How a person masters his fate is more important than what his fate is.
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.
A god without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but Fate and Nature.
It is a hard but good law of fate, that as every evil, so every excessive power, wears itself out.
It is a sad fate for a man to die too well known to everybody else, and still unknown to himself
O! immodest mortal! Your destiny is the joy of watching the evershifting battle!