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.
"When fate decided to strike you down, what amount of crying can help?"
It is the fate of every truth to be an object of ridicule when it is first acclaimed.
The whole race is a poet that writes down
The eccentric propositions of its fate.
Not by hazard are ye come; divine fate, I ween, hath brought you to my shores.
Consider how wise and careful you must be. Do not gamble with your eternal fate.
Methinks we all forget that we are mortal,
And that so short a span the Fates allot.
Deep in the man sits fast his fate
To mould his fortunes, mean or great.
He had discharged his destiny; now, perhaps, he could begin to live.
Beyond the limits of a vulgar fate,
Beneath the good how far,—but far above the great.
As we wash our body so we should wash destiny, change life as we change clothes.