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.
India’s ‘tryst with destiny’ could more appropriately have been called India’s tryst with dynasty.
Our hour is marked, and no one can claim a moment of life beyond what fate has predestined.
Destiny could not bring him this far only to deal him failure!
It is all sheer egocentricity: the myth of self triumphant over destiny!
Convinced of their destiny to rule, they convinced themselves that the end justified the means.
Those who are unwilling to admit error are fated to repeat it?
I believe that it's in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.
To be disesteemed by people you don’t have much respect for is not the worst fate.
Destiny can contain a few extra threads in her design and still accomplish her original aims.
It's everyone's destiny to be glooped at some point in their life.
Actors work and slave — and it is the color of your hair that can determine your fate in the end.