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.
Maybe it's fate that Hound ate the map. Maybe we'll discover something wonderful while we're lost.
May you live happy, you whose Woes are done.
Stern Fates, to Fates more cruel, us constrain.
I don't intend to share fate,
Fate which is a universal loneliness.
We are too great a nation and too grounded as a people to rob ourselves of our finest destiny..
Our destiny as a people is to be one united nation, and this is the path we shall pursue.
For in the days we know not of
Did fate begin
Weaving the web of days that wove
Your doom.
It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation.