where I come from I am considered a third-tier being. The lords and the royals—some of whom know nothing of the horrors and hardships of war—reign over me. It angers me to no end, and yet I continue. I follow. I do what I must. I do what I have to. I follow the path laid out in front of me. I do my duty.”

“Then how are you any different from the slaves?”

“We are all slaves, whether we want to accept it or not. It's finding higher meaning in the process of servitude where we find relief.”
― Steven Seril, The Destroyer of Worlds: An Answer to Every Question

“Maybe I put it wrong, I'm not a philosopher. To me it means something simple, like to say the future is already there, waiting for you. Why not wait, see what it brings?”
― Zadie Smith, Swing Time

“Peopleare sometimes largely powerless, politically, or even psychologically (because we are not flexible, but are indeed brainwashed, or in the grip of strange obsessions that we cannot shake). When we are powerless, fatalism may be a natural frame of mind into which to relapse. If our best efforts come to nothing often enough, we need consolation, and thoughts of unfolding, infinite destiny, or karma, are sometimes consoling.”
― Simon Blackburn, Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy

“What's wrong with China?" Dr. Frene demanded of me almost immediately, after Nym introduced us. "Why were the Chinese able to invent everything and develop nothing? Why did Chinese civilization undergo a menopause? What happened to China's creative power?"

"Maybe China atrophied because of lack of competition," I suggested weakly.

"Nonsense!" he screamed mildly. "China is a case of stability achieved at the expense of stifling the individual. The society lives but the creative personality dies. Taoistic passivism and fatalism on the one hand, bastard-Confucianism on the other: ancestor-worship, adoration of the male offspring, worship of the phallus! Regimentation of the mind by the classics on the one hand, dissipation of sense power and early and constant cohabitation on the other hand. The mind becomes a perfect mechanical instrument but remains a blank because the senses are dead which should serve and simulate it!”
― Edgar Snow, Journey to the Beginning

“CheckFate by Stewart Stafford

Now hear this about Fate!
Its coils squeezing around you,
Directing your every move,
It is your second skin glue.

Scream unilateral lockdown,
As in Covid fever dream years,
Fate is your silent partner,
Lifer cellmate chained to all your fears.

As you hide in a shack in the Andes,
Fate's squatter gatecrashes to stay,
Tracked by a big cat in the Pampas,
Jaguar-spotted stalker in your DNA.

Fate deals its stacked tarot cards,
Catch-22's lotto winners - broke and few,
A drill sergeant drones' whipped parade
In lockstep as one of Fate's crew.

© 2025, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Bullets don't believe in remakes or second chances.”
― Gabino Iglesias, The Devil Takes You Home

“Izgubili se bodo in se bodo vrnili, zato ker jim je usojeno, da poginejo na klancu.”
― Ivan Cankar, Na Klancu

“Working like automatons, the team of doomed spacetroopers attached themselves to the breached wall of the Death Star’s power core. Intense radiation spewed out, darkening their faceplates so they could barely see, slowly frying their life-support systems.
Moving sluggishly as they weakened under the invisible onslaught, they wrestled thick sheets of plating in the low gravity. They used rapid laser welders to slap patches over the breach, reinforcing it to withstand an energy buildup.
One of the spacetroopers, his control pack sparking with blue lightning as the suit’s circuits all broke down, thrashed about in eerie silence; his arm movements gradually slowed until he drifted free. One of the others took his place, ignoring the lost companion. Every one of them had already received a lethal dose of radiation. They knew it, but their training had been thorough: they lived to serve the Empire.
One of the troopers completed a last weld at the hottest point of the breach. His skin blistered. His nerves were deadened. His eyes and lungs hemorrhaged blood. But he forced himself to finish his task.
The cold vacuum of space solidified the welds instantly. With a gurgling voice filled with fluid, the spacetrooper gasped into his helmet radio, “Mission accomplished.”
Then the remaining troopers, with failing life-support systems and bodies already savaged by the fatal radiation, released their hold on the power core in unison. They drifted free, dropping toward the brilliant energy discharge like shooting stars.”
― Kevin J. Anderson