Selected fate quotes

1. I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate.

2. Who made the world I cannot tell; 'Tis made, and here am I in hell. My hand, though now my knuckles bleed, I never soiled with such a deed.

3. A fate is not a punishment.

4. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.

5. One possible reason that I don't believe in fate is that I wasn't fated to.

6. The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.

7. The highway is alive tonight But nobody's kiddin' nobody about where it goes I'm sittin' down here in the campfire light With the ghost of old Tom Joad.

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

9. This type of man who is devoted to the study of wisdom is always most unlucky in everything, and particularly when it comes to procreating children; I imagine this is because Nature wants to ensure that the evils of wisdom shall not spread further throughout mankind.

10. Fate often puts all the material for happiness and prosperity into a man's hands just to see how miserable he can make himself with them.

11. 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?

12. Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat.

13. The world is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil.

14. Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank, The army of unalterable law.

15. Fate seemed to be playing a series of extraordinarily unamusing jokes.

16. The deepest thing in any one is the conviction of the bad luck that follows boasting.

17. The reader of these Memoirs will discover that I never had any fixed aim before my eyes, and that my system, if it can be called a system, has been to glide away unconcernedly on the stream of life, trusting to the wind wherever it led.

18. How often are we forced to charge fortune with partiality towards the unjust!

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

20. You cannot run faster than a bullet.

21. It is perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell. The only possible chance that it might not is that we do not attempt to prevent it from doing so.

22. Death calls ye to the crowd of common men.

23. Love cannot save you from your own fate.

24. Why, I hold fate Clasped in my fist, and could command the course Of time's eternal motion, hadst thou been One thought more steady than an ebbing sea.

25. Every dog must have his day.

26. There are no moral or intellectual merits. Homer composed the Odyssey; if we postulate an infinite period of time, with infinite circumstances and changes, the impossible thing is not to compose the Odyssey, at least once.

27. The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps.

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

29. Puny man can do nothing at all to help or please God Almighty, and Luck is not the hand of God.

30. The two prime movers in the Universe are Time and Luck.

31. If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody's mercy, then you will probably write melodrama.

32. For rarely man escapes his destiny.

33. Man proposes, and God disposes.

34. 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.

35. Fate gave, what Chance shall not control, His sad lucidity of soul.

36. Let the black flower blossom as it may!

37. Time is the king of all men, he is their parent and their grave, and gives them what he will and not what they crave.

38. Fate was dealing from the bottom of the deck.

39. What a joy to know where one is, and where one will stay, without being there. Nothing to do but stretch out comfortably on the rack, in the blissful knowledge you are nobody for all eternity. A pity I should have to give tongue at the same time, it prevents it from bleeding in peace, licking the lips.

40. The man hath penance done, And penance more will do.

41. 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.

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

43. Whatever limits us we call Fate.

44. If you pray for rain long enough, it eventually does fall. If you pray for floodwaters to abate, they eventually do. The same happens in the absence of prayers.

45. We reap what we sow. We are the makers of our own fate. None else has the blame, none has the praise.

46. Alas, regardless of their doom, The little victims play! No sense have they of ills to come, Nor care beyond today.

47. She had the hard, half-apathetic expression of one who deems anything possible at the hands of Time and Chance except, perhaps, fair play.

48. Little Fly, Thy summer's play My thoughtless hand Has brushed away. Am not I A fly like thee? Or art not thou A man like me? For I dance, And drink, and sing, Till some blind hand Shall brush my wing.

49. The years like great black oxen tread the world, And God the herdsman goads them on behind, And I am broken by their passing feet.

50. Fate steals along with silent tread, Found oftenest in what least we dread, Frowns in the storm with angry brow, But in the sunshine strikes the blow.

51. A man is the sum of his misfortunes. One day you'd think misfortune would get tired, but then time is your misfortune.

52. My country or the stars Or my youth, what's farthest?

53. Sometimes there is relief, sometimes there is new inner energy, and one stands up after it; till at last, someday, one perhaps doesn't stand up any more, que soit, but that is nothing extraordinary, and I repeat, in my opinion, such is the common human fate.

54. Why do you complain of your fate when you could so easily change it?

55. Help yourself, then God will also help you! The German people was created by Providence, not in order to obey a law which suits Englishmen or Frenchmen, but to stand up for its vital right. That is what we are there for!

56. There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn. If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning.

57. 'I conclude that all is well,' says Oedipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.

58. 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.

59. Carmelita Montiel, a twenty-year-old virgin, had just bathed in orange-blossom water and was strewing rosemary leaves over Pilar Ternera's bed when the shot rang out. Aureliano Jose had been destined to find with her the happiness that Amaranta had denied him, to have seven children, and to die in her arms of old age, but the bullet that entered his chest had been directed by a wrong interpretation of the cards. (p. 153)

60. Sometimes one bad decision can mess up your life. We seal our fate with the choices we make. But don't give a second thought to the chances we take... Surely, you say, it's not as bad as you make it sound. If we make a mistake, you can always turn it back around. Get back on the straight and narrow -- When I'm through having all my fun . . . We seal our fate with the choices we make . . .

61. Death by hanging...I deserved it and I expected it, as I've always told you. I am glad that I have had the chance to defend myself and to think things over in the last few months.

62. My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived; and as I can do neither good nor evil, I must be borne away by others and meet the common fate.

63. 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.

64. It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate awaiting them on this earth.

65. 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.

66. Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three.

67. It's no go my honey love, it's no go my poppet; Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit. The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall for ever, But if you break the bloody glass you won't hold up the weather.

68. Despite the propaganda, there are no monsters, or none that can be finally buried. Finish one off, and circumstances and the radio create another. Believe me: whole armies have prayed fervently to God all night and meant it, and been slaughtered anyway. Brutality wins frequently, and large outcomes have turned on the invention of a mechanical device, viz. radar. True, valour sometimes counts for something, as at Thermopylae. Sometimes being right - though ultimate virtue, by agreed tradition, is decided by the winner. Sometimes men throw themselves on grenades and burst like paper bags of guts to save their comrades. I can admire that. But rats and cholera have won many wars. Those, and potatoes, or the absence of them.

69. Chance and chance alone has a message for us... Only chance can speak to us.

70. There is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghostlike, the spot where some great and marked event has given the color to their lifetime; and still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it.

71. The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways - I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows.

72. Death's a debt; his mandamus binds all alike-no bail, no demurrer.

73. I see Macbeth as a young, open-faced warrior, who is gradually sucked into a whirpool of events because of his ambition. When he meets the weird sisters and hears their prophecy, he's like the man who hopes to win a million-a gamble for high stakes.

74. To each his suff'rings: all are men, Condemn'd alike to groan, The tender for another's pain; Th' unfeeling for his own. Yet ah! why should they know their fate? Since sorrow never comes too late, And happiness too swiftly flies. Thought would destroy their paradise. No more; where ignorance is bliss, 'Tis folly to be wise.

75. Hands, that the rod of empire might have swayed, Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre.

76. For who to dumb Forgetfulness a prey, This pleasing anxious being e'er resigned, Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day, Nor cast one longing ling'ring look behind?

77. These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.

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

79. People are often unable to do anything, imprisoned as they are in I don't know what kind of terrible, terrible, oh such terrible cage. I do know that there is a release, the belated release. A justly or unjustly ruined reputation, poverty, disastrous circumstances, misfortune, they all turn you into a prisoner. You cannot always tell what keeps you confined, what immures you, what seems to bury you, and yet you can feel those elusive bars, railings, walls. Is all this illusion, imagination? I don't think so. And then one asks: My God! will it be for long, will it be for ever, will it be for eternity?

80. Sometimes there is relief, sometimes there is new inner energy, and one stands up after it; till at last, someday, one perhaps doesn't stand up any more, que soit, but that is nothing extraordinary, and I repeat, in my opinion, such is the common human fate.

81. I am content to live it all again And yet again, if it be life to pitch Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch, A blind man battering blind men; Or into that most fecund ditch of all, The folly that man does Or must suffer, if he woos A proud woman not kindred of his soul.

82. Behind a frowning providence He hides a smiling face.

83. Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.

84. Every day the bucket a-go a well, one day the bottom a-go drop out

85. If Aims impel these Astral Ones The ones allowed to know Know that which makes them as forgot As Dawn forgets them - now

86. 'A person doesn't die when he should but when he can.' (p. 241)

87. Like a blind spinner in the sun, I tread my days: I know that all the threads will run Appointed ways. I know each day will bring its task, And being blind no more I ask.

88. I have had many troubles, but the worst of them never came.

89. But life is sweet, though all that makes it sweet Lessen like sound of friends' departing feet; And Death is beautiful as feet of friend Coming with welcome at our journey's end. For me Fate gave, whate'er she else denied, A nature sloping to the southern side; I thank her for it, though when clouds arise Such natures double-darken gloomy skies.

90. There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat. And in this case, also, the prudent will prepare themselves to encounter what they cannot prevent. Some people advise us to put on the brakes, as if the movement of which we are conscious were that of a railway train running down an incline. But a metaphor is no argument, though it be sometimes the gunpowder to drive one home and imbed it in the memory.

91. In historical events great men - so-called - are but labels serving to give a name to the event, and like labels they have the least possible connection with the event itself. Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own free will, is in an historical sense not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and predestined from all eternity.

92. Here's a sigh to those who love me, And a smile to those who hate: And, whatever sky's above me, Here's a heart for every fate.

93. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's shoulders.

94. Saw it written and i saw it say Pink moon is on its way And none of you stand so tall Pink moon's gonna get ye all.

95. I knew it would soon be the end, so I played the part, you know, the part of-how shall I say, I don't know.

96. The essential is to go on squirming forever at the end of the line, as long as there are waters and banks and ravening in heaven a sporting god to plague his creatures, per pro his chosen shits.

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

98. One feels inclined to say that the intention that man should be 'happy' is not included in the plan of 'Creation.'

99. Ruin seize thee, ruthless King! Confusion on thy banners wait, Though fanned by Conquest's crimson wing They mock the air with idle state.

100. Fair laughs the morn, and soft the zephyr blows, While proudly riding o'er the azure realm In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes; Youth on the prow, and Pleasure at the helm; Regardless of the sweeping whirlwind's sway, That, hushed in grim repose, expects his evening prey.