Selected destiny quotes

1. The irrevocable Hand That opes the year's fair gate, doth ope and shut The portals of our earthly destinies; We walk through blindfold, and the noiseless doors Close after us, for ever. Pause, my soul, On these strange words - for ever - whose large sound Breaks flood-like, drowning all the petty noise Our human moans make on the shores of Time. O Thou that openest, and no man shuts; That shut'st, and no man opens - Thee we wait!

2. According to Buddhism, individuals are masters of their own destiny. And all living beings are believed to possess the nature of the Primordial Buddha Samantabhadra, the potential or seed of enlightenment, within them. So our future is in our own hands. What greater free will do we need?

3. And how am I to face the odds Of man's bedevilment and God's? I, a stranger and afraid In a world I never made.

4. I go the way that Providence dictates with the assurance of a sleepwalker.

5. I, for my part, acknowledge another precept which says that man must deal the final blow to those whose downfall is destined by God.

6. I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.

7. Your quest is for darkness only. This sea is not your sea. The myths of men are not your myths. Men's treasures are not yours.

8. We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands. The loom of time and space works the most astonishing transformations of matter.

9. It seems beyond the comprehension of people that someone can be born to draw comic strips, but I think I was. My ambition from earliest memory was to produce a daily comic strip.

10. Jacques said that his master said that everything good or evil we encounter here below was written on high.

11. Blood will tell, but often it tells too much.

12. Are we no greater than the noise we make Along one blind atomic pilgrimage Whereon by crass chance billeted we go Because our brains and bones and cartilage Will have it so?

13. He whom God has touched will always be a being apart: he is, whatever he may do, a stranger among men; he is marked by a sign.

14. Men do not shape destiny, Destiny produces the man for the hour.

15. There is a Destiny which has the control of our actions, not to be resisted by the strongest efforts of Human Nature.

16. Every man is working out his destiny in his own way and nobody can be of any help except by being kind, generous, and patient.

17. What we do belongs to what we are; and what we are is what becomes of us.

18. Life is God's novel. Let him write it.

19. Man is made or unmade by himself. By the right choice he ascends. As a being of power, intelligence, and love, and the lord of his own thoughts, he holds the key to every situation.

20. The law of harvest is to reap more than you sow. Sow an act, and you reap a habit. Sow a habit and you reap a character. Sow a character and you reap a destiny.

21. Love cannot save you from your own fate.

22. If character is destiny, the good are damned.

23. Lots of folks confuse bad management with destiny.

24. There comes a point when you just love someone. Not because they're good, or bad, or anything really. You just love them. It doesn't mean you'll be together forever. It doesn't mean you won't hurt each other. It just mean you love them. Sometimes in spite of who they are, and sometimes because of who they are. And you know that they love you, sometimes because of who you are, and sometimes in spite of it.

25. Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity.

26. For rarely man escapes his destiny.

27. Man proposes, and God disposes.

28. We are what we were at birth, and each trait has remained in conformity with earth's and with heaven's logic: Be the devil's tool, resort to black magic, None can diverge from the ends which Heaven foreordained.

29. All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.

30. The world is not divine sport, it is divine destiny. There is a divine meaning of the world, of man, of human persons, of you and me.

31. A troubled and afflicted mankind looks to us, pleading for us to keep our rendezvous with destiny; that we will uphold the principles of self-reliance, self-discipline, morality, and, above all, responsible liberty for every individual that we will become that shining city on a hill.

32. Born in a cellar, and living in a garret.

33. And looking to the Heaven, that bends above you, How oft! I bless the Lot, that made me love you.

34. My whole life has been decided by fate.

35. Where do consequences lead? Depends on the escort.

36. A tremendous stream is flowing toward the ocean, carrying us all along with it; and though like straws and scraps of paper we may at times float aimlessly about, in the long run we are sure to join the Ocean of Life and Bliss.

37. As to what happened next, it is possible to maintain that the hand of heaven was involved, and also possible to say that when men are desperate no one can stand up to them.

38. What is to be, will be, and no prayers of ours can arrest the decree.

39. It's not what's happening to you now or what has happened in your past that determines who you become. Rather, it's your decisions about what to focus on, what things mean to you, and what you're going to do about them that will determine your ultimate destiny.

40. Where lies the land to which the ship would go? Far, far ahead, is all her seamen know. And where the land she travels from? Away, Far, far behind, is all that they can say.

41. It was a marriage of love. He was sufficiently spoiled to be charming; she was ingenuous enough to be irresistible. Like two floating logs they met in a head-on rush, caught, and sped along together.

42. The dictates of the heart are the voice of fate.

43. No cause has he to say his doom is harsh, Who's made the master of his destiny.

44. Each state of the human mind has some parable in the physical creation by which it is shadowed forth; nor is it only artists and poets, but even the most abstract thinkers that have drawn from this source. Lively activity we name fire; time is a stream that rolls on, sweeping all before it; eternity is a circle; a mystery is hid in midnight gloom, and truth dwells in the sun. Nay, I begin to believe that even the future destiny of the human race is prefigured in the dark oracular utterances of bodily creation.

45. Full of wisdom are the ordinations of fate.

46. Mankind is made great or little by its own will.

47. Not without a shudder may the human hand reach into the mysterious urn of destiny.

48. There is no such thing as chance; and what seem to us merest accident springs from the deepest source of destiny.

49. The grave is still the best shelter against the storms of destiny.

50. Every man has his own destiny: The only imperative is to follow it, to accept it, no matter where it leads him.

51. I am not afraid: I was born to do this.

52. Any life, no matter how long and complex it may be, is made up of a single moment - the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.

53. Destiny is a good thing to accept when it's going your way. When it isn't, don't call it destiny; call it injustice, treachery or simple bad luck.

54. 'I never thought I had to forge a family, but it felt the most natural thing that ever happened to me - meeting someone and becoming a father.'

55. I believe that you control your destiny, that you can be what you want to be. You can also stop and say, No, I won't do it, I won't behave his way anymore. I'm lonely and I need people around me, maybe I have to change my methods of behaving and then you do it.

56. We doubt not the destiny of our country - that she is to accomplish great things for human nature, and be the mother of a nobler race than the world has yet known. But she has been so false to the scheme made out at her nativity, that it is now hard to say which way that destiny points.

57. Look at Jewish history. Unrelieved lamenting would be intolerable. So, for every ten Jews beating their breasts, God designated one to be crazy and amuse the breast-beaters. By the time I was five I knew I was that one.

58. The long and winding road that leads to your door Will never disappear, I've seen that road before it always leads me here, Leads me to your door.

59. No experience has been too unimportant, and the smallest event unfolds like a fate, and fate itself is like a wonderful, wide fabric in which every thread is guided by an infinitely tender hand and laid alongside another thread and is held and supported by a hundred others.

60. The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.

61. Is there life before death? That's chalked up In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain, Coherent miseries, a bite and a sup, We hug our little destiny again.

62. I view the major features of my own odyssey as a set of mostly fortunate contingencies. I was not destined by inherited mentality or family tradition to become a paleontologist. I can locate no tradition for scientific or intellectual careers anywhere on either side of my eastern European Jewish background. [:] I view my serious and lifelong commitment to baseball in entirely the same manner: purely as a contingent circumstance of numerous, albeit not entirely capricious, accidents.

63. It is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola. They must have guessed, once or twice - guessed and refused to believe - that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return. Yet they do move forever under it, reserved for its own black-and-white bad news certainly as if it were the rainbow, and they its children....

64. Why should I blame her that she filled my days With misery, or that she would of late Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways, Or hurled the little streets upon the great, Had they but courage equal to desire? What could have made her peaceful with a mind That nobleness made simple as a fire, With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind That is not natural in an age like this, Being high and solitary and most stern? Why, what could she have done, being what she is? Was there another Troy for her to burn?

65. These struggling tides of life that seem In wayward, aimless course to tend, Are eddies of the mighty stream That rolls to its appointed end.

66. The irrevocable Hand That opes the year's fair gate, doth ope and shut The portals of our earthly destinies; We walk through blindfold, and the noiseless doors Close after us, for ever. Pause, my soul, On these strange words - for ever - whose large sound Breaks flood-like, drowning all the petty noise Our human moans make on the shores of Time. O Thou that openest, and no man shuts; That shut'st, and no man opens - Thee we wait!

67. Destiny is an absolutely definite and inexorable ruler. Physical ability and moral determination count for nothing. It is impossible to perform the simplest act when the gods say 'No.' I have no idea how they bring pressure to bear on such occasions; I only know that it is irresistible. One may be wholeheartedly eager to do something which is as easy as falling off a log; and yet it is impossible.

68. To accomplish our destiny it is not enough merely to guard prudently against road accidents. We must also cover before nightfall the distance assigned to each of us.

69. Every man got a right to decide his own destiny.

70. Merlin went up-stairs very quietly at nine o'clock. When he was in his room and had closed the door tight he stood by it for a moment, his thin limbs trembling. He knew now that he had always been a fool. 'O Russet Witch!' But it was too late. He had angered Providence by resisting too many temptations. There was nothing left but heaven, where he would meet only those who, like him, had wasted earth.

71. Man is his own star, and the soul that can Render an honest and a perfect man Commands all light, all influence, all fate. Nothing to him falls early, or too late. Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.

72. Once, we all have to be redeemed. The world is pulling with a thousand strings. We sin because of indifference and negligence and heap new guilt on the old original one. Our life is a chain of sin and expiation controlled by a destiny that can not be understood.

73. Though the day of my Destiny's over, And the star of my Fate hath declined, Thy soft heart refused to discover The faults which so many could find.

74. You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on Earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness. We will keep in mind and remember that Barry Goldwater has faith in us. He has faith that you and I have the ability and the dignity and the right to make our own decisions and determine our own destiny.

75. I, for one, thoroughly believe that no power in the universe can withhold from anyone anything he really deserves.

76. Stand up, be bold, be strong. Take the whole responsibility on your own shoulders, and know that you are the creator of your own destiny. All the strength and succor you want is within yourself. Therefore make your own future.

77. It is a defect of God's humour that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.

78. If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, all of us.

79. I felt as if I were walking with destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial.

80. That's the thing about your destiny: how are you supposed to know it when it arrives? How are you supposed to recognise it from the random life?

81. Character is destiny.

82. Must helpless man, in ignorance sedate, Roll darkling down the torrent of his fate?

83. History says don't hope On this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime The longed for tidal wave Of justice can rise up And hope and history rhyme.

84. Anatomy is destiny.

85. Say, 'This misery that I am suffering is of my own doing, and that very thing proves that it will have to be undone by me alone.' That which I created, I can demolish; that which is created by someone else, I shall never be able to destroy. Therefore, stand up, be bold, be strong. Take the whole responsibility on your own shoulders, and know that you are the creators of your own destiny. All the strength and succour you want is within ourselves.

86. And as the smart ship grew In stature, grace, and hue, In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too. Alien they seemed to be; No mortal eye could see The intimate welding of their later history, Or sign that they were bent By paths coincident On being anon twin halves of one august event, Till the Spinner of the Years Said 'Now!' And each one hears, And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

87. Whether we be young or old, Our destiny, our being's heart and home, Is with infinitude, and only there; With hope it is, hope that can never die, Effort and expectation, and desire, And something evermore about to be.

88. In this hour I would ask of the Lord God only this: that, as in the past, so in the years to come He would give His blessing to our work and our action, to our judgement and our resolution, that He will safeguard us from all false pride and from all cowardly servility, that He may grant us to find the straight path which His Providence has ordained for the German people, and that He may ever give us the courage to do the right, never to falter, never to yield before any violence, before any danger. : I am convinced that men who are created by God should live in accordance with the will of the Almighty. : If Providence had not guided us I could often never have found these dizzy paths. : Thus it is that we National Socialists, too, have in the depths of our hearts our faith. We cannot do otherwise: no man can fashion world-history or the history of peoples unless upon his purpose and his powers there rests the blessings of this Providence.

89. God the Almighty has made our nation. By defending its existence we are defending His work. : Only He can relieve me of this duty Who called me to it. It was in the hand of Providence to snuff me out by the bomb that exploded only one and a half meters from me on July 20, and thus to terminate my life's work. That the Almighty protected me on that day I consider a renewed affirmation of the task entrusted to me. : Therefore, it is all the more necessary on this twelfth anniversary of the rise to power to strengthen the heart more than ever before and to steel ourselves in the holy determination to wield the sword, no-matter where and under what circumstances, until final victory crowns our efforts. : In the years to come I shall continue on this road, uncompromisingly safeguarding my people's interests, oblivious to all misery and danger, and filled with the holy conviction that God the Almighty will not abandon him who, during all his life, had no desire but to save his people from a fate it had never deserved, neither by virtue of its number nor by way of its importance. : In vowing ourselves to one another, we are entitled to stand before the Almighty and ask Him for His grace and His blessing. No people can do more than that everybody who can fight, fights, and that everybody who can work, works, and that they all sacrifice in common, filled with but one thought: to safeguard freedom and national honor and thus the future of life.

90. They didn't have to believe in you. They didn't have to choose to die. But they didn't know that's what they was choosing They knew. We always know. We don't admit it to ourselves, not until the very moment of death, but in that moment, we see all the life before us and we understand how we chose, every day of our lives, the manner of our death

91. If God in his wisdom have brought close The day when I must die, That day by water or fire or air My feet shall fall in the destined snare Wherever my road may lie.

92. Come in, kidnapped child, hostage of fate. Come and talk to the fates, who are playing such clever little games with your life

93. Soldiers are citizens of death's grey land, Drawing no dividend from time's to-morrows. In the great hour of destiny they stand, Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows.

94. Chorus: O suitably attired in leather boots Head of a traveller, wherefore seeking whom Whence by what way how purposed art thou come To this well-nightingaled vicinity? My object in inquiring is to know. But if you happen to be deaf and dumb And do not understand a word I say, Nod with your hand to signify as much. Alcmaeon: I journeyed hither a Boeotian road. Chorus: Sailing on horseback or with feet for oars? Alcmaeon: Plying by turns my partnership of legs. Chorus: Beneath a shining or a rainy Zeus? Alcmaeon: Mud's sister, not himself, adorns my shoes. Chorus: To learn your name would not displease me much. Alcmaeon: Not all that men desire do they attain.

95. I can give vent to my inmost feelings only in the form of humble thanks to Providence which called upon me and vouchsafed it to me, once an unknown soldier of the Great War, to rise to be the Leader of my people, so dear to me. Providence showed me the way to free our people from the depths of its misery without bloodshed and to lead it upward once again. Providence granted that I might fulfill my life's task-to raise my German people out of the depths of defeat and to liberate it from the bonds of the most outrageous dictate of all times. : I have regarded myself as called upon by Providence to serve my own people alone and to deliver them from their frightful misery.

96. In my eyes, the year 1942 already has behind it the most fateful trial of our people. That was the winter of '41 to '42. I may be permitted to say that in that winter the German people, and in particular its Wehrmacht, were weighed in the balance by Providence. Nothing worse can or will happen. That we conquered that winter, that 'General Winter,' that at last the German fronts stood, and that this spring, that is, early this summer, we were able to proceed again, that, I believe, is the proof that Providence was content with the German people. : You do not realize what is hidden beneath these words in the way of human heroism, and also of human pain, and suffering, and we may say, often anxiety too, naturally, deathly anxiety on the part of all those who, especially for the first time, are placed before the trial of God in this highest court.

97. Lying, robed in snowy white That loosely flew to left and right - The leaves upon her falling light - Thro' the noises of the night, She floated down to Camelot: And as the boat-head wound along The willowy hills and fields among, They heard her singing her last song, The Lady of Shalott. Heard a carol, mournful, holy, Chanted loudly, chanted lowly, Till her blood was frozen slowly, And her eyes were darkened wholly, Turn'd to tower'd Camelot. For ere she reach'd upon the tide The first house by the water-side, Singing in her song she died, The Lady of Shalott.

98. Ask me no more: thy fate and mine are seal'd: I strove against the stream and all in vain: Let the great river take me to the main: No more, dear love, for at a touch I yield; Ask me no more.

99. Centuries ago, when I first stood on that little boulevard stage in Paris-when I saw the happy faces, when I heard applause- I felt as if my body and soul had found their destiny; I felt as if every promise in my birth and childhood had begun its fulfillment at last.

100. It's in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.