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.
Your destiny is that of a man, and your vows those of a god.
Man, be he who he may, experiences a last piece of good fortune and a last day.
Must helpless man, in ignorance sedate,
Roll darkling down the torrent of his fate?
All human things are subject to decay,
And, when fate summons, monarchs must obey.
The problem with Destiny, of course, is that she is often not careful where she puts her finger.
Mighty things haste to destruction: this limit have the gods assigned to human prosperity.
Endure the hardships of your present state,
Live, and reserve yourselves for better fate.