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.
The best of men cannot suspend their fate:
The good die early, and the bad die late.
Free will without fate is no more conceivable than spirit without matter, good without evil.
Such is our pride, our folly, or our fate,
That few but such as cannot write, translate.
We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours.
The essential truth of democracy is that each nation determines its own destiny.
How strange it is, he thought, how so many senseless things shape our destiny.
The leveling process need find no place in Power's programme: it is embedded in its destiny.