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:

Why, I hold fate
Clasped in my fist, and could command the course
Of time's eternal motion, hadst thou been
One thought more steady than an ebbing sea.

John Ford Tis Pity She's a Whore (1629)

The blackest Ink of Fate, sure, was my Lot,
And, when she writ my Name, she made a blot.

George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham The Rehearsal (1671)

Neither Germany nor Italy have doubts. Our crisis is not a material crisis. We have lost faith in our destiny...We are like mariners without a pilot.

Philippe Pétain

Destiny is not a metaphysical confrontation with one's self, rather, society has knit its pattern so tight that a confrontation with it is inevitable. (p59)

Ana Castillo The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986)

Habent sua fata libelli et balli [Books and bullets have their own destinies]

Ernst Jünger Storm of Steel (1920)