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.
Destiny isn’t taken in by people trying to make what came first come afterwards.
Tempt not the stars, young man, thou canst not play
With the severity of fate.
The vitality of our network will determine our professional fate.
Fate deals unexpected hands, and we learn to play the cards we are given.
Easy, but willing to die if God and my country think I have fulfilled my destiny and done my duty.