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.
Nudimmud, lord who determines the fates, who strengthens the Land.
A consistent man believes in Destiny — a capricious man in Chance.
What separates the winners from the losers is how a person reacts to each new twist of fate.
Their fate will be in each other's hands as they decide whether to share or to shaft.
Only the sword now carries any weight in the balance for the destiny of a nation.
The historic fate of one growth industry after another has been its suicidal product provincialism.
If a historian, like a novelist, seeks comfort, what is the fate of the truth?