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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"I do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and I do not live in chronic dread of disaster. It is no happiness, but suffering that I consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that I regard as the abnormal exception in Human Life."
"So tomorrow we disappear into the unknown. This account I am transmitting down the river by canoe, and it may be our last word to those who are interested in our fate."
"All that remains is a fate whose outcome alone is fatal. Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty. A world remains of which man is the sole master. What bound him was the illusion of another world."
"Politics and the fate of mankind are formed by men without ideals and without greatness. Those who have greatness within them do not go in for politics."
"A fate is not a punishment."
"I’ve worked in an economy that rewards someone who saves the lives of others on a battlefield with a medal, rewards a great teacher with thank-you notes from parents, but rewards those who can detect the mispricing of securities with sums reaching into the billions."
"Come near, that no more blinded by man's fate, I find under the boughs of love and hate, In all poor foolish things that live a day, Eternal beauty wandering on her way."
"I weave the shoes of Sorrow: Soundless shall be the footfall light In all men's ears of Sorrow, Sudden and light."
"We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. ...Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out."
"Who can control his fate?"
"I have a bone to pick with Fate"
"Our wills and fates do so contrary run."
"He shall spurn fate, scorn death, and bear His hopes 'bove wisdom, grace and fear: And you all know, security Is mortals' chiefest enemy."
"I do I know not what, and fear to find Mine eye too great a flatterer for my mind. Fate, show thy force. Ourselves we do not owe. What is decreed must be; and be this so."
"The happiest youth, viewing his progress through, What perils past, what crosses to ensue, Would shut the book, and sit him down and die."
"Crowns have their compass-length of days their date- Triumphs their tomb-felicity, her fate- Of nought but earth can earth make us partaker, But knowledge makes a king most like his Maker."
"what cannot be saved when fate takes, patience her injury a mockery makes"
"What can be avoided Whose end is purposed by the mighty gods?"
"Now at this very moment I knew that the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all! ... How long the war would last or in what fashion it would end no man could tell, nor did I at this moment care ... We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end ... Hitler's fate was sealed. Mussolini's fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to a powder. All the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming force."
"It would be the irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs."
