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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:

Mother and father abandoned me at birth and the author of my life also did not write any worth or merit on the page of destiny.

Tulsidas

I sing of arms and of a man: his fate
had made him fugitive; he was the first
to journey from the coasts of Troy as far
as Italy and the Lavinian shores.

Allen Mandelbaum The Aeneid of Virgil (1971)

General Wei Qing's victory was only a thing of chance.
And General Li Guang's thwarted effort was his fate, not his fault.

Wang Wei

Covid–19 stole two years of our work. Our destiny seemed to be steering a difficult path.

Margaret Kenyatta

He understood the destiny of Botswana was bound to that of Namibia, that our futures like our rivers and deserts flow together

Ian Khama

The blackest ink of fate was sure my lot,
And when fate writ my name it made a blot.

Henry Fielding

So…Bessieres lived like Bayard; he died like Turenne. We should all be envious of his fate.

Napoleon

Ah state of mortal man! in time of weal,
A line, a shadow! and if ill fate fall,
One wet sponge-sweep wipes all our trace away. (tr. E. D. A. Morshead)

Aeschylus Oresteia (-458)

1923. You challenged your fate. To surmount or to die! It was not yet time. Therefore you became a victim.
Your answer was: Death!

Joseph Goebbels Michael: a German fate in diary notes (1926)

Cairo can’t escapes its Fatimid destiny, Cairo is Cairo of Al-Muizz.

Muammar Gaddafi

Which are more full of fate:
The stars; or those sad eyes?
Which are more still and great:
Those brows; or the dark skies?

Lionel Johnson By the Statue of King Charles at Charing Cross (1895)

"No" — I could never be another person’s father, fate, god,
"No" — it should never happen to another child, what happened to me; my childhood. (Auschwitz).

Imre Kertész Kaddish for a Child Not Born (1990)

But she bloomed on earth, where the most beautiful things have the saddest destiny;
And Rose, she lived as live the roses, for the space of a morning.

François de Malherbe

In life the error teaches us to face our destiny.

Prevale

Against destiny I fulfilled my duty .
Uselessly? No, for I fulfilled it.

Fernando Pessoa

It did not matter, after all. He was only one man. One man’s fate is not important.
“If it is not, what is?”
He could not endure those remembered words.

Ursula K. Le Guin Rocannon’s World (1966)

Live amongst no roses, only the drama, for real
A nickel-plate is my fate, my medicine is the ganja

Nas Illmatic (1994)

Fate laughs at probabilities.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton Eugene Aram (1832)

Would but some wing'ed Angel ere too late
Arrest the yet unfolded Roll of Fate,
And make the stern Recorder otherwise
Enregister, or quite obliterate!

Omar Khayyám FitzGerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859)

Where’er she lie,
Locked up from mortal eye,
In shady leaves of destiny.

Richard Crashaw

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