"Fortuitous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... too will be infected; he will see that too close crowding renders the prospect for good fruit doubtful; and, by natural transition of thought, will be glad that his boys and girls are not shut in to the fortuitous associations of hall- way and street. The area of land purchased will depend largely on the desires and purse of the buyer; but about one acre appears to satisfy the majority of people. This amount is not so great that the business man is burdened with care, nor is its limit so small that ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... himself. "No choice at all." After years of handling hot and cold local wars and crises of every description, his military mind had become conditioned to a complete disbelief in fortuitous coincidence, and he gagged at the thought of Aku "just happening by." Still frowning, he punched a yellow button on his desk, and reviewed in his mind the things he ...
— Alien Offer • Al Sevcik
... for a while after she had left him, forming his plans. He was grateful to her for a tact which had not transgressed beyond the limits of unspoken thought during their brief interview, but he was more pleased with the fortuitous absence of Phil and Musard at that period of his investigations. He welcomed the opportunity of working unquestioned, because he was not prepared to disclose the statements of Nepcote and Hazel Rath to any of the inmates of the moat-house until he ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... creature to ask his charity, no poor cripple to seek his sympathy; she was almost alone. She could have fled, but felt herself fixed to the ground, and with desperate efforts endeavored to conceal her excitement. He approaches nearer; with glistening eye she watches and hopes some fortuitous circumstances may call him aside. Their glance meets; she blushes and trembles, Father ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... have the famous "Messianic" Eclogue, the fourth, which was addressed to Pollio during his consulship. By its fortuitous resemblance to the prophetic literature of the Bible, it came at one time to be the best known poem in Latin, and elevated its author to the position of an arch-magician in the medieval world. Indeed, this poem was largely influential in saving the rest of Vergil's works from the oblivion ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... to think that it is not entirely fortuitous that this added impulse is given to our work just at this time. We all feel that the present is a moment when the very foundations of our ethical life—both as individuals and as groups—have received a rude shock. At such a time—more than ever—we ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... with the method for applying it; the Professor had given him his head, Max had given him his tongue. Looking forward to the exercise of his new-found powers he meant, in a word, to be voluble; and when in later chapters he becomes yet more surprising, let the reader remember that fortuitous crack at the back of his skull through which the windows of his head were open and his brain-pan a place of draughts wherein any winds of doctrine might blow. A word of opposition, a mere gust of excitement, were now quite ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... from fate all the great and magnificent prizes of life. A prince of poets and philosophers, a historian and general, no triumph which he had won had satisfied him. All earthly glory had become to him fortuitous, uncertain and worthless, and he had kept only his iron sense of duty incessantly active. His soul had grown up and out of the dangerous habit of alternating between warm enthusiasm and sober keenness of perception. Once he had ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... depraved, and at the same time it gave them a deep yearning for some strong deliverer. To this messianic hope of politics may be ascribed what is in some respects the most remarkable career in the political history of the United States. The rapid and fortuitous rise of Grover Cleveland to political eminence is without a parallel in the records of American statesmanship, notwithstanding many instances of public distinction attained from ...
— The Cleveland Era - A Chronicle of the New Order in Politics, Volume 44 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Henry Jones Ford
... Rembrandt's pictures, like The Woman taken in Adultery, should be so mysterious and poetical, and others like this old lady so lifelike and straightforward. He was too young to understand that the composition of the fortuitous concourse of atoms called Rembrandt, included not only the power that Velasquez possessed in so supreme a degree of painting just what his eyes saw, exemplified by this portrait of An Old Lady, aged 83, and by the portrait of Elizabeth ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... three days from the mouth of the Tuba we passed the last Russian village near the Mongolian-Urianhai border, three days of constant contact with a lawless population, of continuous danger and of the ever present possibility of fortuitous death. Only iron will power, presence of mind and dogged tenacity brought us through all the dangers and saved us from rolling back down our precipice of adventure, at whose foot lay so many others who had failed to make this same climb ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... as it was rather a cold night, and there was something respectable in the outline of that Roman nose, I turned my back on him and determined to accept the situation, soothing myself with the reflection that if I repeated the assault upon his nose, such an accident must be excused as a fortuitous result of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... say—"These things do not happen,"—because it is indisputable that they do happen. That combination which comprises a dark night, a highwayman armed and hatted to the teeth, and myself, may be a purely fortuitous one, but will such a criticism bring any comfort to the highwayman? And the concourse of three benevolent millionaires with the person to whom poverty can do no more is so pleasant and possible that I marvel it does not occur more ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... would be much mistaken in this conclusion. The theory is a very plausible one; it is one of the best cosmogonies that the wit of man has ever framed. It is a revival of the old atheistic hypothesis,—the Epicurean doctrine of the formation of the universe by a fortuitous concourse of atoms,—with all the modifications and improvements that were rendered necessary by the discoveries of modern science. We call it an atheistic theory, because, though the writer supposes that primitive matter was first endowed by divine power ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... honor to her sex, a striking example of what a quiet country girl can accomplish without money or fortuitous circumstances. ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... mother, in consideration of natural justice, of the pains of childbirth, and of the danger and even death which mothers often incur in this manner; for which reason we have judged it a sin that they should be prejudiced by a circumstance which is entirely fortuitous. For if a freeborn woman had not borne three, or a freedwoman four children, she was undeservedly defrauded of the succession to her own offspring; and yet what fault had she committed in bearing ...
— The Institutes of Justinian • Caesar Flavius Justinian
... in the holidays. On the day of Uncle Bobby's visit, by a fortuitous circumstance, Miss Sallie was five miles away, superintending a new incubator house at the school farm. The Dowager and Miss Wadsworth and Miss Jellings were scheduled for a reception in the village, and the other teachers were all ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... picture writings these days of the week are placed respectively north, south, east, and west, and that in the Maya language the quarters of the indiction still bear the names of the cardinal points, hinting the reason of their adoption.[74-1] This cannot be fortuitous. Again, the division of the year into four seasons—a division as devoid of foundation in nature as that of the ancient Aryans into three, and unknown among many tribes, yet obtained in very early times among Algonkins, Cherokees, Choctaws, Creeks, Aztecs, Muyscas, ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... I came here looking for you, Theresa. Your vanity shall not be tickled by any such misapprehension. Our meeting is wholly fortuitous. I broke with the life academic and I had to go somewhere. To be honest, I came into the Klondike because I thought it the place you were least liable ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... were so casual and fortuitous, Bowers's studio was the one fixed thing in Thea's life. She went out from it to uncertainties, and hastened to it from nebulous confusion. She was more influenced by Bowers than she knew. Unconsciously she began to take ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... blood, but in which community of blood is the starting-point, in which those who are connected by natural community of blood form the original body within whose circle the artificial members are admitted. A group of mankind thus formed is something quite different from a fortuitous concurrence of atoms. Three or four brothers by blood, with a fourth or fifth man whom they agree to look on as filling in everything the same place as a brother by blood, form a group which is quite ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... its last attempts. Chance would have kept things at a standstill; the principle of chance, give it time enough, must end where it began. Chance is a man lost in the woods; he never arrives; he wanders aimlessly. If evolution pursued a course equally fortuitous, would it not still be wandering in the wilderness of the ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... writer could pen three consecutive sentences with a connected meaning: chaos is felt to be natural to ancient literature: no search is made for sense, and the Latin or Greek book is looked upon as a more or less fortuitous concourse of words;' when Dr. Rouse can assert, 'The public schoolboy at nineteen is unable to read a simple Latin or Greek book with ease, or to express a simple series of thoughts without atrocious blunders: he has learnt from his classics neither accuracy ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... not pass my Civil Law trial immediately, I will still have the satisfaction of passing at some early period, avoiding an additional L60 which it is intended will be imposed, and from which no advantage, either real or fortuitous, is to be expected. Now the Widows' Fund, you know, when one has a widow, will be a very good sort of thing—L80 per annum, I believe. So if any lady wishes me to marry her, she had better advise me by all means to join the scheme. I know of no way of making one's ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... exhibits the picture of a nation either so wearied with changes as not to feel, or so subdued by military power as not to dare to show, any care or even preference with regard to the form of their government. All was in the army; and that army, by such a concurrence of fortuitous circumstances as history teaches us not to be surprised at, had fallen into the hands of a man than whom a baser could not be found in its lowest ranks. Personal courage appears to have been Monk's only virtue; reserve and dissimulation made up ...
— A History of the Early Part of the Reign of James the Second • Charles James Fox
... result of the labours of the artisan who was neither controlled by fixed principles nor by a knowledge of the effects and properties of bodies and of the systematic experiments of the chemist, and yet in consequence of some fortuitous and repeated trials we find that he has been successful, and moreover has amassed a body of facts which we may reasonably infer may either be rendered more perfect by knowledge or improved upon by the exact ...
— James Cutbush - An American Chemist, 1788-1823 • Edgar F. Smith
... stretched, an unexplored country, before her, which, to one of her sanguine disposition, seemed to offer boundless opportunities of happiness. It appeared a strange conjunction of circumstances that she should have been sent for by a person living in her native place. It seemed fortuitous to Mavis that she should earn her bread in a neighbourhood where she would be known, if only because of the high reputation which her dear father had enjoyed. It all seemed as if it had been arranged like something out of a book. Amelia's words, ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... sources of my thoughts, I find they had their beginning in fragile Chance; were born of little moments that shine for me curiously in the past. Slight the impulse that made me take this turning at the crossroads, trivial and fortuitous the meeting, and light as gossamer the thread that first knit me to my friend. These are full of wonder; more mysterious are the moments that must have brushed me with their wings and passed me by: when Fate beckoned and I did not see it, when new Life trembled ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... Tammany Hall was the ultra-respectable Abram S. Hewitt, a millionaire capitalist. The Republican party nominated a verbose, pushful, self-glorifying young man, who, by a combination of fortuitous circumstances, later attained the position of President of the United States. This was Theodore Roosevelt, the scion of a moderately rich New York family, and a remarkable character whose pugnacious disposition, indifference to political conventionalities, capacity for exhortation, and bold ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... whom I had never seen, yet knew that I should recognize when found. My quest was not aimless and fortuitous; it had a definite method. I turned from one street into another without hesitation and threaded a maze of intricate passages, devoid of the ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... suspected that they could possess rights which they feared to defend. From thence sprang, in the sequel, that long disorder at the commencement of the Middle Ages, during which everything was isolated, fortuitous, and partial; hence also proceeded the absolute separation between the nobles and the people, and those abuses of the feudal system which only became portions of a system when long possession had caused to be looked upon as a right, what at ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... the great writers of history in France and England in the eighteenth century. Many of the sayings to which we are referred for the origin of the modern idea of history, such as Pascal's for instance, are the fortuitous glimpses of men of genius into a vast sea, whose extent they have not been led to suspect, and which only make a passing and momentary mark. Bossuet's talk of universal history, which has been so constantly praised, was fundamentally, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... different kind was required. To learn the laws of Heredity and Variation there is no other way than that which Darwin himself followed, the direct examination of the phenomena. A beginning could be made by collecting fortuitous observations of this class, which have often thrown a suggestive light, but such evidence can be at best but superficial and some more penetrating instrument of research is required. This can only be provided ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... forcible conversion, declaring that, in his heart, he clung to the Christian faith and longed to return to his native Spain. Whether his sentiments were sincere or feigned, his presence in an influential capacity at the Sultan's court was a fortuitous circumstance of which the ambassador gladly took advantage. The audience was fixed for the following morning at daybreak, and that night Tangriberdy lodged the embassy ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... his universe, why shouldn't he? In any case a creative, intelligent power is equally essential. It would be just as easy for me to believe that all the watches and jewelry at Tiffany's were the result of fortuitous causes as to believe that the world as we find it has ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... these provinces afford a singular spectacle. Calculating on the poverty of their soil, and their climate by its latitude only, they should have been the poorest in France. On the contrary, they are the richest, from one fortuitous circumstance. Spurs or ramifications of high mountains, making down from the Alps, and, as it were, reticulating these provinces, give to the valleys the protection of a particular inclosure to each, and the benefit of a general stagnation of the northern winds ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... principal directions, the first a juridical, the second a political one. The axiom, res nullius cedit primo occupanti (compare L. 3, Digest, XLI, 1), explains only the smallest part of the relations of property, and that only because of a very fortuitous circumstance. According to Hobbes (Leviathan, 24), property has its origin in the recognition of it by the power of the state, by the autorite publique, the gouvernement (Bossuet, Politique tiree de l'Ecriture, Sainte, L. 3, 4), or as Montesquieu (Esprit des Lois XXVI., 15) ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... now, if I approved of the doctrines of Epicurus, that is to say, of Democritus, I could write of natural philosophy in as plain a style as Amafanius. For what is the great difficulty when you have put an end to all efficient causes, in speaking of the fortuitous concourse of corpuscules, for this is the name he gives to atoms. You know our system of natural philosophy, which depends upon the two principles, the efficient cause, and the subject matter out of which the efficient cause forms and produces what it does produce. ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... directed, pardoned, and sustained by a supreme power, to feel himself in the right road, at the point where God would have him be—in order with God and the universe. This faith gives strength and calm. I have not got it. All that is, seems to me arbitrary and fortuitous. It may as well not be, as be. Nothing in my own circumstances seems to me providential. All appears to me left to my own responsibility, and it is this thought which disgusts me with the government of my own life. I longed to give myself up wholly to some great love, some noble ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... upon the affinity between this temper of adventure in poetry and the teaching of Bergson. That the link is not wholly fortuitous is shown by the interesting Art Poetique (1903) of his quondam pupil, Claudel, a little treatise pervaded ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... country houses is, in my opinion, of a kind more or less fortuitous. It consists mainly of persons connected with their entertainers by family ties or long and intimate friendship. Most of the houses to which I am now alluding—some of them great, others relatively small, but most of them built by ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... accident; appearance, phenomenon &c. 448. Adj. derived from without; objective; extrinsic, extrinsical[obs3]; extraneous &c. (foreign) 57; modal, adventitious; ascititious[obs3], adscititious[obs3]; incidental, accidental, nonessential; contingent, fortuitous. implanted, ingrafted[obs3]; inculcated, infused. outward, apparent &c. (external) 220. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... scientific subject, a good deal depends on the meaning we attach to the term. If we understand by it striking conclusions drawn from theoretic premises, (as in Knox's "Races of Man,") clever generalizations from fortuitous analogies and coincidences insufficiently weighed, (as in Pococke's "India in Greece,") or, to take a philologic example, speculations suggestive of thought, it may be, but too insecurely based on positive data, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... Musical composition, however, of a high order, and able executants, were to be found elsewhere, and in Flanders in particular, and there the principal music and musicians were sought by the Italian dilettanti. To this fortuitous combination of melody and musical learning we owe the greatest achievements in the art of music. Upon it was raised the work of Palestrina, Scarlatti, and Corelli, which their distinguished followers utilised with such judgment and effect. The progress and development of ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... the results of our deliberations bear some analogy to actual warfare, we may certainly give way to a kind of aesthetic satisfaction in that our own occupation has some parallel in real life, but we must never fashion our principles in accordance with such fortuitous circumstances. ...
— Chess Strategy • Edward Lasker
... is rarely that names are altogether fortuitous, and do not correspond to things. It has often given rise to astonishment that the party of slavery should have taken the name of the democratic party; notwithstanding, nothing was more natural. How could slavery have been defended if not by exaggerating democracy? It was necessary, ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... things, coming coincidentally with a battle of the frogs, to an ignorant mind would appear to be a phenomenon in the immediate vicinity. Bearing in mind that this seemingly real, but impossible, phenomenon could only be due to a fortuitous concatenation of actual occurrences, Nora was not disturbed in her mind. Leaving her cart some little distance up the road, in order that she might not be seen in the undignified position of pushing it, she walked into Klingenspiel's front yard, ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... epochs. Successive growth and decay is a central part of God's original plan, as appears from the very structure of living bodies and the whole order of the globe. Death, therefore, which furthermore actually reigned on earth unknown ages before the existence of man, could not have been a fortuitous after clap of human sin. And so the foregoing theory of a general resurrection as the restoration of God's broken plan to its ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... hate with the effusion and delicacy of love. The evil and the good, the beautiful and the ugly, the repulsive and the agreeable, are in him then but remoter effects, of slight importance, born of changing circumstances, acquired and fortuitous qualities, not essential and primitive, different forms which different streams present ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... obsequious servants since he had been on the throne. Their sole crime was their religion; and for this crime they had been discarded. In great perturbation men began to look round for help; and soon all eyes were fixed on one whom a rare concurrence both of personal qualities and of fortuitous circumstances ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... than a subscription to the Young Women's Christian Association, though no one could have been more docile or more intelligent. During one viceroyalty of happy memory half a dozen clever and amusing men and women came together in Simla—it was a mere fortuitous occurrence, aided by a joyous ruler who hated being bored as none before or ever since have hated it—and the place has lived socially upon the reputation of that meteoric term ever since. Whereas the domestic virtues are no more deeply rooted anywhere than under ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... closes. The Fifth Book examines the origin and formation of the solar system, which it treats not as eternal after the manner of the Stoics, but as having had a definite beginning, and as being destined to a natural and inevitable decay. He applies his principle of "Fortuitous Concurrence" to this part of his subject with signal power, but the faultiness of his method interferes with the effect of his argument. The finest part of the book, and perhaps of the whole poem, is his account of the "origin of species," and the progress of human society. His views read like ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... tenets. If Mr. Bulstrode insisted, as he was apt to do, on the Lutheran doctrine of justification, as that by which a Church must stand or fall, Dr. Minchin in return was quite sure that man was not a mere machine or a fortuitous conjunction of atoms; if Mrs. Wimple insisted on a particular providence in relation to her stomach complaint, Dr. Minchin for his part liked to keep the mental windows open and objected to fixed limits; if the Unitarian brewer jested about the ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... because every thing acts and moves according to the various properties of the different beings it contains; that in Nature there cannot be either confusion or real evil, since every thing follows the laws of its natural existence; that there is neither chance nor any thing fortuitous in this Nature, where no effect is produced without a sufficient, without a substantial cause; where all causes act necessarily according to fixed and certain laws, which are themselves dependant on the essential properties ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... After the fortuitous meeting of those men had come irresistible attraction and communion, moral, intellectual and scientific—friendship to the full meaning ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... the railroad tracks at what used to be Townsend street, food was mined from the ruins as a result of a fortuitous discovery made by Ben Campbell, a negro. While in search of possible treasure he located the ruins of a grocery warehouse, which turned out to be a veritable oven of plenty. People gathered to this place and picked up oysters, canned asparagus, ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... I am wrong in inferring that he occupied a room somewhere at the South End or in South Boston, and lived entirely alone, heating his coffee and boiling his egg over an alcohol lamp. I got from him one or two fortuitous hints of quaint housekeeping. Every winter, it appeared, some relative, far or near, sent him a large batch of mince pies, twenty or thirty at least. He once spoke to me of having laid in his winter pie, just as another might speak of laying in his winter coal. The only fireside companion Tom Folio ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... coronation as a King of Italy; hence his incorporation of Parma and Genoa with France; and hence his donation of Piombino and Lucca to his brother-in-law, Bacchiochi!" Nowhere in history have I read of men of sense being so easily led astray as in our times, by confounding fortuitous events with consequences resulting from preconcerted plans ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... own constituency a member of the national House of Representatives may be a marked man; but his office confers no particular distinction at the national capital. He must achieve distinction either by native talent or through fortuitous circumstance; rarely is greatness thrust upon him. A newly elected member labors under a peculiar and immediate necessity to acquire importance, since the time of his probation is very brief. The representative ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... genius, an Italian whom a fortuitous circumstance made the citizen and the master of a country not his own, grasped both the vital necessity of unity from an Italian point of view, and the certainty of its ultimate achievement. Napoleon's notes on the subject, written at St Helena, sum up the whole question without rhetoric but ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... pertinent in ontology. Monism and pluralism now obtain a new meaning. Where the world process is informed with some singleness of plan, as teleology proposes, the parts are reciprocally necessary, and inseparable from the unity. Where, on the other hand, the processes are random and reciprocally fortuitous, as Leucippus proposes, the world as a whole is an aggregate rather than a unity. In this way uniformity in kind of being may prevail in a world the relations of whose parts are due to chance, while diversity in kind of being may prevail in a world knit together by some thorough-going plan ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... Dalmahoy no longer ago than Wednesday. You may put it that we three are here together again by accident; that you never suspected me; that my invasion of your machine was a complete surprise to you, and, so far as you were concerned, wholly fortuitous. But ask yourself what any intelligent jury is likely to make of that cock-and-bull story." Mr. Byfield was visibly shaken. "Add to this," I proceeded, "that you have to explain Sheepshanks; to confess that you gulled ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... form his mother Leah, and levi the official priest. If it were practicable to find a convincing derivation of levi in its later use from the appellative meaning of the root, then one might believe the coincidence to be merley fortuitous, but it is impossible to do so. the solution therefore has been suggested that the violent dissolution of the tribe in the period of the judges led the individual Levites, who now were landless, to seek their maintenance by the exercise of sacrificial functions; this lay to their hand and ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... and, what was of even greater importance, a thoroughly digested catalogue of desiderata, embracing the most important books in every department of literature and science. No such opportunity of buying the finest books at the lowest prices is likely ever to occur again, as the fortuitous concourse of events brought to Dr. Cogswell. It was the year of revolutions—the year when the thrones were tottering or falling all over Europe, when the wealthy and privileged classes were trembling for their possessions, and anxious to turn ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... takes possession of him, rather stealthily, yet rather languidly too, that it might be a "nice" thing to have oneself—that or such another. The spirit of collecting, like a delicate germ, is at first easily extinguished; but an incident as trivial and fortuitous as the one just suggested has ere now constituted the nucleus and starting-point of a large library. It may, indeed, be a favourable symptom and augury when a man begins circumspectly and deliberately; he is more apt, other circumstances favouring, ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... you said about it when (at the very time of the events in this chronicle) it was hanging in Burlington House. Marvellous, I grant you, are those passes of the swirling brush by which the velvet of the mantle is rendered—passes so light and seemingly so fortuitous, yet, seen at the right distance, so absolute in their power to create an illusion of the actual velvet. Sheen of white satin and silk, glint of gold, glitter of diamonds—never were such things caught by surer hand obedient to more voracious eye. Yes, all the splendid surface of ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... flakes. No shape was to be seen, no sound but that of the wind to be heard. It was like the dream of a delirious child after reading the ancient theory of the existence of the world by the rushing together of fortuitous atoms. Wan and thick, tumultuous, innumerable to millions of angels, an interminable tempest of intermingling and indistinguishable vortices, it stretched on and on, a boundless hell of cold and shapelessness—white ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... directs our attention, and which so aptly is made to symbolize the softened or the hardened heart, the clean or the thorn-infested soil. Observe the grades of soil, given in the increasing order of their fertility: (A) the compacted highway, the wayside path, on which, save by a combination of fortuitous circumstances practically amounting to a miracle, no seed can possibly strike root or grow; (B) the thin layer of soil covering an impenetrable bed-rock, wherein seed may sprout yet can never mature; (C) the weed-encumbered field, capable of producing ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... His infinite is nothing else but matter." "Whence," says Cudworth, "we conclude that Anaximander's infinite was nothing else but an infinite chaos of matter, in which were actually or potentially contained all manner of qualities, by the fortuitous secretion and segregation of which he supposed infinite worlds to be successively generated and corrupted. So that we may easily guess whence Leucippus and Democritus had their infinite worlds, and perceive how near akin ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... thrown down by the repeated commotions of the earth, together with several magnificent churches, monasteries, and public buildings. But what entirely completed the ruin of this then most opulent capital of the Portuguese dominions, was a devouring conflagration, partly fortuitous or natural, but chiefly occasioned by a set of impious villains, who, unawed by the tremendous scene at that very instant passing before their eyes, with a wickedness scarcely to be credited, set fire even to the falling edifices in different parts of the city, to increase the general confusion, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... finally nothing but pure mucus is ejected. Nevertheless, when thoroughly aroused, the reptile is enabled to constantly hurl a secretion, since both rage and hunger swell the glands to enormous size, and stimulate to extraordinary activity—a fortuitous circumstance to which many an unfortunate is doubtless indebted for his life. The removal of a fang, however, affects its gland to a degree that it becomes almost inoperative, until such a time as a new tooth is grown, and again calls it into action, which is commonly but a few weeks at ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... horrors irony is seldom absent. Sometimes it enters directly into the composition of the events, while sometimes it relates only to their fortuitous position among persons and places. The latter sort is splendidly exemplified by a case in the ancient city of Providence, where in the late forties Edgar Allan Poe used to sojourn often during his unsuccessful wooing of the gifted poetess, Mrs. Whitman. ...
— The Shunned House • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... due to the ancestry of the individual—that is, they must be matters of heredity in the ordinary sense, coupled with the fortuitous variations which accompany heredity ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... may, perhaps, accept as substantially true—so far, at least, as to suppose that he had formed no deliberate plan of slaughtering the inhabitants of Vassy who had adopted the reformed religion.[40] It is difficult, indeed, to accept the argument of Brantome and Le Laboureur, who conceive that the fortuitous character of the event is proved by the circumstance that the deed was below the courage of Guise. Nor, perhaps, shall we give excessive credit to the asseverations of the duke, repeated, we are told, even on his death-bed. For why should these be more worthy of belief ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... be demonstrated) that Shakespeare was familiar with the Attic tragedians? He begins by saying that he will not bottom his case "on the ground of parallels in sentiment and reflection, which, as they express commonplaces, are likely to be" (fortuitous) "coincidences." Three pages of such parallels, all from Sophocles, therefore follow. "Curiously close similarities of expression" are also barred. Four pages of examples therefore follow, from Sophocles and ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... in ideation is not fortuitous, but follows the law of association, which may be stated thus: that every idea tends to be followed by some other idea which is associated with the first, or its impression, by a relation of succession, of ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... begun to languish. Marriage was impossible; and had now, in some degree, ceased to be desirable. We are apt to judge of others by ourselves. The passion I now found myself disposed to ascribe chiefly to fortuitous circumstances; to the impulse of gratitude, and the exclusion of competitors; and believed that your resemblance to her brother, your age and personal accomplishments, might, after a certain time, and in consequence of suitable ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... a fortuitous question. He hardly knew why lie had asked it. Yet it opened the door to what she wanted ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... a task for every man. We are born with different equipments, but if we have a gift, be very sure it is not fortuitous. We have earned it. It should make us the finer workman. But all work is good. The handle of an axe ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... shopkeepers, this sketch will also show by what singular chances Cesar Birotteau became deputy-mayor and perfumer, retired officer of the National Guard, and chevalier of the Legion of honor. In bringing to light the depths of his character and the causes of his rise, we shall show that fortuitous commercial events which strong brains dominate, may become irreparable catastrophes for weak ones. Events are never absolute; their results depend on individuals. Misfortune is a stepping-stone for genius, ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... certain analogy between the operations of nature and those of man which is a peculiar but not fortuitous character, and is based on the identity of the will in both. When the herbivorous animals had taken their place in the organic world, beasts of prey made their appearance—necessarily a late appearance—in ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... led her through by-ways that the most scrupulous of the previous biographers had left unexplored. She accumulated her material with a blind animal patience unconscious of fortuitous risks. The years stretched before her like some vast blank page spread out to receive the record of her toil; and she had a mystic conviction that she would not die till her ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... Corinne; "Oswald! you do not know the pain you give me. If I were mad enough to tell you all you would no longer love me." "Great God!" replied he; "what have you then to reveal?" "Nothing that renders me unworthy of you," said she; "but fortuitous circumstances, and differences between our tastes and opinions, which existed formerly and which no longer exist. Do not oblige me to confess who I am. Some day, perhaps—some day, should you love me sufficiently—Ah! I know not what I say," continued Corinne; "you shall know all; ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... Rigby, impatient at any one giving the tone in a political discussion but himself, and chafing under the vigilance of Lord Eskdale, which to him ever appeared only fortuitous, violently assaulted the argument, and astonished several country gentlemen present by its volubility. They at length listened to real eloquence. At the end of a long appeal to Sidonia, that gentleman only bowed his head and said, 'Perhaps;' and then, turning to his neighbour, inquired whether birds ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... and cutlery, of excellent quality and in large quantities, are manufactured. The paper, household furniture, pottery, crockery, and even glass generally in use, are of home production, which will give the reader an idea of the present native resources of the country, developed not by fortuitous aid, but under the most ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... often surprised out of long years of prejudice, and even of dislike and suspicion, by some fortuitous incident, which might have chanced to two who had every impulse towards each other, not such antagonisms as lay between Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and this Huguenot refugee. She had every cue to hate hum. Each moment of her life in ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... By the fortuitous circumstance of the charge against D——, our Governor, who professed a smiling ignorance of all the circumstances of the case, had been relieved of his only formidable rival, and he prepared to do the honors of Capiz to the concejales. ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... any permanent influence, frames for itself occupations out of accidents. Moral integrity sometimes falls a prey to this want of fixed pursuits; and the man who receives his direction in active life from the fortuitous impulse of circumstances, will be very apt to receive his principles likewise from chance. Genius, under such guidance, attains no noble ends; but resembles rather a copious spring, conveyed in a falling aqueduct; where the waters continually escape through the frequent crevices, and waste ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... the most fortuitous of circumstances did we escape complete annihilation the first moment we appeared within range. We had no idea what lay ahead—although the guides we had brought with us from the Lone City informed us we were nearing our destination—and ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... But defined as to its visible manifestations, it is God's preservation and government of all things. As a thing is known by its opposites, the meaning of Providence is elucidated by considering that it is opposed to fortune and fortuitous accidents. ...
— Conversion of a High Priest into a Christian Worker • Meletios Golden
... a water serpent. Their achievements in the myths therefore have no possible relationship with the natural habits of the real snakes. They are purely arbitrary attributes which they have acquired as the result of a peculiar and fortuitous series of ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... passage of permanent works, a disposition as good as a weight of battery somewhat more equally distributed, with, however, a decided preponderance in the van. The last of the ships in this column received a shot in the boiler, which entirely disabled her—an accident that may have been purely fortuitous, and to which any one of her predecessors was in a degree liable, but also possibly due to the greater activity of the enemy when no longer scourged by the more powerful batteries which preceded. She was saved from the ...
— Admiral Farragut • A. T. Mahan
... commenced, or immediately followed upon, those remarkable changes and reductions in the tariff of this country which signalized the very opening of Sir Robert Peel's administration. Conceding, however, this seeming concert of action to be merely fortuitous, what will the vice-president of the Board of Trade say to the long-laboured, but still unconsummated customs' union between France and Belgium? Was that in the nature of a combination against British commercial ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... not being understood by some, who failed to perceive that it was owing to preceding causes originating in free will, that this variety of arrangement had been instituted by God, they have concluded that all things in this world are directed either by fortuitous movements or by a necessary fate, and that nothing is in the power of our ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... mutually expressed the satisfaction they experienced; but by the behavior of every individual present, whose feelings on the occasion were not to be repressed; whilst their sensibility testified the happiness which this apparently fortuitous ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... asks if there is really any such thing as chance. Philosophy answers, in conformity with Aristotle's definition (Phys., II. iv.), that chance is merely relative to human purpose, and that what seems fortuitous really depends on a more subtle form of causation.—CH. II. Has man, then, any freedom, if the reign of law is thus absolute? Freedom of choice, replies Philosophy, is a necessary attribute of reason. Man has a measure of freedom, ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius
... well here to remark that with all beings there must be much fortuitous destruction, which can have little or no influence on the course of natural selection. For instance, a vast number of eggs or seeds are annually devoured, and these could be modified through natural selection only if they varied in some manner which ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... himself, realising what a mere chance it had been, after all—a fortuitous meeting in the passage—that had first aroused his suspicions, and placed between his fingers the end of the thread he now thought it so simple to follow up. But he did hold the thread, and depended no longer upon chance or guess-work, but on his own relentless ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... conjunction of several nations, which it was impossible to fuse into a permanent whole, but over whose united resources a single monarch for a time disposed. And the very concentration of these vast and unlimited, powers, fortuitous as it was, in this single hand, inspiring the individual, not unnaturally, with a consciousness of superhuman grandeur; impelled him to those frantic and puerile efforts to achieve the impossible which resulted, in the downfall of Spain. The man who inherited ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... no sin, no misuse of power in sending into the world swarms of fortuitous, poverty-stricken human souls, as those souls must be who are born in bondage, with the blended instincts of the slave and the master for a proud inheritance? It sounds awful I know, but truth is apt to sound awful. Motherhood, as our wisdom has appointed it, among civilized people, represents a ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... one word more—either for you, or any other readers who may be startled at what I have been saying, as to the peculiar stress laid by the Founder of our religion on right dealing with wealth. Let them be assured that it is with no fortuitous choice among the attributes or powers of evil, that "Mammon" is assigned for the direct adversary of the Master whom they are bound to serve. You cannot, by any artifice of reconciliation, be God's soldier, ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... Seigneurie, or Old Palace, which by its imposing mass and severe elegance at first attracts the attention, occupies a corner of the Place, instead of the middle. This idea, a happy one, in our opinion, regrettable for those who only see architectural beauty in geometrical regularity, is not fortuitous; it has a reason wholly Florentine. In order to obtain perfect symmetry, it would have been necessary to build upon the detested soil of the Ghibelline house, rebellious and proscribed by the Uberti; ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 - Italy, Sicily, and Greece (Part One) • Various
... including the reigns of Ferdinand and Isabella, of Charles V., and of Philip II., is, in a way, one of unmatched splendor. Spain had not like England by slow degrees expanded into great proportions, but through strange and perfectly fortuitous circumstances, she had, from a proud obscurity, suddenly leaped into a position of commanding power and magnificence. Fortune threw into her lap the greatest prize she ever had to bestow, and at the same time gave her two sovereigns of exceptional qualities and abilities. The story ...
— A Short History of Spain • Mary Platt Parmele
... ORTHOGRAPHY, which has been to this time unsettled and fortuitous, I found it necessary to distinguish those irregularities that are inherent in our tongue, and, perhaps, coeval with it, from others, which the ignorance or negligence of later writers has produced. Every language ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... listening to him attentively, as he had long known the surprising outbursts of his fancy, asked him: "Then you believe that human thought is the spontaneous product of blind, divine parturition?" "Naturally? A fortuitous function of the nerve-centers of our brain, like some unforeseen chemical action which is due to new mixtures, and which also resemble a product of electricity, caused by friction, or the unexpected proximity of some substance, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... as the writing on the wall, that some extraordinary transformation has come over the scene as soon as man appeared, and that an element utterly irreconcilable with all that has appeared previously manifests itself in him, not as an accident or a fortuitous occurrence, but as an essential, nay, as the ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... persist for long ages unchanged, though even in the latter case changes in structure are apt to occur, since variation in species is not wholly dependent upon external changes. To a considerable extent it is due to causes existing within the organism itself, fortuitous variations being occasionally preserved when not out of harmony with the state of affairs prevailing in the external world. Or variation may occur through the establishment of new relations between the species inhabiting some locality while inanimate nature remains ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... heavy and dangerous sea, in which the boats could not possibly have lived but for the precautions which had been taken for their preservation; and even as it was, we repeatedly escaped disaster only by the merest hair's- breadth, and by what seemed to be more a combination of fortuitous circumstances than anything else. Taken altogether, that night was one of the most tense and long-drawn-out anxieties that I had ever, up to then, experienced. About two bells in the morning watch the gale broke, and from that moment the strength of the wind ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... Pansie, as apprehensive and quick of motion as a fawn, started up with a shriek of mirth and fear to escape him. It so happened that the garden-gate was ajar; and a puff of wind blowing it wide open, she escaped through this fortuitous avenue, followed ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... or what is called a sect—no doubt improperly—that of the Whistlers. Duncan Cameron, so clear in favour of the Mormons, was no less loud in condemnation of the Whistlers. Yet I do not know; I still fancy there is some connection, perhaps fortuitous, probably disavowed. Here at least are some doings in the house of an Israelite clergyman (or prophet) in the island Anaa, of which I am equally sure that Duncan would disclaim and the Whistlers hail them for an imitation of their ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... as they all rose and left the restaurant together. "If our present existence is the result of a fortuitous conglomeration of atoms,—I think the atoms ought to have been more careful what they were about, ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... grand scenery—or perhaps for the first time even the common sunshine, or landscape, or may-be even the mystery of identity, most curious mystery of all—there comes some lucky five minutes of a man's life, set amid a fortuitous concurrence of circumstances, and bringing in a brief flash the culmination of years of reading and travel and thought. The present case about two o'clock this afternoon, gave me Niagara, its superb severity of action and color and majestic grouping, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... counteracted by the practical experience that many men are immoral without becoming diseased. One man commits many immoral acts and suffers not at all; another man becomes syphilitic by yielding for the very first time; the penalty is purely fortuitous. There is no necessary connection at all between immorality and disease. The dangers of sexual intercourse are due to dirt and promiscuity rather than to immorality, and in part to the physical conformation ...
— Safe Marriage - A Return to Sanity • Ettie A. Rout
... first as a necessity, when neither forks nor knives were used, and subsequently as a mark of breeding. The knife preceded the spoon, and the fork, which had been introduced into Italy in the eleventh century, and which strikes one as a fortuitous development of the Oriental chopstick, came last. It was not in general use even in the seventeenth century here. Coryat the traveller saw it among the Italians, and deemed it a luxury and ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt
... to hoot at him. In their midst was Ferdy Wickersham, the boy who had crossed the ocean with him. He was setting the others on. The cry that came to Gordon was: "Nigger-driver! Nigger-driver!" Sometimes Fortune, Chance, or whatever may be the deity of fortuitous occurrence, places our weapons right to hand. What would David have done had there not been a stony brook between him and Goliath that day? Just as Gordon with burning face turned to defy his deriders, ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... and I will swear to the truth of this case. (243/3. See "Descent of Man," II., page 141. Darwin says that no one will attribute the shading of the "eyes" on the wings of the Argus pheasant to the "fortuitous concourse of atoms of colouring-matter." He goes on to say that the development of the ball-and-socket effect by means of Natural Selection seems at first as incredible as that "one of Raphael's Madonnas should have been formed ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... France, to elect him first consul for life. I took it for granted that the spanish proverb of "tell me with whom you are, and I will tell you what you are," was not to be applied in this instance, on account of the company in which the Consular application, by a mere fortuitous coincidence, ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... had come swiftly upon Jose de Rincon during the last few days, changes which were destined after much vacillation and great mental struggle to leave a reversed outlook. But let no one think these changes fortuitous or casual, the chance result of a new throw of Fate's dice. Jose, seeing them dimly outlined, did not so regard them, but rather looked upon them as the working of great mental laws, still unknown, whose cumulative ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... action, because he is convinced that they will not use it to his prejudice. In despotic states the sovereign is so attached to the exercise of his power, that he dislikes the constraint even of his own regulations; and he is well pleased that his agents should follow a somewhat fortuitous line of conduct, provided he be certain that their actions ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... at their very last gasp, and had mentally resigned themselves to death, when there came a tremendous shock, throwing the two lads off their feet only just in time to avoid the final thrusts from the two pirates, to which fortuitous circumstance they owed their lives. As they lay on the deck, struggling to regain their footing, they were trampled on and knocked over again by a swarm of men who were rushing in over the port bulwarks. It was the Tiger's crew, who had boarded in the very nick of time. With this reinforcement ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... phenomena of life that the religious world declares they were designed and created by God as an independent species. The scientific world, on the other hand, denies that there is any design in connection with them, and holds that if any slight variation happened to arise by which a fortuitous combination of atoms occurred which was more suitable for advertising purposes (the automata were chiefly used for advertising) it was seized upon and ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... beneficial, might readily be made a permanent trait by natural selection. Again, the modifications which follow use and disuse can by no possibility account for changes in the numbers of vertebrae; but after recognizing spontaneous, or rather fortuitous, variation as a factor, we can see that where an additional vertebra hence resulting (as in some pigeons) proves beneficial, survival of the fittest may make it a constant character; and there may, by further like additions, be produced ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... Tennessee; the chairmanship of the Committee on Naval Affairs he gave to Langdon Cheves of South Carolina; and the chairmanship of the Committee on Military Affairs, to another South Carolinian, David Williams. There was nothing fortuitous in this selection of representatives from the South and Southwest for important committee posts. Like Clay himself, these young intrepid spirits were solicitous about the southern frontier—about the ultimate disposal ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... Government to leave the difficult problem of South African unity to local initiative. On the other hand, the progress which was made in this direction by local initiative, aided as it was by the fortuitous discovery of the Witwatersrand gold-fields, was considerable. The highlands of South Central Africa were acquired for the British race, and the Boer was effectively prevented from carrying the Vier-kleur beyond the Limpopo; the railway, drawn through the Free ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... Billy Louise tried to believe that it was all going to be as plain sailing as this fortuitous beginning, but she was aware of a nervous fluttering in her throat while she waited, and she knew that she positively dreaded hearing Seabeck gallop up behind her on the frozen trail. "Why will people do things that make a lot of trouble for others?" she cried out ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... communication the Venetian, Domenico, thought the most acceptable kindness which could repay his hospitality; and whose solitary possession Castagno thought cheaply purchased by the guilt of the betrayer and murderer; it was in this process, the deduction of watchful intelligence, not by fortuitous discovery, that the first impulse was given to European art. Many a plank had yawned in the sun before Van Eyck's; but he alone saw through the rent, as through an opening portal, the lofty perspective of triumph widening its rapid wedge;—many a spot of opaque color had ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... has very bad pains in her legs, and sent me to bring these cocoons to the Santissima Nunziata, because they're so wonderful; see!"—she held up the bunch of cocoons, which were arranged with fortuitous regularity on a stem,—"and she had kept them to bring them herself, but she couldn't, and so she sent me because she thinks the Holy Madonna may take away her pains; and somebody took my bag with the bread and chestnuts in it, and the people pushed ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... than the case of Colorado. The population was larger, and being devoted to agriculture, was naturally regarded as more stable than that of Colorado, which was based principally upon the somewhat fortuitous discovery of mines of the precious metals. But there was an admitted political embarrassment in regard to both Territories, the principal debate on which occurred when the bill admitting Nebraska was under consideration. Congress was, at ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... proposition to swamp the Court which received the approval of four-fifths of the House of Representatives cannot be lightly dismissed as an aberration. Was it due to a fortuitous coalescence of local grievances, or was there a general underlying cause? That Marshall's principles of constitutional law did not entirely accord with the political and economic life of the nation ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... streamed by connatural result and emanation from God, the infinite and eternal Mind, as the light issues from the sun; so that there was no instant of duration assignable of God's eternal existence in which the world did not also coexist. Others held a fortuitous concourse of atoms—but all seem jointly to explode a creation, still beating upon this ground, that the producing something out of nothing is impossible and incomprehensible; incomprehensible, indeed, I grant, ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser
... of the military faculties, courage, activity, and fortitude, discipline, gunnery, and tactics, for the first time the palm was awarded by Englishmen to Americans over Englishmen. Without fortuitous advantage the Americans proved too much for the redoubtable English, though superior in number, therefore universally arrogating to themselves even with inferior numbers, a mastery but faintly questioned by most Americana; no accident to depreciate the ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... circle of influence which a people exerts through its traders, its deep-sea fishermen, its picturesque marauders and more respectable missionaries, and earlier still by a widening of its mere geographical horizon through fortuitous or systematic exploration. The Northmen visited the coasts of Britain and France first as pirates, then as settlers. Norman and Breton fishermen were drawing in their nets on the Grand Bank of Newfoundland thirty years before ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... date the whole ship was through fortuitous circumstances exposed to certain disadvantageous conditions which rendered her incapable of ...
— British Airships, Past, Present, and Future • George Whale
... general constituents of plants, it has been already stated that the older chemists and vegetable physiologists, misled by the small quantity of ash found in them, entertained the opinion that mineral matters were purely fortuitous components of vegetables, and were present merely because they had been dissolved and absorbed along with the humus, which was then supposed to enter the roots in solution, and to form the chief food of the plant. This supposition, which could only be sustained ...
— Elements of Agricultural Chemistry • Thomas Anderson
... the South Sea Drift. Blind, fortuitous, precarious as no other drift has been, nevertheless the islands in that waste of ocean have received drift after drift of the races. Down from the mainland of Asia poured an Aryan drift that built civilisations in Ceylon, ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... promises to the Sieur Avenelles, whom with the greatest difficulty they allowed, towards midnight, to depart, at which hour he issued secretly from the castle. At this moment the pages of the gentleman and all his people were having a right jovial supper in honour of the fortuitous wedding of their master. Now, arriving at the height of the festivities, in the middle of the intoxication and joyous huzzahs, he was assailed with jeers, jokes, and laughter that turned him sick when he came into his room. The poor servant wished to speak, ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 2 • Honore de Balzac
... who, aided by the obscure intrigues of the Catholics themselves, and the fortuitous circumstance of Godfrey's murder, had been able to cram down the public throat such a mass of absurdity as his evidence amounts to, had no other talent for imposture than an impudence which set conviction and shame alike at defiance. A man of sense ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... "in despair of finding better game." What I mean is this that not one woman in a hundred ever marries her first choice among marriageable men. That first choice is almost invariably one who is beyond her talents, for reasons either fortuitous or intrinsic. Let us take, for example, a woman whose relative navetete makes the process clearly apparent, to wit, a simple shop-girl. Her absolute first choice, perhaps, is not a living man at all, but a supernatural abstraction in a book, say, one ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... and fortuitous circumstance seemed to make advisable another Southern effort in Parliament. The cotton loan, though fairly strong again because of Confederate governmental aid, was in fact a failure in its expected result of public support for the South; something must be done to offset ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... past history of mankind, during which many things conspired to make progress in the subjugation of nature slow, fitful, and fortuitous. What of the future? Bacon's answer is: if the errors of the past are understood and avoided there is every hope of steady progress ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... was a matter so fortuitous that Mr. Hammond could not accept Ruth's version of the loss without some doubt, in any case. And then, her suddenly finding in the only good scenario submitted to him by any of his company, one that she ...
— Ruth Fielding Down East - Or, The Hermit of Beach Plum Point • Alice B. Emerson
... Five or six years ago, I knew a little of Alan Walcott. I had made his acquaintance in a fortuitous way, and he once did me a good turn by coming forward as a ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... but it was not likely. As the hours passed, and the man neither returned nor answered Stonor's frequent shouts, the policeman began to wonder if an accident could have occurred to him. But he had certainly been alive and well within a half-hour of their arrival, and it seemed too fortuitous a circumstance that anything should have happened just at that juncture. A more probable explanation was that the man had seen them coming, and had reasons of his own for wishing to keep out of the way. After all, Stonor had no precise knowledge of the situation existing between Imbrie and ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... embrace them. I would fain ask one of these bigotted Infidels, supposing all the great Points of Atheism, as the casual or eternal Formation of the World, the Materiality of a thinking Substance, the Mortality of the Soul, the fortuitous Organization of the Body, the Motions and Gravitation of Matter, with the like Particulars, were laid together and formed [into [7]] a kind of Creed, according to the Opinions of the most celebrated Atheists; ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... himself his plans for the reconquest of the Soudan. He wrought and watched while he waited, selecting and surrounding himself with able officers, and exacting from each diligence and obedience in the discharge of their duties. The Dongola campaign and the fortuitous one of the Atbara against Mahmoud greatly strengthened his position. There might be further delay, but his triumphal entry into Omdurman and the downfall of the Khalifa were certain. The Sirdar had but to ask, to receive all the material and men he wished ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... on horseback, who had with him some friends, and thirty slaves armed with swords. Milo's attendants were nearly ten times as numerous. It is not supposed by Asconius that either of the two men expected the meeting, which may be presumed to have been fortuitous. Milo and Clodius passed each other without words or blows—scowling, no doubt; but the two gladiators who were at the end of the file of Milo's men began to quarrel with certain of the followers of Clodius. ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... nor chooses anything, and which has neither will nor understanding. Now I maintain that the universe bears the character and stamp of a cause infinitely powerful and industrious; and, at the same time, that chance (that is, the blind and fortuitous concourse of causes necessary and void of reason) cannot have formed this universe. To this purpose it is not amiss to call to mind the celebrated ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... of nature is fortuitous. The tree has the irregularity and abandon of the picturesque. The pruning of man is for a different end, and it produces the comely well-proportioned tree of the orchards. The tree becomes a manipulated subject, comforting to the eye ...
— The Apple-Tree - The Open Country Books—No. 1 • L. H. Bailey
... to achieve the full measure of national control of corporations that he desired. The elements opposed to his view were too powerful. There was a fortuitous involuntary partnership though it was not admitted and was even violently denied between the advocates of "Let us alone!" and of "Smash the trusts!" against the champion of the middle way. In his "Autobiography" Roosevelt ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland
... facts? Shall we gloss them over with false colouring? Shall we describe things as they are, or as they are not? Shall we draw with the pencil of nature, or of art? Do we indeed paint life as it is, or as it is not? Cast thine eyes, reader, over the ephemeral circle of passing and fortuitous events; view the change of contingencies; mark well the varied and shifting scenery in the great drama of time;—seriously contemplate nature in her operations; minutely examine the entrance, the action, and the exit of characters on the stage of existence—then ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... I've a lot to be thankful for!" breathed Ellen. She had this rich consciousness of her surroundings, a fortuitous possession, a mere congenital peculiarity like her red hair or her white skin, which did the girl no credit. It kept her happy even now, when from time to time she had to lick up a tear with the point of her tongue, on the ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... an ogre. Hence, by way of justification, I purpose explaining to you what led up to it. I think it needless to account for the nature and origin of the reports which circulated originally, as also why you were connected with them. There was, however, one circumstance, a purely fortuitous one, and which need not now be mentioned, which aroused my suspicions. From these reports and accidental circumstances, the same conclusion became evolved for me. I make this statement in all sincerity, for it was I who first implicated you with the matter. ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne
... enterprise—all had contributed to soften down his first painful impression. Having once promised secrecy to M. de Cinq-Mars, he considered himself as in a position to accept in detail all the secondary disclosures; and since the fortuitous event which had compromised him with the conspirators at the house of Marion de Lorme, he considered himself united to them by honor, and engaged to an inviolable secrecy. Since that time he had seen Monsieur, the Duc de Bouillon, and Fontrailles; they had become accustomed ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... hit upon the only plausible reason of this deviation. However slight it might have been, it had sufficed to modify the course of the projectile. It was a fatality. The bold attempt had miscarried by a fortuitous circumstance; and unless by some exceptional event, they could now never reach ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... the thrill of discovery and the lift of reawakened hope that came to him when first he suspected, aye perceived, the existence of verbal matrimony. For weeks he had struggled with words that apparently were made up of fortuitous collocations of letters. Then in some beatific moment these huddles of letters took meaning; in instance after instance they represented, not a word, but words—a linguistic household. Let them be what they might—a harem, the ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... in men and in money, on the land and on the water. Availing himself of fortuitous advantages, he is aiming with his undivided force a deadly blow at our growing prosperity, perhaps at our national existence. He has avowed his purpose of trampling on the usages of civilized warfare, and given earnests of it in the plunder and wanton destruction of private property. ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Madison • James Madison
... isn't philosophy"—he has the gift of expounding in a language which is piercingly individual. It strips his village of trivial local color and reduces it to the simplest terms—making it out a more or less fortuitous congregation of human beings of whom some work and some play, some behave themselves and some do not, some consequently prosper and some fail, some are happy and some are miserable. His village is not dainty, ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... followers: they would have built ships, or have seized them, and have wandered with him, at all adventures, as far as they could keep hope in their company. But the age being now past of vagrant excursion and fortuitous hostility, he was under the necessity of travelling from court to court, scorned and repulsed as a wild projector, an idle promiser of kingdoms in the clouds; nor has any part of the world yet had reason to rejoice that he found, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... in the way of coming upon a solution of the problem of life, neither society nor the school has any special warrant for exultation. These defectives did not just happen. The law of life is neither fortuitous nor capricious. On the contrary, like begets like, and the law is immutable. With lavish hand, society provides the pound of cure but gives only superficial consideration to the ounce of prevention. ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... less real. Their meeting and marriage had been so sudden, unpremeditated, adventurous, that she could hardly believe that she had played her part in such a reckless drama. Of all the few hours of her life with Charles, the portion that most insisted in coming back to memory was their fortuitous encounter on the previous Saturday, and those bitter reprimands with which he had begun the attack, as it might be called, which had piqued ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... one person. To the exquisite kindliness and simplicity of Uncle Toby he unites the omnivorous intellectual appetite and the humorous pedantry of the head of the family. The resemblance, indeed, may not be quite fortuitous. Though it does not appear that Sterne, amidst his multifarious pilferings, laid hands upon Sir Thomas Browne, one may fancy that he took a general hint or two ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... more brilliant exploit been performed by a handful of cavalry. To the distinguished Alexander of Parma, who improvised so striking and complete a victory out of a fortuitous circumstance, belonged the whole credit of the day, for his quick eye detected a passing weakness of the enemy, and turned it to terrible account with the promptness which comes from genius alone. A whole army was overthrown. Everything belonging to the enemy fell into the hands of the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... tiger!" murmured Perenna, who could not remove his eyes from that double imprint. "The teeth of the tiger! The teeth that had already left their mark on Inspector Verot's piece of chocolate! What a coincidence! It can hardly be fortuitous. Must we not take it as certain that the same person bit into this apple and into that cake of chocolate which Inspector Verot brought to the police office as ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc |
