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.
Unseen, in the background, Fate was quietly slipping the lead into the boxing-glove.
We did not flinch but gave our lives to save Greece when her fate hung on a razor's edge.
How do people choose their final words? Do they realize their gravity? Are they fated to be wise?
There is no destiny beyond and above ourselves; we are ourselves the architects of our future.
I wonder if our names determine our destiny, or if destiny leads us to choose certain names.
The fate and future of the People's Republic of China are facing serious threat!
“Our destinies, that is mine and that of the nation, are inextricably linked.