quotations about fate
Fate often allows a future to take shape with no regard for our expectation, plan, or readiness. Fate's skillful editing of our life choices is like the careful grooming of lads on their first day of school: combed, polished, scrubbed, newly dressed, and glowing too. This is how we become ready for our life lessons.
DAVID RICHO
The Power of Coincidence: How Life Shows Us What We Need to Know
In a curious sense, we all must admit that our fate is indeed a part of our existence. Whether we like it or not, we are beings who do not control all, or even most, of what goes on to make us who we are. So, on the one hand, if we appeal to fate as some kind of explanatory force we are grossly mistaken about how concepts explain; but if we deny that our fate is indeed an essential part of who we are, we are likewise grossly mistaken, and existentially beguiled.
MICHAEL GELVEN
Truth and Existence
What is Fate? Fate is the name given to the unfolding of all events, all worlds, realms, lives and powers, and the final end that awaits them, before they are regenerated at the hands of the Fate-weaver, who is the Old Veiled One.
ROBIN ARTISSON
The Flaming Circle
To bear is to conquer our fate.
THOMAS CAMPBELL
"Lines Written on Visiting a Scene in Argyleshire"
Why should we try to shield people from fate? Isn't that always wrong? One is fated to be born the child of a certain father, and one can no more escape the consequences of his father's misdeeds than the doer himself can. Perhaps the pain and the shame come from the wish and the attempt to do so, more than from the fact itself. The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children. But the children are innocent of evil, and this visitation must be for their good, and will be, if they bear it willingly.
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
A Pair of Patient Lovers
Each fate is just, since each individual chooses it freely.
ROBERT APATOW
The Spiritual Art of Dialogue
Fate is a fickle bitch who dotes on irony.
GLEN COOK
The Black Company
Fate never wounds more deep the generous heart,
Than when a blockhead's insult points the dart.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
Fate of Poverty in London
Free will appears unfettered, deliberate; it is boundlessly free, wandering, the spirit. But fate is a necessity; unless we believe that world history is a dream-error, the unspeakable sorrows of mankind fantasies, and that we ourselves are but the toys of our fantasies. Fate is the boundless force of opposition against free will. Free will without fate is just as unthinkable as spirit without reality, good without evil. Only antithesis creates the quality.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
"Fate and History"
Thy fate is seeking thee,
Fear not! Fear not!
Nor hither, thither run, with puny strain
Of frenzied fingers on this closèd door,
Or that, to find her. Leave thy worse than vain
And feverish seeking; fret thy soul no more,
Nor vex the heavens with ineffectual cries;
Fate will adjust her perfect harmonies
And weave thee in.
CLARA MARCELLE FARRAR GREENE
"Thy Fate Is Seeking Thee"
Fate happens.
DOTTI ENDERLE
Hand of Fate
Our fate is something which exists outside ourselves, and which once revealed expresses the meaning of our lives. Apart, however, from soothsayers who claim to have a means of foretelling exactly what will befall us, this kind of fate is only normally revealed after a life has ended. Only then can the meaning of that life be understood.
ANDREW GAMBLE
Politics and Fate
So long as it fated, fate didn't care what it fated.
CHINA MIéVILLE
Kraken
Fate loves the fearless.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
"The Voyage to Vinland"
I would not fear nor wish my fate,
But boldly say each night,
To-morrow let my sun his beams display,
Or in clouds hide them; I have lived to-day.
ABRAHAM COWLEY
Of Myself
If fate be not, then what can we foresee?
And how can we avoid it if it be?
If by free will in our own paths we move,
How are we bounded by decrees of above?
Whether we drive, or whether we are driven,
If ill, 'tis ours; if good, the act of heaven.
JOHN DRYDEN
The Tempest
Spin thy plain thread--'tis wanted soon or late;
No friend will seek thee out so sure as Fate.
CLARA MARCELLE FARRAR GREENE
"Thy Fate Is Seeking Thee"
They may well fear fate who have any infirmity of habit or aim: but he who rests on what is has a destiny beyond destiny, and can make mouths of fortune.
ORISON SWETT MARDEN
Architects of Fate
Fate in the life of a people, as in the life of an individual, signifies an existence of compulsion. A strange necessity binds the particulars into one whole. The individual, against his will, is subjected and subjugated to the national, fate-laden, reality.
JOSEPH DOV SOLOVEITCHIK
Fate and Destiny
Fate remains a confrontation with that which cannot be explained in any other way. It is a part of the very meaning of fate that it is incomprehensible, but this curiously does not mean that all who accept fate are irrational. Whatever is experienced is contingent, and insofar as it is contingent it is not necessary; and not being necessary it is not a product of pure reason. But no one would say that what is contingent is irrational. It might be said to be nonrational, meaning it is not known necessarily; but the term "irrational" is usually reserved for that which directly contradicts itself, like an odd number wholly divisible by two, or a married bachelor. Fate is troubling and perhaps even nonrational, but it is certainly not irrational.
MICHAEL GELVEN
Truth and Existence