No cause has he to say his doom is harsh,
Who's made the master of his destiny.
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.
Certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.
Democracy is the destiny of humanity; freedom its indestructible arm.
Fate seemed to be playing a series of extraordinarily unamusing jokes.
A touch of madness is, I think, almost always necessary for constructing a destiny.
I do not measure the historical process by the yardstick of one's personal fate.
There is no more terrible fate for a comedian than to be taken seriously.
The fate of all explanation is to close one door only to have another fly wide open.