This principle is old, but true as fate,—
Kings may love treason, but the traitor hate.
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.
Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate.
Never underestimate the role of luck in the fate of individuals or of nations.
They wait in clutching haste for fate to fill the inside straight of their happiness.
That’s what being human means: to be master of your own fate.
There are no uninteresting fates, and each man takes away the universe when he dies.
Many a man is given what was intended for another, but no one is given another man’s fate.
Small moments, unnoticed at the time, change the fate of empires.
Disappointments—like fate and love—will not bear to be too much talked about.
The global destiny of the species is somehow unfolding with the logic of a dream.