Fate quotes

Fate

2.5K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.

2.5K quotes

Explore further

Browse quotes that often appear alongside fate — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.

Quote collection

Fate quotes (page 16 of 123)

Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.

Jimmy Buffett Musician, Author
Fate

"Yes, I am a pirate, two hundred years to late. Cannons don't thunder, there's nothing to plunder, I'm an over forty victim of fate."

Read quote 9 likes
John Muir Naturalist, Writer
Fate

"Oh, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days, inciting at once to work and rest! Days in whose light everything seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show us God. Nevermore, however weary, should one faint by the way who gains the blessings of one mountain day; whatever his fate, long life, short life, stormy or calm, he is rich forever."

Read quote 9 likes
Ernest Hemingway Novelist
Fate

"The worst death for anyone is to lose the center of his being, the thing he really is. Retirement is the filthiest word in the language. Whether by choice or by fate, to retire from what you do - and makes you what you are - is to back up into the grave."

Read quote 8 likes
Fate

"Are some people destined for a great fate, or to do great things? Or is it only that they're born somehow with that great passion - and if they find themselves in the right circumstances, then things happen? It's the sort of thing you wonder."

Read quote 8 likes
Charles Bukowski Poet, Novelist
Fate

"alone with everybody the flesh covers the bone and they put a mind in there and sometimes a soul, and the women break vases against the walls and them men drink too much and nobody finds the one but they keep looking crawling in and out of beds. flesh covers the bone and the flesh searches for more than flesh. there's no chance at all: we are all trapped by a singular fate. nobody ever finds the one. the city dumps fill the junkyards fill the madhouses fill the hospitals fill the graveyards fill nothing else fills."

Read quote 8 likes
Blaise Pascal Mathematician, Physicist, Philosopher
Fate

"Let us imagine a number of men in chains and all condemned to death, where some are killed each day in the sight of the others, and those who remain see their own fate in that of their fellows and wait their turn, looking at each other sorrowfully and without hope. It is an image of the condition of man."

Read quote 8 likes
Aldous Huxley Novelist, Essayist
Fate

"My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger."

Read quote 8 likes
Arthur Conan Doyle Writer, Physician
Fate

"The ways of fate are indeed hard to understand. If there is not some compensation hereafter, then the world is a cruel jest."

Read quote 8 likes
Arthur Schopenhauer Philosopher
Fate

"It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in the face of every question that makes the philosopher. He must be like Sophocles' Oedipus, who, seeking enlightenment concerning his terrible fate, pursues his indefatigable inquiry even though he divines that appalling horror awaits him in the answer. But most of us carry with us the Jocasta in our hearts, who begs Oedipus, for God's sake, not to inquire further."

Read quote 8 likes
Willa Cather Novelist, Short Story Writer
Fate

"Some people's lives are affected by what happens to their person or their property; but for others fate is what happens to their feelings and their thoughts -- that and nothing more."

Read quote 8 likes