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.
'Tis writ on Paradise's gate,
"Woe to the dupe that yields to Fate!"
What fates impose, that men must needs abide;
It boots not to resist both wind and tide.
Jove lifts the golden balances that show
The fates of mortal men, and things below.
To be a Prodigal's favourite,—then, worse truth,
A Miser's pensioner,—behold our lot!
It lies not in our power to love or hate,
For will in us is overruled by fate.
Let Hercules himself do what he may,
The cat will mew and dog will have his day.