Fate quotes
2.5K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside fate — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Plans are one thing and fate another. When they coincide, success results. Yet success mustn't be considered the absolute. It is questionable, for that matter, whether success is an adequate resposne to life. Success can eliminate as many options as failure."
"Nobody becomes guilty by fate."
"Dreadful is the mysterious power of fate; there is no deliverance from it by wealth or by war, by walled city or dark, seabeaten ships."
"Fate, then, is the nothing of anxiety."
"If the whole responsibility is thrown upon our own shoulders, we shall be at our highest and best; when we have nobody to grope towards, no devil to lay our blame upon, no Personal God to carry our burdens, when we are alone responsible, then we shall rise to our highest and best. I am responsible for my fate, I am the bringer of good unto myself, I am the bringer of evil."
"It's just a freak of fate that I'm paid to write, not paying to print my own books - but I'd be doing it anyway: it's my life."
"A battle sometimes decides everything; and sometimes the most trifling thing decides the fate of a battle."
"I love mixing humor and terror, or humor and exhaustion, or even humor and despair. I'm dealing right now with a loved one with cancer, and she's of course sad, but also telling the most disturbingly morbid jokes and puns. I love that, there's so much humanity in being able to mock fate and hardship."
"When I take up my pen, nothing can happen to me. Fate, remember that."
"Whatever may happen to thee, it was prepared for thee from all eternity."
"And so they parted, she to the east, and he to the west. The test they had agreed upon, however, was utterly unnecessary. They should never have undertaken it, because they really and truly were each other's 100% perfect lovers, and it was a miracle that they had ever met. But it was impossible for them to know this, young as they were. The cold, indifferent waves of fate proceeded to toss them unmercifully."
"We are led on, like little children, by a way we know not."
"When you think to take determination of your fate into your own hands, that is the moment you can be crushed. Be cautious."
"Injustice in this world is not something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate."
"Revisiting the Revolutionary War is a bracing reminder that the fate of a continent, and the shape of the modern world, turned on the free choices of remarkably few Americans defying an empire."
"As a working hypothesis to explain the riddle of our existence, I propose that our universe is the most interesting of all possible universes, and our fate as human beings is to make it so"
"Life seems a jest of Fate's contriving."
"One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is the whole - there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole...But nothing exists apart from the whole!"
"The man who meets with a failure attributes this failure rather to the ill will of another than to fate."
"Fate has never ladled out hardship very evenly, and this frequently trips our often infantile sense of justice."
