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.
I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy.
I was hardly fit for human society. Thus destiny shaped me to be a science fiction writer.
Yes, I am a fatal man, Madame Fribsbi. To inspire hopeless passion is my destiny.
We need Hawaii just as much and a good deal more than we did California. It is manifest destiny.
Their words were spoken to the breezes nor swayed appointed fate.
Who gives to friends so much from Fate secures,
That is the only wealth for ever yours.
Seeing only what is fair,
Sipping only what is sweet,
Thou dost mock at fate and care.
The clock of doom had struck as fated;
the poet, without a sound,
let fall his pistol on the ground.
Because I had sought to challenge Destiny, Destiny had taken vengeance.