Skip to content

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:

No man can change the common lot to rare.

Thomas Hardy Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)

Destiny or gods or fortune—whatever one is pleased or innocent enough to call them—they seal men to their decree.

Tanith Lee Quest for the White Witch (1978)

Men heap together the mistakes of their lives and create a monster which they call Destiny.

John Oliver Hobbes The Sinner's Comedy (1892)

Balder holds up a completely blank rune. Wyrd. The beginning and the end. Fate.
I don't know what that means, but it's not doing anything to uncreep me.

Libba Bray Going Bovine (2009)

Women never become aware of their own destiny, An invisible hand always guides them on the right path. Then abandons them if they show themselves to be somewhat rebellious.

Tanella Boni

There is no fate that plans men's lives. Whatever comes to us, good or bad, is usually the result of our own action or lack of action.

Herbert N. Casson Herbert N. Casson cited in: Forbes magazine (1950)

Men do not shape destiny. Destiny produces the man for the hour.

Fidel Castro I Won't Be a Dictator (1959)

I don’t have much truck with romantic notions of human destiny, or Gods, or Good Guys winning out in the end. I have seen destiny in action, and I can tell you, it stinks.

John Varley Millennium (1983)

The destiny of the colored American … is the destiny of America.

Frederick Douglass

If only—but it has been my unfortunate experience that you can’t rely on divine intervention and that fate favors the bad as often as the good.

Terry Hayes I Am Pilgrim (2013)

Captain Kirk was captain of everybody's fate. He was a dictator.

William Shatner

Ken, the Tot of Destiny, had turned into the Marquis de Sade, and I in response had become a virago.

Elaine Dundy

It is the tragedy of our generation, that small nations have not yet gained the security of exercising their natural right—namely that of being masters of their own destiny.

Golda Meir

William the Second was not equal to Fate’s crucial moments.

Emil Ludwig Wilhelm Hohenzollern: The Last of the Kaisers (1926)

He could almost wish he were superstitious. He could then console himself with the thought that the casual meaningless meeting had really been directed by a knowing and purposeful Fate.

Isaac Asimov The Complete Stories, Volume 1 (1990)

Chance, another word for destiny.

Philip José Farmer The Dark Design (1977)

The ancients, even though they believed in destiny, believed primarily in nature, in which they participated wholeheartedly. To rebel against nature amounted to rebelling against oneself. It was butting one's head against a wall.

Albert Camus The Rebel (1951)

There was something about the cocksure confidence of that statement that gave Auger goose pimples. It was like an invitation to fate.

Alastair Reynolds Century Rain (2004)

Sometimes I think your life and mine are under the protection of some supreme being or fate, because, after many years of parallel thought, we find ourselves in the positions we now occupy.

George S. Patton

Men … ask nothing better, it would seem, than to leave their destiny, their life, and all their thoughts in the hands of a few men with a gift for the exclusive manipulation of this or that technique.

Simone Weil On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God (1968)

Related topics