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.
Things at the worst will cease or else climb upward
To what they were before.
If he had been as you and you as he,
You would have slipt like him.
And from his ashes may be made
The violet of his native land.
They only fall, that strive to move,
Or lose, that care to keep.
But yet I'll make assurance double sure,
And take a bond of fate: thou shalt not live.
Fate, show thy force; ourselves we do not owe;
What is decreed must be, and be this so.
But blind to former as to future fate,
What mortal knows his pre-existent state?
We are but as the instrument of heaven.
Our work is not design, but destiny.
DESTINY, n. A tyrant's authority for crime and fool's excuse for failure.
Nothing indeed remains for me but that I should hang myself.