"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."
Fate quotes
Fate
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Fate quotes (page 16 of 123)
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"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."
"We can say with some assurance that, although children may be the victims of fate, they will not be the victims of our neglect."
"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."
"The fates have given mankind a patient soul."
"To be envied is a nobler fate than to be pitied."
"Fate leads him who follows it, and drags him who resist."
"A child is a person who is going to carry on what you have started ... the fate of humanity is in his hands."
"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."
"Necessity is harsh. Fate has no reprieve."
"A man's fate is his own temper."
"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."
"Fate pulls you in different directions"
"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."
"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."
"The individual must not merely wait and criticize, he must defend the cause the best he can. The fate of the world will be such as the world deserves."
"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."
"The ways of fate are indeed hard to understand. If there is not some compensation hereafter, then the world is a cruel jest."
"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."
"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."