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 willingly accept Cassandra's fate,
To speak the truth, although believ'd too late.
And stepping westward seemed to be
A kind of heavenly destiny.
We are star stuff, which has taken its destiny into its own hands.
I believe it is the duty of each of us to act as if the fate of the world depended on him.
To turn away from the enemy is cowardice. Misfortune is the fate of the enemy.
Till the Future dares
Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be
An echo and a light unto eternity!