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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.

Random quote on Fate

Most quoted on fate:

And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it,
neither brave man nor coward, I tell you—
it's born with us the day that we are born.

Homer Iliad (-750)

Fate presented itself to some like a chinese fan--one side black, the other side gilded with flowers.

José Rizal

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

Theodore Roethke The Waking (1953)

When youth was lord of my unchallenged fate,
And time seemed but the vassal of my will,
I entertained certain guests of state—
The great of older days.

Silas Weir Mitchell

...the company must not throw money away on huge bonuses for executives or other frivolities but must share its fate with the workers.

Akio Morita Made in Japan (1986)

Only the heel
Of splendid steel
Shall stand secure on sliding fate,
When golden navies weep their freight.

Arthur Quiller-Couch

The fate of America is already decided — Behold her independent beyond recovery. — But will She be free and happy?

Anne Robert Jacques Turgot

Ukraine that has mentally transformed into the Third Reich will have the same fate.

Dmitry Medvedev

I could not say
which one was more authentic,
their fate or
the slender woody sticks
that supported their shacks.

Suman Pokhrel

"Sow a thought, and you reap an action, sow an act and you reap a habit, sow a habit and you reap a character, sow a character and you reap a destiny."

Mavis Moyo

Like every people on earth, my compatriots want to live in a democratic country, without fear for their future and the life and destiny of coming generations.

Leonid Kuchma Speech at the 55th session of the United Nations General Assembly (excerpts) (2000)

It is within you to carve out your future and create your own destiny.

Mamokgethi Phakeng

Youth is a silly, vapid state,
Old age with fears and ills is rife;
This simple boon I beg of Fate —
A thousand years of Middle Life.

Carolyn Wells

Rise up from the place of guilt and feeling sorry for yourself and run to your destiny.

Xoli Zondi

"When faith and effort unite, even destiny bows."

Pandit Shriram Sharma Acharya

They come as come to become”;Nigeria is at the juncture where it must reach “an accord Con-cordial” with itself, its fate and its future.

K. O. Mbadiwe

"Destiny" is a story about deep-seated loss, a loss that felt like without that loss, you would not have become the person that you are.

Lady Zamar

Fate shall yield
To fickle Chance, and Chaos judge the strife.

John Milton

We are our own fates. Our own deeds
Are our doomsmen. Man's life was made
Not for men's creeds,
But men's actions.

Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton

The true adventurer goes forth aimless and uncalculating to meet and greet unknown fate. A fine example was the Prodigal Son—when he started back home.

O. Henry The Four Million (1906)

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