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.
Why doth IT so and so, and ever so,
This viewless,
voiceless Turner of the Wheel?
Here burns my candle out; ay, here it dies,
Which, whiles it lasted, gave King Henry light.
My fate cries out,
And makes each petty artery in this body
As hardy as the Numean lion's nerve.
If thou read this, O Cæsar, thou mayst live;
If not, the Fates with traitors do contrive.
What should be spoken here, where our fate,
Hid within an auger-hole, may rush, and seize us?
'Tis Fate that flings the dice,
And as she flings
Of kings makes peasants,
And of peasants kings.
Necessity and chance
Approach not me, and what I will is fate.
Each curs'd his fate that thus their project cross'd;
How hard their lot who neither won nor lost.