Fate Quotes
Shakespeare leads again, with Homer, Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Bulwer-Lytton and Dryden following. Samuel Johnson’s The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) asks whether helpless man must roll darkling down the torrent of his fate, and Shelley’s Song to the Men of England (1819) turns the idea into a complaint about labour: the seed ye sow another reaps. Longfellow’s lines from 1842 are the gentler pick, about no one being so accursed by fate that no heart responds to his.
Three entries are flagged misattributed: a sentence of Matthew Arnold’s about things being what they are and consequences being what they will be, a line about dying too well known and still unknown to oneself credited to Francis Bacon, and a remark on providence and final causes credited to Alexander Pope.
We may not have chosen the time, but the time has chosen us.
“Destiny,” said John. “The ghastliest word a man can speak.”
Fate holds the strings, and men like children move
But as they're led: success is from above.
No people are truly free until they can determine their own destiny.
Our destiny is frequently met in the very paths we take to avoid it.
We must go through life so inconspicuously that Fate does not notice us.
They are raised on high that they may be dashed to pieces with a greater fall.
All events whatsoever are governed by the secret counsel of God.